Making sense of horror
In the face of events from Ukraine to Gaza, we want to believe that the world is not a place of uncontrollable catastrophe, writes Jonathan Freedland.
ANY JOURNALIST should hesitate before saying this, but news can be bad for you. You don’t have to agree with the analyst who reckons ‘‘ news is to the mind what sugar is to the body’’ to see that reading of horror and foreboding hour by hour, day after day, can sap the soul. This week ended with a double dose, administered within the space of a few hours: Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza and, more shocking because it was entirely unexpected, the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine, killing all 298 on board.
The different responses these events stir in those of us who are distant, and the strategies we devise to cope with them, say much about our behaviour as consumers of news. But they also go some way to determining our reaction as citizens, as constituent members of the amorphous body we call public, or even world, opinion.
As I write, 18 of the 20 mostread articles on the Guardian website – on any website probably – are about MH17. The entry into Gaza by Israeli forces stands at No 21. It’s not hard to fathom why the Malaysian jet strikes the louder chord. As the preacher might put it: ‘‘There but for the grace of God go I.’’ Stated baldly, most of us will never live in Gaza, but we know it could have been us boarding that plane in Amsterdam.
Which is why there is a morbid fascination with tales of the passenger who changed flights at the last minute, thereby cheating death, or with the crew member who made the opposite move, hastily switching to MH17, a decision that would have seemed so trivial at the time but which cost him his life. When we read about the debris – the holiday guidebooks strewn over the Ukrainian countryside, the man found next to an iPhone, the boy with his seatbelt still on – we can see ourselves on that flight. Of course we have sympathy for the victims and their families. But our fear is for ourselves.
The reports from Gaza stir a different feeling. Three Palestinian siblings killed by an Israeli artillery shell that crashed into their bedroom, a father putting the remains of his two-year-old son into a plastic shopping bag – these leave us shaken by a different kind of horror. It is compassion for another human being, someone in a situation utterly different to ours. We don’t worry that this might happen to us, as we now might when we contemplate an international flight over a war zone. Our reaction is directed not inward, but outward.
Not that that makes one situation easier to contemplate than
Life in this global world is fragile.
the other. They are both unbearable. And so we devise coping strategies. The first is the attempt to make sense of what we have seen – to construct a story that permits us to believe that the world is not, natural disasters apart, a place of random catastrophe and anarchy. And, usually, the first building block in this effort is blame.
If we know whom to blame, then suddenly life is not quite so arbitrary: if only X or Y had behaved differently then we might be safe. So within minutes, even before anybody had had a chance to absorb what had happened, journalists and politicians were asking who was responsible. The very act of pointing the finger at proRussian separatists brings some relief. If we can state with confidence that it’s their fault and their fault alone, then we do not face the tougher possibility: that life in this new, globally interconnected world is terribly fragile.
In Gaza, this same impulse creates the urge to anoint clearcut goodies and baddies, a side to cheer and a side to boo. Once we know whom to support, then, we imagine, we are halfway to knowing how this problem might be solved: all that need happen is that the good guys prevail. The usual practice is to say that the hero is the victim, defined as whoever is suffering the most at that moment, with the other side declared the villain.
So in Gaza we look at the wildly lopsided death tolls – nearly 300 Palestinians and two Israelis killed these past 10 days – and conclude that Israel must be completely in the wrong and Palestinians completely in the right. But then Israelis remind you that millions of their own civilians are under constant Hamas rocket fire and that recent years have done little to convince them that, even if Israel were to lift its siege of Gaza, those rockets would stop. So while seeing faraway conflicts in black and white might be a helpful coping strategy, it doesn’t always fit the reality or help solve the problem.
Others find a different way to handle all this horror. They also look for someone to blame, but their search starts closer to home. They work on the assumption that whatever nightmares are unfolding in Ukraine, Gaza or elsewhere, they are ultimately the result of our own action, or inaction. So it must have been US- led advances in eastern Europe that made Russia feel so threatened that it had to annex a chunk of its neighbour’s territory – or it must be American and British support for Israel that lies at the root of the current trouble.
Arguments of this kind can sometimes have merit: it’s quite true that if the US truly decided that Israel’s 47-year occupation of Palestinian territory was no longer acceptable, that would bring change. But the impulse behind such arguments is not always coolly analytical. Sometimes the urge to say ‘‘this is our fault’’ seems to owe more to a desire to exert a kind of control. For if every bad thing in the world is the fault of America, then it’s surely so much easier to fix.
Of course, there is another way to cope. It’s the one that most of us deploy most often. It is to look away. That’s what we have done with Syria, where the killing goes on. On Thursday, 115 people were killed, 25 of them civilians, in a single clash in Homs province. But none of us was watching.
Looking away is certainly comfortable. The trouble is, that option is not always available, as MH17 has proved. We might have wanted to avert our gaze from the civil war in Ukraine. But now we can’t. As one analyst so rightly says: ‘‘The war has come to us.’’