“...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
[[[Sordid—adjective. Ignoble actions and motives; arousing moral distaste and contempt; marked by baseness or grossness. Similar: sleazy, seedy, vile, dirty, filthy.]]]
It is Day 200 of the war. Here’s the situation, the full picture. I won’t spare you the sordid details. Why should I? Nobody is sparing anyone the sordid details anymore.
There is no quiet on any front. “Fierce” battles rage [[as if all battles aren’t fierce?]] in Gaza, Lebanon, the Golan Heights, Damascus, the West Bank, Tehran, Yemen, Yale, Harvard and Columbia.
The North and the South of my country are under siege, largely abandoned hellscapes. My country, with its nuclear submarines, stealth bombers, cruise missiles, spy satellites, Jewish space lasers— supposedly the most powerful country in a radius of 1,000 miles— is buckling under the weight of several simultaneous fronts, 200 days and counting.
Over 300,000 soldiers are being sent this way, then that way, then this way again. The blanket is too short to cover the bed. By the time the soldiers get home to sleep in their own beds again for a few days, they’re all over the place. So are their spouses. So are their finances. And don’t get me started on their children. Nobody knows what will be with the children. Who knows what sordid future awaits them.
But the soldiers who come home in one piece to rest are the lucky ones. Some soldiers come home in pieces. And even they are the lucky ones, at least most of their pieces are together so they can be buried. Some soldiers’ pieces are still being held by the enemy. Recently a special unit was sent to bring back the severed head hacked off a soldier’s body with a spade on October 7. They found it wrapped in plastic and kept in an ice cream fridge in Gaza. The unit brought the head to his father. Can you take a moment to see this situation? Can you look at this image, this act of sordid kindness? A commander bringing a father his son’s head, missing from his son’s body for a hundred days? I told you it was sordid. Still, the father was grateful he could bury his fallen son with some respect, at least he could give him that —and the country bowed its head in reverence. It has been normalized. If, someday, another son’s head is taken, nobody will bat an eyelid. An eye for an eye, a head for a head. What a sordid world we live in.
In Northern Israel —or Occupied Northern Palestine as it’s called at expensive American universities —explosive suicide drones crash into city council buildings and army barracks; electricity lines are blown up, then electrical workers who come to fix the lines are shot in the head by snipers over 3km away; rockets crash into world-class wineries; mortars blow up chicken coops and cow sheds. Any cows that survive are later blown up in rocket attacks on Shwarma shops. Farms lie fallow: over 200 days, our reconnection to the land we were expelled from 2,000 years ago is being severed, like a head off a soldier’s neck. It’s sordid.
100,000 Israeli civilians are “internally displaced” —the way you feel the morning after an overnight trance-party-cum-massacre in the desert. For 200 days they feel like this. Most of these 100,000 are still in hotels. They can’t go back home. Their homes have big rocket holes in them, walls and roofs blown off, craters in the kitchen, cars burnt in the driveway. And nobody knows how long this is going to be going on for. It’s sordid. The hotels don’t want them anymore, they want paying customers not homeless zombies. Suicide rates are through the roof. But at least there is a roof.
There are posters around town of young women soldiers and teenage girls who were taken on October 7. Some were taken in their uniforms, others still in their pyjamas. Folks round here believe these girls are being gang-raped in Gaza for 200 days and counting, and that if they ever do come out in a hostage deal they’ll come out pregnant or cradling their Hamas babies. That would be Hamas’ ultimate victory picture, wouldn’t it? This is how they’re terrorizing the parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents. I told you it was sordid.
But what’s even more sordid is that almost nobody in the big wide world sees any of this. Trees are falling but no-one’s watching the forest channel; we’re not making a sound so nobody can hear the Jews scream.
But do you want to know what the most sordid thing of all is?
It’s people like me, the lucky ones, the ones who can choose when to watch the forest channel and when to switch it off. Around me I don’t see any falling trees. The buildings around me are all standing. I see cars pulling into and out of the driveways. I see able-bodied fathers and their whole-bodied sons walking into their homes with shopping bags. But I’m not being complacent. About 96 days ago I got a gun just to be on the safe side. And so now I owe you a sordid picture of my own.
///ends///