How do we process the latest Rafah footage?

The moral injury of seeing an incinerated, beheaded child is real

I woke Monday to the video of the Palestinian man carrying the body of a small child, decapitated, incinerated. He’d pulled the poor little thing from the burning rubble left after Israel dropped bombs on a “safe zone” tent camp in Rafah. The image and the other videos capturing the scores of charred bodies viscerally changed me. And I’ve been trying to process it. I imagine some of you here (whose algorithms exposed it) have been, too.

I’m not sure any words can capture the horror of this image (I won’t describe it further and I don’t recommend you go and look it up), or, more to the point, the circumstances of the death of the child, and at least 44 other civilians. (Nor the Israeli posts mocking the incident. Nor the fact Israel then bombed another tent camp on Tuesday, killing more than 20 people.)

Language often betrays.

For me, so much of what has been going on for months, years and decades in Palestine - and beyond - feels represented in this one meme. And I feel it signifies some kind of juncture. I’m not sure what kind yet. It seems to have pushed things to a new edge. As I shared on Instagram:

I don’t like using this kind of overly self-conscious language, but I thought it might be good to hold provide some space here today to compassionately process the moral injury suffered (either from this particular footage that has gripped me, or other atrocities). We all might benefit from having common felt experiences recognised, challenged, extended.

Below are a few thoughts and feelings I’ve been wrestling with and that swirl together. You might have some to share, too. I invite everyone to be as aware as they can be of owning their strong feelings.

1. The fact-volleying, the tidy justifications and blame game, the inhumane language, I won’t can’t be in it any longer.

I feel I am now in some eerie place beyond the “tragic mishap” rhetoric, the geopolitical bag-fumbling and the ridiculous couching of language and untangling of false equivalencies. I simply can’t engage at such a destructive, distracting, unintegrated level. I’m done. It’s all been said. And it hasn’t held us, nor the situation. In fact, it’s enabled atrocities, like the one on the weekend.

As I wrote back in October, we must resist the horrendous politicking and polarising to preserve humanity. But I didn’t resist enough. And I am now repulsed by the way this alienating, fracturing mindset distracted me at times from what I think matters to all of us as humans. As I write this, I’m aware that this is actually something we have been forced to get very, very real about during this gruesome catastrophe - what matters, what our moral fibre feels like and how it should be.

Which is a dark gift in the lining, right? When we are forced - repulsed ? - out beyond ideas of right and wrong, we arrive at Rumi’s field. Perhaps this is the juncture, or edge, that I couldn’t quite pinpoint above?

Further to this, I got hit overnight with the usual barrage of DMs¹ from people who don’t like what’s happening, and don’t like the truth of it. They draw on (and flood me with) the false equivalencies and victim projection, IDF propaganda (if Hamas gave back the hostages, if Hamas didn’t use these people as human shields, none of this would be happening) and deep fake memes touting misinformation. I finally gave up. I gave up strategising how to respond responsibly, helpfully, and trying to understand. And I blocked them all.

2. This wisdom from a stranger helped: Don’t try to understand

A French spiritual teacher I met briefly last Sunday (to get some details for a project) told me he felt compelled to relay the following, apropos nothing remotely relevant:

“When they bite at you, don’t try to understand it all. You don’t have time, Sarah. You have work to do.”

He reached over and flicked an imaginary mosquito off my arm.

I knew immediately that this was a evolution that I - and many of us - need to go through to cope with, and to be of service to, a world that will only get more difficult to understand. And to explain. And to reason with, at least in the ways we are generally limited to in our culture.

Obviously discernment is required. Understanding, to a point, is always required. But often compassion can just step in and take its place after a bit.

3. I’m devastated by the very fact that Palestinians are having to post images of their dead or mutilated children (and other loved ones) to social media.

I think this needs to be recognised for the injury and injustice that it is.

These people do not get to suffer with dignity. They are forced to broadcast the carnage because if they don’t, no one sees what is going on. Israel banned all foreign media from Gaza and has called for journalists in the area to be killed. The IDF have repeatedly targeted - and killed - Palestinian journalists and their families; more than 120 have been murdered since October 7. They have also banned or blocked several media outlets from Israel.

I watch videos on social media of men (and women) in Gaza rushing to yet another scene of carnage. They grapple with helping the injured, moving dead bodies, while filming it all, documenting their own caged extermination.

I have spent time sitting with this.

4. The moral injury is real.

We must now witness wars and genocides in real time, uncensored on phones, with no space, no pauses, no wisdoms. And with the bullying DMs. The moral injury of this is profound. Moral injury refers to “the psychological, social and spiritual impact of events involving betrayal or transgression of one's own deeply held moral beliefs and values occurring in high stakes situations.” This is what we’re going through. We are feeling betrayed, and we feel we have betrayed ourselves.

We need to acknowledge this, and as Stephen Jenkinson says in our Wild episode, “that we were born to troubled times”. Rage and disorientation is understandable; we must forgive ourselves and each other.

5. I’m reminded of the 1972 photo of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked down the street after a napalm attack.

This one image, published widely at the time, is said to have turned Americans against the Vietnam War. Will this Rafah image of the so-far unnamed child shift the bulk of Israeli and American sentiment? Trigger world leaders to intervene comprehensively?

I’m not sure it will. You?

