Sitting with the Heaviness of the World
Lessons from our immaturity, amid recent acts of cruelty and wartime escalation
Sometimes, when the weight of the world’s events sits heavily upon me, I make use of a simple walk to reconnect with the little things in life.
Today I’m going to talk about the fruits of my walk yesterday, in the wake of the second round of booby-trap attacks in Lebanon and Syria, and before today’s predictable follow-up of more overt military action by Israel in the north—which is in keeping with an escalation of regional war that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been champing at the bit over for months.
First, though, a little context.
This past week in the Middle East, we’ve had a whirlwind of news cycles: not all reaching the West directly, but most signalling how unhinged the region’s leadership continues to be, and at such cost to human thriving.
First, Gaza’s health ministry released an updated list of all the names of the dead for which they have at least five key ID markers—names, genders, birth dates, death dates, (and thus) ages. As I noted a few months ago, Gaza’s Ministry of Health announced back in April that, due to the deteriorating state of its facilities amid IDF operations, it was separating death counts into two lists: one for which those basic details are available, and one for the bodies that haven’t been identified in full.
This latest, 649-page document includes 215 pages of children, 100 pages of which are under ten, with 710 infants in general and 169 born after October 7. This list of 34,344 bodies contains 11,355 children, 2,955 people aged 60 or older, and 6,297 women.
A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to justify these deaths, or to deny them.
Whenever such a report comes out, social media is full of people rushing to do this work of propaganda—sometimes by undermining the death count directly; other times, by invoking the existence of other global conflicts to deflect from this one.
Gaza is not the only war in process, after all: from April 2023 to April 2024, Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) reported some 15,500 fatalities in Sudan’s civil war. Darfur had the highest rate of civilian casualties from this number, at 32%, while Khartoum endured the most civilian deaths by raw figures: 1,470. Meanwhile, in Myanmar, which was just hit by a typhoon and is still fighting ethnic cleansing after a military coup in 2021, the civilian and activist death count up to February 2024 was 4,611, according to The Lancet. As for Yemen, the “whataboutist” crew likes to use its total death count to suppress discussion of Gaza, but the most comparable time stamp is from March 2015 to June 2019, when ACLED and the Yemen Data Project note that this worst period of persecution yielded 15,000 direct civilian deaths over four years.
I find the activity of trying to diminish death counts rather ghoulish, myself.
I understand how reluctant some people are to reckon with their complicity in this violence—after cheering it on, after refusing to engage with data that might seem “disloyal” to the cause, and after disseminating falsehoods about the enemy to further the war effort. But it’s possible, whatever one’s position in this war, to sit with the fact of death without rushing to spin it for optics. We can choose to retain our humanity.
Also in the news—though less frequently in Western papers—was more word of Israeli settlers in the West Bank continuing their attacks on Palestinian residents—razing farmland, poisoning cattle, polluting drinking water. These Israeli settlers have been sanctioned and condemned multiple times for a reason by European and US bodies, and videos of their concerted harassment of Palestinian and Bedouin communities are widely available online if you care to see how brutally they act.
They are empowered to do so by local government, though: as I noted a few months ago, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was furious when these violent settler actions inspired more countries to back Palestinian statehood. In conference settings this year, he openly discussed how he was encouraging civilian groups (watched over by IDF, for added intimidation factor) to seize this land faster for Israel, since a military annexation in wartime would be a blatant violation of international law.
But in local Israeli news, the big story leading up to the last few days of attacks in Lebanon involved Netanyahu’s hinted desire to replace the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, with someone more loyal to him and more invested in aggressive action in the north. Netanyahu fired Gallant once before, back in March 2023 over Gallant’s criticism of the PM’s attacks on Israel’s judiciary, before public pressure compelled Netanyahu to cave. Gallant has been a striking figure in this war: certainly not any less in favour of military action in general, but more pragmatic about it, and routinely concerned about IDF readiness amid the prime minister’s eagerness (along with the eagerness of his far-right coalition) to press for a wider war on multiple fronts.
Gallant was among the intelligence experts questioning the latest narrative Netanyahu was spinning to keep his war alive. Netanyahu had been stalling ceasefire talks with claims about the utmost importance of maintaining IDF presence along the Philadelphi corridor—something Gallant and other locals were quick to debunk based on the state of local operations, which suggested a very different strategic direction.
