I have a hobbyhorse I haven’t mounted: the failure of The New Yorker magazine, which helped shape liberal blue-state opposition to the Vietnam War, to say one word about Gaza. Yes, editor David Remnick said something about the onslaught in a comment back in January, noncommital. And a blogger at the New Yorker did some coverage, praising Jeffrey Goldberg, as I recall. But that’s pretty much it. There’s been no coverage of this central event in the life of the mind and our politics, let alone the lives of the Palestinians and of liberal American Jews agonizing about the soul of Israel.
Compare the New Yorker to the Lancet, the Guardian, the American Conservative, or the Nation–this beautiful piece by Wallace Shawn, the son of the late legendary editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn, who supervised much of the Vietnam coverage– and you see that The New Yorker has abdicated leadership–I believe out of identification with Israel (the same identification that leaks into the Times, when it disses Obama and parrots Israel’s talking points).
This is a long buildup to a fine piece by Taghreed El-Khodary (of the New York Times) in the CJR on reporting the slaughter. It’s a you-are-there piece with some interesting interactions with Hamas, and a lot about how Palestinians feel about their children:
Al-Shifa is the main hospital in Gaza City, and there are faces and voices there I don’t forget. A girl declares loudly—in conservative Gaza run by an Islamic movement—that she is losing her faith in God. She blames her mother for the loss of her sister’s leg. I ask the crying mother why, and she explains that she thought it would be safer to send the girl to her uncle’s home because it is built of concrete. The concrete wasn’t much protection.
Another mother wishes aloud for the extermination of Hamas, having seen her daughter cut in half by an Israeli bomb…
A father searches for his son, who he says is twenty-two. I listen to him talking quietly to God: I always prayed. Please save him. He is my only son. I know the guards will show sympathy when the man learns his son is dead. “He is a martyr,” they tell him later. But the father doesn’t stop talking to himself. I will cry until I die, my dear son…
In Jabalia, I enter a location that has been hit five times by Israeli bombs. I worry that the drones could hit at any moment, but try to focus on the story. I attend a funeral for more than thirty people, and talk to a father while staring into his dead daughter’s brown eyes. “From now on,” he says, “I’m Hamas.”
Back at Al-Shifa hospital, an ambulance arrives with bodies from Zeitoun district, east of the city. I ask the driver how many were killed. A man next to the driver screams at him: “Don’t answer her! She is saying ‘killed,’ not ‘martyred.’” The driver pulls away.
I want to leave before it gets any darker, but a taxi stops in front of the emergency room and a Hamas fighter steps out. Finally, I’m seeing a fighter.