To this point, and the one I make above, I read this N+1 article, Who Sees Gaza?, while looking for information about the “Napalm Girl” image. The journalist quotes Sarah Schulman, an American writer, who wrote back in January:

“It does not escape me that when it comes to Palestine, these images are not in our contemporary versions of Life magazine. That American journalists were fired for merely signing letters of protest against these war crimes, not even for showing them. And that, as of this writing, over 100 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists were targeted and murdered by Israeli forces, often with their entire families.”

Likewise, it doesn’t escape me that MSM outlets have not mentioned the live footage of the beheaded child, only referring loosely to accounts of dismembered children². They’ve also not mentioned the comparisons that can certainly be made with the blanket coverage of what turned out to be a fake beheaded babies story after October 7. I can’t work out whether gun-shyness is at play. I can’t work out a lot of this, actually.

The article also refers to a feature from a little while back that ran in The Times that pivots from an image of six small Palestinian children lying in a row with a sheet over their bodies. “This is an image that demands to be seen”, wrote the journalist. Except the paper ran with a cropped version of the original image where you can’t see that one of the children has the side of their head blown off. It’s only once you see this detail that you realise the children are all dead (and not asleep). The editor who censored the image explained in a follow-up piece that the decision was made because they couldn’t contact the parents to get permission.

I get the sense that she was also struggling to work it all out.

I’ve written already about investigations by The Conversation and The Intercept showing clear bias in the way MSM is reporting on Gaza.

Meanwhile, in Israel, there’s hasbara, which means“explaining” in Hebrew (there is a different word for propaganda). Hasbara describes a range of efforts to justify Israel’s actions to the world. That N+1 article gave a few examples:

One video, produced by the Israeli National Public Diplomacy Directorate (@NationalHasbara) and aired on Hulu, used AI to construct a faux tourist ad for Gaza, showing how friendly and beautiful it would be for Western tourists — beaches, restaurants! — if not for Hamas. Another… aired to American audiences over the holidays, showed Santa squinting over a letter from a little boy….“Dear Santa,” the letter reads as music swells. “I’m writing to you for the first time. On October 7, some bad people came into our house. They hurt my mommy and my little sister, took my daddy away, and are still holding him. I’m all alone. I wish you could help bring my daddy back home.” Santa removes his glasses and begins to sob into his white-gloved hand. The video was posted to the official @Israel TikTok account on Christmas Eve. “This is a letter no child should have to write to Santa,” it said.

The point is, this experience itself is fragmented; we’re not going through it collectively. And so we can’t process it as a whole. Some of us facing it, looking, bearing witness. And some people are not seeing it at all.

And so…

6. What are the moral implications of looking and not looking?

I struggle with this. The Times editor had a feeble point - is it right to be looking at dead children? Is it just war porn if we are powerless to do anything with all our looking?

You might have seen the videos posted to Instagram with little kids in Gaza pleading for our help. Nadin Abdullatif, a 13-year-old, posted to Instagram a message to the West: “Does no one care about the two million people here in Gaza? Does no one care about us? I don’t know. What is happening here? What has happened to the world? I’m suffering, and every other child is suffering. So please, notice us!” Another young boy posts, “Guys, please. Let’s stop this now. Like talk about it, share. I don’t know. Call — anyone. Try to do something.”

This too is beyond language: The horrific absurdity of watching fellow humans in 2024 trapped in a military cage and filming their own deaths, while realising we are too trapped in the system ourselves to do anything to help.

William S Burrough’s once explained the meaning of the title of his book Naked Lunch. I think of it now:

“It’s the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”

This, too, is an edge we’ve been taken to. A frozen moment. A reckoning.

No?

As the Palestinian American writer Sarah Aziza³ asks, “What does all this looking do?” The “Napalm Girl” image shifted opinion, but it didn’t stop the war. The shared images and videos, the celebrities wearing Palestinian flag pins on red carpets…what does it do?

I’m not sure. But I feel obliged to bear witness. I follow and “like” on the accounts of journalists and civilians posting from Gaza so that they know they are being seen. It is indeed absurd, perhaps deluded - but I feel it matters. I know not everyone feels the same, or feels they can do the same.

7. Joanne Macy has helped: This pain is not for nothing

Have any of you caught the podcast series Macy is doing with Jessica Serrante? One of you here alerted me to this episode below and I listened to it on Sunday afternoon, so the wisdom I gleaned from it was fresh. It helped.

Jess and Joanna discuss the intolerable pain and rage they feel observing what is going on in the world, specifically in Gaza. And Joanna says to Jess that this pain is one you would not want to wish away, that you wouldn’t want the alternative - to find the situation tolerable.

“It's a pain that you have to bow to as a human being. That it is, you wouldn't want it not to be true for you… somehow you've got to allow it to hurt like hell without actually driving you crazy.”

I’m not sure I can add to this. Except to say I’m sitting radically in it all. I’d love to hear any wisdoms that are working for you…

Sarah xx

PS Today’s Wild episode is a really important one. It’s with a super cool French woman and we sit in my “kitchen” (which is also my lounge and bedroom) and talk about the renewable energy transition blindspot no one wants to talk about. I’m guessing many of you here know what I’m talking about….

1. I’m not sure if you are aware of the extent of this barrage that people like me - creatives mostly - have been subjected to in the past 8-9 months? I’ve hinted at it a few times.

2. And it occurred to me that it could be fake. I went searching for data to this effect. No one seems to be disputing it. And as I say, there are multiple accounts of dismembered bodies and children without heads, and footage of much of this.

3. Quoted in the N+1 article.