Adding to this mess of an internal dispute was a body fake news planted in the Jewish Chronicle to sway Israelis toward the government position. That caused a huge local scandal this week. Yes, Israel has its own Fox-news-esque channels feeding right-wing delusions among a type of Israeli MAGA, but the depth of this government’s implantation of false narratives even into old journalistic institutions has been deeply demoralizing for a country that already had its democracy downgraded this year thanks to Netanyahu’s attacks on the judiciary. These are Russian-style propaganda tactics, and it’s a grim sign to see them so emboldened internally and externally.
Nevertheless, as the Philadelphi corridor gambit faltered under internal debunking, Netanyahu was already on to his next objective in the north, where Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies have been engaging in skirmishes with the express goal of keeping up pressure on Israel until there’s a ceasefire in Gaza. The US, like Gallant, has been trying to convince Netanyahu that his objective for this northern war is unrealistic, but not long after the US tried to sit down with Netanyahu’s government on this issue, the first of two attacks on radio-based devices in Lebanon took place.
And it’s been tough, if also important, to pay attention to everyday people’s reactions. I watched well over a dozen videos of the explosions themselves and the hospital aftermath, but nothing hits as hard as seeing the gleeful reactions of people half a world away, hand-waving away any interest in the broader ethical implications, because to them this is a game with a simplistic sense of “good guys” and “bad guys”.
There are grounds for calling what happened a war crime, as expressed by legal scholars and world leaders (most notably, in Belgium and from an EU rep) in the wake of Netanyahu announcing this “new phase in the war”—but we don’t like using that term when the perpetrator is an ally, and when the event struck well-known enemies.
And this makes us tremendous hypocrites: not because we treat the slightest attack on our own citizens as unconscionable, yet shrug at violence in civilian spaces elsewhere; but because we do so and still somehow think ourselves a more moral and righteous civilization. We are not. We are acting like crude tribalists.
Meanwhile, there is literally a Geneva Convention to cover this situation.
Article 7.2-3 of the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects reads:
It is prohibited to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.
Without prejudice to the provisions of Article 3, it is prohibited to use weapons to which this Article applies in any city, town, village or other area containing a similar concentration of civilians in which combat between ground forces is not taking place or does not appear to be imminent, unless either:
they are placed on or in the close vicinity of a military objective; or
measures are taken to protect civilians from their effects, for example, the posting of warning sentries, the issuing of warnings or the provision of fences.
Where
“Booby-trap” means any device or material which is designed, constructed or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object or performs an apparently safe act.
“Other devices” means manually-emplaced munitions and devices including improvised explosive devices designed to kill, injure or damage and which are actuated manually, by remote control or automatically after a lapse of time.
(And yes, Israel is a party to this convention—even if it’s not party to all of them.)
So now we’re witnessing the fallout of these acts of state terrorism from an ally.
Again.
And while Netanyahu’s last two major plays for a broader regional war—first with an attack around an Iranian consulate in Syria in April, then with the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Iran in July—fizzled out (not exactly due to Iranian “restraint”, so much as the country’s unreadiness to engage in warfare by more conventional means), who knows how long that status quo can continue?
Netanyahu is working hard to whip up a larger war than anyone outside his far-right coalition, and its fan-base among local MAGA-esque extremists and a selection of Christian nationalists in the West, really wants. But if he gets his way? Then the US will be further locked into regional military support, for a complex array of reasons related to broader global security issues.
But ML, one might suggest: Why keep dwelling on this one site of conflict? The world is so much bigger than this one awful regional nightmare, isn’t it?
Yes, it is.
And yet, that’s exactly the problem: the outsize importance placed on this territory.
Whenever regional war escalates in ways that lock in larger parts of the world, we also lock ourselves into more industries shaped by destruction—not only of land and people, but also of our climate. Instead of addressing that much greater existential threat (a threat that also guarantees the rise of more extremists and ethno-religious wars), our societies keep throwing themselves deeper into this nationalist death spiral.
And so, wearied by the stupidity and cruelty of it all, I went for a walk.
