The Tragedy of Gaza.
The Tragedy of Gaza
Reflecting on the horrors of war.
It is sometimes hard to understand the tragedies that characterize the lives of others. We lean on our own lives and experiences to find empathy, and on what we read, what we see on film, what we hear from those who have lived through tragedies to find compassion for the experiences we cannot imagine. And yet we fall short. We fall short of truly appreciating the unspeakable horror—including wonton cruelty, torture, and sexual violence—inflicted on thousands of people in Israel on October 7, 2023. We fall short of truly appreciating the psychological implications of this horror—the worst loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust—for Israeli citizens, as it has captured all civic and political reality and conversation. And we fall short of understanding the horror that has been life—and death—in Gaza.
The exact scope of the damage wrought on Gaza by Israel since October 7 remains unclear, but there is little question that more than 20,000 residents of the region have died, that more than a million Gazans have been displaced, and that essentially all public infrastructure—including schools, social services, and mosques—in Northern Gaza have been destroyed. A United Nations official expressed concern that Gazans are at risk of malnutrition, and it is almost certainly the case that children have been nearly half of those killed since the war started. Stories help us see past the numbers and the stories that are slowly beginning to emerge from Gaza paint a picture of unimaginable hardship, of living in a state of constant fear of death, of scraping by enough food to feed families, of uncertainty about where one can live next, and about what 2024 will hold. Gazans have for the past two months been living through indelible traumas that will, for many, add to the physical hardship of today the psychological hardship that will last a lifetime. At the same time, the months since October 7 have provided a clearer picture of Hamas, the mercilessness of the attack on Israelis, and of its totalitarian cruelty against its own people in Gaza. Such knowledge complicates our common wish to see hostilities cease, as we balance compassion for the people of Gaza with clearheaded understanding of what Israel faces.
How can our compassion and our understanding help us to engage with this moment? How do good people of good conscience continue our comfortable day-to-day lives in a world where we know unspeakable horror is happening? What particular role, if any, might those of us who are engaged in a mission-driven public health community have to play over and above that of our role as citizens?
I confess to finding answers to these questions difficult to come by. In this I am sure I am not alone. However, I felt it important to reflect on the current moment in Gaza as part of an honest effort to grapple with the circumstances that engage our community and command our attention. I offer, then, four thoughts on the moment, building on prior writing, hoping they are helpful, or at least that they occasion other reflections that can contribute to a vision of, and action towards, a better world.
First, the immediate needs in Gaza are so large that they call upon us to assist practically when we can. Given the competing narratives and contemporary divisive political forces that surround this particular conflict, it can feel overwhelming to separate the very real need for pragmatic aid from the ways in which many weaponize this need. I try to see through this by leaning on long-established leaders in providing aid to conflict areas, such as the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, which has called for the protection of civilians on all sides, a call we should echo and work to support in all our actions. Throughout the history of conflict, it has consistently been the innocent, the vulnerable, who suffer most. Protecting these populations always is a core aim of public health and should be at the heart of all we do in this moment.
Second, while the abject horror being experienced by Gazans is clear, immediate solutions are far less so, particularly when more than 100 residents of Israel remain hostage, likely somewhere in Gaza. It is nearly impossible to understand the enormous hold this has on the psychology of the region and suggests to me that too-easy calls for a particular course of action are just that—too easy. The challenge, then, for us is how to think about what action to agitate for, and to recognize that for every one of us who has carefully thought through the rights and wrongs, determined that we can see clearly an important and incisive course of action, there is another one of us who, in equally good faith, may disagree and see another course of action as correct, equally motivated by careful weighing of rights and wrongs. This may deeply dissatisfy our impulse for clear activist purpose but reflects a complex reality that rests on competing historical injustice, and the horrible realization that even a just war is still a war, that proportionality is freighted by values, and that there is little moral clarity to be found in measuring suffering against other suffering. It is worth noting, for example, that even World War II, which most people acknowledge as a war that needed to be fought, provides many examples—from the firebombing of Dresden to the dropping of the atomic bombs—of acts of war that test the limits of what we should deem acceptable in the prosecution of such a conflict. The hard realities of history reflect the truth that there is malevolence in the world, there are determined enemies of the values we hold dear, and this can create moments when war, with all its horrors, might be accepted to forestall an even darker future.
This calls on each of us to keep an open heart and mind as we engage with others among us who feel strongly about particular courses of action, to, in the words of Khaled Hosseini, lean into “both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person’s heart.”
Third, I have reflected often on our good fortune that our work is informed by mission and purpose. This includes doing the science and scholarship that illuminates how the world thinks. It also involves teaching students about the historical, philosophical, and intellectual architecture we need to grapple with in moments such as this one. And it involves looking for useful activist action informed by our values and by the exigencies of the moment. This is all difficult to do, but far better that it is done by those who think about their responsibilities carefully than be left to those who do not. Scholarship that documents the physical and psychological consequences of war has the potential to bear witness, to scaffold efforts that can mitigate this and future wars. Our students are at the forefront of a world grappling with present tragedies and will be even more so in a world that aims to prevent future ones. We do well by our mission to stand by those who take practical actions that we see as productive in the face of so much that is not.
Fourth, I am always aware of the very real toll ongoing horror takes on our community, locally as a school and as a global public health community. Clearly what we are living through pales next to what is being lived through in Gaza, but it is difficult for our community nonetheless. Bearing in mind this difficulty, we offer a large number of resources for those who wish to avail themselves of them. Perhaps as importantly, we shall continue to have community conversations as appropriate, both at a school level, in the form of upcoming breakfast and coffee chats, and at the individual unit level. I do not know what the coming weeks and months will hold, but we will continue to make it a priority to create spaces for coming together as is helpful, to ensure that we encourage conversation and honest efforts to grapple with difficult issues as they arise.
I conclude with two pragmatic notes. First, I would stress that the focus in a note like this one on the tragedies in Gaza does not for a moment elide other tragedies that I know are happening in the world as I write. Horror in Gaza does not make ongoing horror in Sudan, in Yemen, in Ukraine any less consequential, and no one horror diminishes others. I write here about Gaza, as I have previously, out of an effort to grapple with issues that affect millions in the present, that have immediacy in our collective reality and consciousness, and where in writing I can lean on our shared mission and purpose. Second, I am well aware how freighted the war in Gaza has become on college campuses, and how difficult the politics of invective that surround it have been. I write on this here, as I have on so many issues over the past decade, seeing us as being better collectively, and in our own thinking, when we surface difficult issues, when we create the space for shared reflection and deliberation, and when we acknowledge the centrality of compassion as a value we aspire to live by. I look forward to learning from others’ writing and thinking on this in the coming days and weeks.
Warm regards,
Sandro
Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor
Boston University School of Public Health
Previous Dean’s Notes are archived at: http://www.bu.edu/sph/tag/deansnote/
