It took a sideways glance to jolt me from numb news-following to an adequate appreciation of the dreadfulness I have been watching. For weeks, I have been desperate for the faintest glimmer of hope that an end will come to Israel’s war of annihilation of the Palestinians of Gaza, that there will be a ceasefire, that the bombing, shooting and demolition will stop, that aid will flow in, that hostages and prisoners will be exchanged. Like a junkie, I just needed a report every day that negotiations were continuing between Hamas and the Israeli government via the mediators.
By chance, I watched a documentary by Chiara Sambuchi on the BBC, The Srebrenica Tape, which tells of the genocide through the story of a young mother of mixed Serbian and Bosnian heritage now living in the US. The film follows “Alisa’s road trip to the old home country interwoven with footage from her father Sejfo’s film, allowing a unique interior view from the enclosed and now disappeared town of Srebrenica.” Sejfo was was one of the 8,000 Bosnian Muslims massacred there when Serbian forces overwhelmed the UN “safe zone” in 1995 after encircling it for two years. The documentary has scenes familiar from similar documentaries. Alisa shows her daughter parts of her father’s video, preparing her to learn about his death in a less innocent future. She asks her stony-faced Serbian grandmother, in his whom home Alisa lived during the war, about why they did not talk about the war. She meets up with her half-sister, comparing which features they inherited from their father, regretting the separation between them.
The documentary evoked associations with Holocaust remembrances, fictional and factual, of traumatised survivors numbed into silence, of painful family separations, of unknown burials of the dead, of the bitter-sweet comfort of reunions. It was easy to empathise with Alisa’s story and share in her mourning for her father, because her pain is so easily recognisable as that pain we Jews carry round from place to place, never forgetting, never far from the surface, never quite knowing where to unpack it, wherever we have made our new homes.
Now, however, there is a sharper, more immediate, more difficult pain of recognition and remembrance. Now I – or we, but I can speak only for myself – feel through the sorrowful story of Srebrenica the utter grimness of the genocide perpetrated in Gaza, not by the wicked hands of others, but by our own hands, the hands of Israeli Jews, and are we not, as the Talmud says, all responsible for each other? Responsible not only for each others’ safety, for redeeming our hostages, but also for each others’ heinous actions and inactions? We do not need to wait for Alisa’s father’s video to be smuggled out of Srebrenica or for victorious allies to film liberated camps. Every moment on 24 hours news channels and social media platforms we can see starvation being used as a weapon of this war of annihilation, despite the frantic, denials of Israeli spokespersons and the silence of most Israeli media. Can we not hear in the disgraceful, sinful planning of Israeli politicians and generals for the ever-tighter concentration of Palestinians in Gaza the echoes of the ghettos and concentration camps? Can we not see that the utter depravity of starving a Jewish child in Warsaw is as utterly depraved when it is a child in Gaza?
I quote again Si Heyman’s protest song in 1988, during the first intifada, “Shooting and Crying,” in which she asks, “when did we forget that our children were also killed?” I paraphrase one of the other lines in the song to ask “Whenever did we learn how to starve children to death?” The answer is that we learned all of this when it was done to us. So when will we learn that inflicting it on innocent Palestinians who were not the perpetrators of the Holocaust or of October 7th will not take way the pain of what was perpetrated against us? It creates instead thousands more stories of loss and desolation, thousands more cases of trauma, all of which will be repeated down the generations.
Picturing Peace 