Dear reader,
This morning, a colleague sent me an image she said she had got from social media. It stopped me in my tracks.
The image shows what appears to be an Israeli military bulldozer, likely a D9 armoured bulldozer, whose adornment made an unusual and striking contrast—several stuffed teddy bears and other stuffed toys were attached to its front grill and body. The massive industrial vehicle, with heavy treads and hydraulic systems typical of military engineering vehicles, made a stark grey military background for the fluffy toys.
Commentators on X said that the IDF bulldozer was decorated with the trophies of toys belonging to children whose homes it had destroyed and termed the act “truly demonic”. Social media, as you will know dear reader, is a place where misinformation thrives, and I genuinely hope this turns out to be a doctored “photoshopped” image. Because if it’s true, I frankly do not have the mental bandwidth to fathom the minds behind such activities.
But of course, if you’ve been following the war raging in and beyond Gaza, the latest edition of which began after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on a music festival in Israel, you will already be familiar with such gruesome images, of mutilated children, mothers searching for lost children, and fathers carrying tiny shrouded bodies through rubble-strewn streets. You would have seen hospitals turned into battlegrounds, schools reduced to ash, and sacred spaces of worship transformed into graveyards. The numbers have become so overwhelming—over 42,000 dead, mostly women and children, with another 1,00,000 wounded—that we risk becoming numb to the individual tragedies unfolding each day in this besieged strip of land.
As we witness the atrocities, there is only one question that pops up.
Why? Why such cruelty: on children, women, and the vulnerable? We thought such wars were over in the age of cyberwarfare, modern diplomacies, negotiations, and arbitrations. Why does the atrocity continue unabated in Gaza? The Ukraine war, going on for over two years now, and much condemned by the West is nothing in comparison. So, we ask again, why?
“There is no why here.” These words from Primo Levi’s haunting memoir If This Is a Man reach us across time, written from the depths of Auschwitz, where human dignity was stripped to its bare bones. Levi’s memoir describes an encounter with a concentration camp guard that illustrates the dehumanising nature of the camps. Levi, desperately thirsty, breaks off an icicle to quench his thirst. A guard immediately takes it away from him. When Levi asks him why, the guard simply responds: “There is no why here.”
This is what we hear Israel telling the world today: “There is no why here.” As we witness the ongoing tragedy in Gaza, the Jewish writer’s words take on a new, devastating meaning. Levi’s testament to human suffering and resilience speaks to us across generations, reminding us that the duty to witness, to remember, and to speak out against inhumanity knows no boundaries of time or identity. Wars don’t need a why. It’s all about the hows, whats, and whens.
As Vaishna Roy, our Editor, says in her introduction to the latest cover package of Frontline (What is the Endgame?), one did not imagine that history would “come full circle” in less than 80 years, when our collective memories of the Holocaust are still fresh. Our cover package, anchored by a comprehensive analysis by former Ambassador Talmiz Ahmad of the current crisis, takes us through the devastating year since October 7, 2023. The numbers are stark. But numbers, as Edward Said once reminded us, can never capture the full measure of human suffering.
Ironically, the suffering of the Palestinian people has only one parallel in history. And that is the suffering of its oppressors during the Holocaust. The dehumanising elements of the Holocaust are at play in Gaza as well. Judith Butler, whose family lost relatives in the Holocaust, writes poignantly that Palestinians are not “regarded as people” by Israel and the US. Those of us who were raised with the imperative “Never Again”, she wrote, understood it to mean that no population should be subjected to genocidal violence ever again. Last year, in an interview to the American news organisation Truthout, she quoted poet June Jordan who saw, in 1982, how Israel bombed Palestinian encampments and carried out massacres in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. Butler recites the following lines from Jordan’s “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon”:
“They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children
But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
“They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla
strongholds.
They called the screaming devastation
that they created the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?”
The Gazans are asked to leave and leave, every day. And they leave. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote: “We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere.” Darwish captures the perpetual displacement that has characterised the Palestinian experience. Today, as hundreds of thousands of Gazans move from one “safe zone” to another, only to find that safety is an illusion, Darwish’s words ring with renewed tragedy.
It does not end there. West Asia today stares at what Talmiz Ahmad calls a “Sarajevo moment”. The comparison is chilling. Israel’s actions and the impunity it enjoys are like the two bullets that assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and triggered World War I. The recent Israeli strikes on Iran, and the attacks and counter-attacks involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and other regional militias, have created a tinderbox that threatens to engulf the region and beyond.
In this issue, we revisit the historical roots of the crisis. The colonial mindset that shaped the creation of Israel, articulated by the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, in 1895 when he wrote of Israelis taking over Palestine: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border...” West Asia experts Bashir Ali Abbas and Md. Muddassir Quamar write, respectively, about the Iran and the Arab question, while Jayati Ghosh analyses the war’s impact on oil. We were among the first mainstream publications worldwide to call the Israeli attack a genocide. With the war completing a year, this is our second cover feature. We have, in fact, extensively covered the Israeli occupation through numerous analyses and ground reports since our inception in 1984.
Why do we do this? We quote the Israeli writer Amira Hass, who has spent decades reporting from the occupied territories: “To resist the normalisation of evil and of injustice.” Our coverage seeks to document, analyse, and understand in real time events as they unfold at a dizzying pace.
As we cover the war, we are mindful of Hannah Arendt’s warning about the “banality of evil”, about how systematic violence can become normalised through bureaucratic and political processes. Our stories are attempts to cut through this normalisation, to show both the human cost of the conflict and the complex web of political and historical factors that perpetuate it.
We invite you to engage with this complex and challenging material, to move beyond simplified narratives, and to understand the full scope of the tragedy unfolding in Gaza—and the choices that lie ahead.
I leave you with the words of the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan: “Enough for me to die on her earth, be buried in her, to melt and vanish into her soil.” As Gaza’s soil continues to receive its dead, our duty to witness, to understand, and to seek paths to peace becomes ever more urgent.
And I wish tomorrow someone will tell me that the IDF bulldozer image is fake.
Wishing you peace and time with your loved ones this Diwali,
For Frontline,
Jinoy Jose P.
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