Palestine Letter: Did the ‘war’ in Gaza even happen?

On October 10, after watching Donald Trump announce from Egypt the end of the Gaza war, I said to a friend who has been following the developments of the past two years in Gaza: “The war is over then.” My friend, who has the habit of philosophizing everything, replied: “What war?”

My friend is a very pragmatic person, though. I saw him sobbing in shock the night the Baptist Al-Ahly hospital in Gaza was bombed for the first time. I’ve witnessed him go for days into silence, not showing any kind of expression, though inside I knew he felt the bleeding, as all of us in Palestine did throughout the genocide. I know for a fact that he doesn’t take the reality of what happened and is still happening in Gaza as a philosophical matter, but he had a point; To ask if the war ended presupposes that a war took place to begin with.

You might be wondering, as I did, how anyone would question the fact that a war happened in Gaza, even more so, why a Palestinian in Palestine would ask this. But it turns out that this question could have multiple answers, depending on how you understand it, and it matters to you and me, now more than ever.

Back in the early 1990s, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard claimed that “the Gulf war did not take place.” Baudrillard did not doubt the factual events of the Gulf War, but he highlighted the fact that for the general public, the lived experience of the war was absent. The Gulf War was little more than a mediatized, carefully controlled, hyperreality spectacle, broadcast live for the first time in the history of warfare through CNN. However, the human lived experience of the war, in the symbolic world of the media, did not occur.

Surely, the human tragedy of the genocide in Gaza did get through to the general public through the internet, and to some extent through conventional media. But did it, really? Mixed with tons of talking points, most of which were part of the attempt to justify what was happening, while paradoxically trying to deny it, the “war” in Gaza was largely lived as a wave of controversy over how to explain the idea of the events. Which begs the question, in the symbolic world of media and the internet, was “the war” in Gaza anything more than the symbolic, rhetorical war over its perception?

As a Palestinian journalist reporting from Palestine, whose daily life is often confronted with the media coverage of Palestine, I have lived all of my professional life walking the fine line between the real and the symbolic existence of Palestine and Palestinians.

In the real, on-the-ground, physical life, Palestine is as complex as a human existence can be. Daily life is not a political event, although it is marked by the political reality in every single detail. Palestinians work, or search for work, struggle to earn daily bread, study, fight, reconcile, fall in and out of love, start families, and do everything else people do. They express and live their culture through all of it, and it is not a folkloric celebration, but a living, heavily influential, hard-to-navigate culture. And in every single part of this life, the denial of their freedom, rights, and dignity due to their political reality is a major factor that they have to deal with.

However, in today’s world, our collective, everyday existence as a people is not significant enough to the architects of the media’s symbolic world. We are not a “start-up nation” that exports surveillance AI to police governments. We do not have a multi-million dollar arms industry. We are not even interesting as consumers, because the occupation of our country has deprived us of our natural resources and forced us to be dependent on international assistance.

My father’s ties to his olive grove, my friend’s family’s life-long struggle to build a house, my village’s elders’ attachment to the worn-out stones of their ancient church, the community culture of Gaza’s refugee camps, and their people’s memories of their destroyed villages have no economic value, and therefore do not qualify for existence in the media. This is why we are expendable, and why it is possible for mainstream media to dismiss our collective destruction as mere numbers. Our popular culture, our identity, our traditions, have no place in the world of symbolic existence, not even as a tourist attraction, since most of the tourism to our country is controlled by our occupiers, who control our holy places; the only thing that most tourists find interesting in our land.

To be a Palestinian journalist, understanding the market rules of the media, means, at least in one of its aspects, to live daily with the reality that everything that makes your identity, everything that you hold dear, everything that you belong to, has no value whatsoever in the world in which people buy and sell, trade and are told how and what to consume. The world in which existence, any existence, is judged worthy or not. But what is even harder to live with is the realization that in order to exist in such a world, your people need to die. That death is the only clickbait that you and your people have to offer.

In the past two years, the existence of Palestinians has been market-worthy, because they died on a massive scale, violently, on a daily basis. Our people in Gaza provided the spectacle with their own blood, tears, and screams, and that is why they were at the forefront of the news. And now that the rules of capitalism dictate that it is time to end the war, to make way for mega-projects in the Middle East, the Palestinian existence has moved to the back of the news again, even though Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank continue to bleed, shed tears, and scream.

So did the war end? Did it even happen? If you look back at mainstream media coverage after reading these lines, you might conclude that it didn’t. Fortunately, the world of capitalist media is not the only realm of existence. Not even the main one. Palestine has existed for a long time, long before cable TV was even invented. It has existed, with its Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities, long before Napoleon put it on the map of his imperialist conquests, and long before British imperialists began planning its colonization.

Our people have lived, struggled, and developed our identity since 1948, even when the media erased our name from its virtual narration of existence. And no matter what the mainstream media says, the war in Palestine was taking place long before October 7, 2023, and still is going on. More importantly, over the past two years, millions of people around the world, in real life, have begun to see our real existence, in all its dimensions, and can no longer unsee it.

This is why journalism has another meaning. One that doesn’t obey the rules of capitalist symbolic existence. One that is committed to people; people whose reality is covered, and people who deserve to know it. It is a kind of journalism that matters, in part, because you, the audience, take it seriously. It is the kind of journalism that we, at Mondoweiss, are committed to continuing to do.