The phrase “there are no words” has been circulating a lot lately concurrently with its cousins “I’m speechless” and “what more is there to say.” Used to express overwhelm with regards to the endless barrage of depravity coming out of Gaza every day, the sentiment is understandable. However, the statement is despicable because it weaponizes a manufactured helplessness where it need not exist. It’s not that language inherently fails but that it requires upkeep—the will to recognize that its current shape is insufficient and the courage to make a new lexicon. Our mistake is assuming language is a static object with a defined purpose of communicating ideas. The problem with this oversimplification is that it forces us to overlook a crucial qualifier. Language is an appendage. It is a sentient tool that we are responsible for molding as we shape history, and it shapes us.
When Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in 1943/4 (sources vary), his reference point was the Ottoman Empire’s mass murder of Armenians in 1915. Having recognized a pattern repeating with the nazi’s mass extermination of jews in Europe, he realized a word was needed to qualify the horrors unfolding. The word is there to signal the pattern and prompt us into action. Language should serve as our safeguard against catastrophe. The reason 2024 bears chilling parallels to 1942 is not because history repeats but because patterns do. Pattern recognition is how make sense of the world. Language is what helps us coin these patterns through verbal cues.
I, too, have grown frustrated by words inability to convey the scale of the horror. I’ve grown tired of using the word “evil.” It feels juvenile, lacking, underwhelming. Is it enough to call a soldier taking a photo of himself napping in the crib of a child’s invaded home in Gaza “evil” knowing the child’s whereabouts and vitals are unknown? The word “psychopathic” comes to mind, but even that feels inaccurate.
The soldiers are mere pawns in a colonial enterprise that utilizes their bodies to achieve its goals. They are agents of the settler’s state killing machine, engineered since the cradle to view Palestinians —and Arabs as a whole— as subhuman. Their brainwashing does not absolve them of any atrocity, and they are by no means victims. But psychopathy is a physiological condition describing a person born with a malfunctioning amygdala: someone who is physically unable to experience empathy. This particular brand of evil is manufactured, not innate. As such, what word can best describe the impulse of documenting one’s own increasing depravity for a large audience, I wonder? Soul loss is the closest and most tragic one I’ve found.
In my frustration, I turn to images to fill the gaps. A photograph is also a category of language symbiotically fused with verbal communication. Take any image, whether historical or simply a selfie on your phone. Each of these photographs is a metaphor that stories our time.
There are a number of photographs living in the forefront of my mind. One, currently haunts me day and night. The image of a cop pointing a gun at Aaron Bushnell’s burning body collapsed on the ground. The active member of the US Air Force who self-immolated dressed in his fatigues in front of the is**li embassy in Washington DC screaming “Free Palestine” until he could no longer produce words. That photograph is the most all-encompassing metaphor for empire I’ve ever seen: the impulse to shoot an already dying man rather than to look for a fire extinguisher. The cognitive dissonance betrayed by this response are a product of what Aaron represents. Here is a white man who embodies by birthright the higher echelons of privilege. He enlisted in the air force to serve the empire, and had a moment of reckoning that evidenced to him what he was participating in. He had the courage to go off-script and orchestrated his sacrifice to send as strong a message as conceivable—one he knew full-well wouldn’t go ignored.
Empires fall because they are inherently self-cannibalizing entities that require the continuous scapegoating of various groups as sacrificial lambs at the altar of conquest. Building a culture driven by an unsustainable need to consume convenience mandates plunder and bloodshed. Many have put blinders on and bubble-wrapped their lives so that it may not be disturbed by the dying breaths of Palestinians their taxes are paying to bomb and starve. Doing so will neither absolve them of their complicity, nor will it make Gaza go away. It also won’t change the fact that Palestinians are simply first in line on the chopping block. If we fail to interfere, everyone else’s number will eventually be called, too.
further reading:
Taking Stock of an Unrecognizable Gaza What Israel’s bombing has wrought —Mahdi Sabbagh, CurbedNYC
Two Shore, One Sea — Suja Sawafta, The Baffler
Memories of Aaron Bushnell —as recounted by his friends, The Crime Thinc
An Interview with Fady Joudah—Aria Aber, The Yale Review
Gaza: A Model of Exclusion and its Implications for Global Politics— Jehad Abusalim, The Jerusalem Fund