Now, in my neighbourhood, I certainly can’t hope for a complete reprieve from sorrow when I go for a walk. There are everyday traumas all around me: neighbours having a hard time financially, folks on the street desperate for something to eat. I greet the ones I know with a warm smile and friendly word. I help out where I can, and bear witness to the rest. The huddled, skeletal bodies passed out in the shade of a tree. The people picking through trash and stinking to high heaven themselves.
Still, there is also so much in the outer world that doesn’t give a hoot about human incompetence. The trees in my barrio are gonna keep a-tree-in’. The bees are gonna keep a-bee-in’. The birds and the flowers and the horses I see most days will abide.
Maybe not forever, but—for now.
And when one takes a moment away from the immensity of human stupidity and cruelty, there’s room to notice how atypical all this nonsense is in nature.
Most critters deal with what’s before them: a more concrete, everyday notion of struggle. It’s only we humans who have this special gift for going out of our way to struggle over things we can’t change, and which are transpiring half a world away.
At the end of my walk, I had tea with a vendor friend of mine, and I told him about some of the news I’d been sifting through. His face lit up. He was just reading about this, he said—and then he took out his Bible, and read from Isaiah 13:
9 Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.
10 For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon shall not cause her light to shine.
11 And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.
12 I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir.
13 Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the Lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger.
14 And it shall be as the chased roe, and as a sheep that no man taketh up: they shall every man turn to his own people, and flee every one into his own land.
15 Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword.
16 Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.
17 Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, which shall not regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it.
18 Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eyes shall not spare children.
19 And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.
20 It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.
Now, I’m a seasoned hand at listening to people talk excitedly about sections of Biblical verse—even its worst parts, like this one, which depicts a godhead explicitly sanctioning the rape of women and the murder of every man, woman, and child (in utero and otherwise), to the great glory of his chosen people.
And I know more about the construction of this text than my friend does. I know that Isaiah is considered to be the author of around half the book, writing in the middle of the 8th Century BCE to fortify himself and his people amid geopolitical decline. I also know that King Josiah’s people had a huge hand in tinkering with the text a century or so later, around when Deuteronomy also conveniently showed up to reinforce Josiah’s purging of other faith practices and general warmongering for nationalist reforms.
But none of that deep history really matters here, because my friend was right to marvel at the similarity between what I’d been describing from recent news, and what he’d just been reading. It’s not that Isaiah was saying anything prophetic about the world of 2024; it’s that his depiction of the world 2,700 years ago—and the vision he offered his people to give them comfort at a time when they’d been laid low—offers a sharp reminder of how little we humans ever change.
The most potent part of Isaiah 13 might be line 14, which reads in part: “they shall every man turn to his own people, and flee every one into his own land” (KJV).
That is indeed the nationalist way of early Biblical history. People and land “belong” to tribes by divine decree—and so, the deaths of individuals don’t really matter. It didn’t matter then what harm one did to specific members of a different tribe. The notion of a shared humanity wasn’t really around yet (if we can even dare to say that it’s around now). The most important concept was defence of the tribe itself.
This concept persists across faith traditions and in many perceptions of modern nation-states, and although many of us don’t agree with this way of viewing human life, we live in paradigms shaped by leaders who do, and which are upheld by everyday citizens who eagerly adopt this sportsball attitude to “winning” and “losing”.
And that’s just the way things are going to be, for as long as we draw breath.
So those of us who are heart-sick in a world created by such ugly, nationalist stories are going to keep having days, weeks, months, and years when the latest word of human cruelty and indifference, warmongering and hypocrisy, weighs heavily on us.
Because when we keep trying to build something better, amid all this noise and waste, we know that’s probably going to be seen as stupid and useless, too.
I for one have no illusions about some folks who read my words and who might even nod along sympathetically with them. Many will do so, then rush back to check in on the warmongers, eager to see what their latest stats say—because the game of war feels more real to them, more thrilling and important, than working for peace.
So why bother?
Well, because I am not a flower or a bee, a tree or a horse or a bird.
I can wander in nature and envy it for the simplicity of the struggles it faces, but at the end of the day, I’m still stuck with the weight of greater knowledge—futile though it might be—and the responsibility to act accordingly that it imposes on us.
Even if it seems useless.
Even if it seems hopeless.
Because that’s how humans keep a-human-in’.
At least, while we still can.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML