Catch the pro-Palestinian rally last weekend in Toronto’s busiest shopping neighborhood, over a thousand people there. It was obvious that the organizers were professional veterans. There were even two mute anchors, working in shifts. The rally was also attended not only by Arabs, but also by orthodox Jewishs, Westerners, and there were signs in Korean.
The host shouted from the stage for everyone to take out their cell phones and take pictures of him for posting on all types of social media. Behind him, someone opens their hands, each with a short stick, and there is colorful smoke coming out of the stick, which is eye-catching.
As that war in Gaza advances, there are now two wars. One in Gaza and one in all corners of the globe, on cell phones, on social media, and in the face-off scene between politicians and academics. The former war is fire and blood. The latter war is a confrontation between the new self-conscious Palestinian national movement and Israel’s image as the protector of the state. Each side is producing the necessary emotional and content products, doing its best to sell the emotions, narratives and knowledge in its favor in a marketplace of changing perceptions, in a dizzying array of categories. The war in Gaza, for its part, is the primary source of raw material for the latter confrontation, spewing fear, hatred and grief at all times. It is conceivable that after the war in Gaza is over, there will be a flood of narratives, memories and related content material from the parties involved, which will continue to be processed into content commodities suitable for consumption and transported to social media across the globe.
This is probably one of the biggest differences between current wars and past wars. In the past, content production in a state of war was tightly regulated or even monopolized. There would be censorship by the powers that be, a unified voice to curb content that interfered with wartime mobilization to disrupt military morale. For example, conveying the horrors of war and selling peacemaking. But today’s wars are different. Censorship cannot eliminate decentralized social media, and it cannot curb the ability of those who experience war to sell their personal “biases” and catharsis directly on the field.
In the first war, it was clear that Israel was winning, but the longer it drags on, the greater the challenge Israel will face in the second war. One reason may be that what sustains Israel is the one day of October 7, while the destruction of Gaza has been exporting suffering for more than 2 months, continuously.
The most common slogan of the pro-Palestinian side is now “genocide”, a slogan that is in fact linked to the pro-Israeli fight against terrorism, which implicitly targets the same people, the civilian victims of their own side. When Hamas kills Israeli civilians, it is terrorism. When Israel annihilates Palestinian civilians, it is genocide.
As the war dragged on, the early bickering and polemics from different viewpoints diminished dramatically, and the intellectual science was receding. The focus seems to be more on two things; one, showing the victims on your side. Two, denying the other side’s victims. For example, pro-Israelis will show how cruel and anti-human Hamas is, that so many people didn’t die in Gaza’s hospitals, and that children are plastic. The pro-Palestinians, on the other hand, of course, show the tragedy in Gaza, accuse the Israeli army of inhumanity, and try to “debunk” Israel’s “lies”.
And so the arguments on social media became more and more like a comparison between victims.
In the early days of the Israeli attack on Gaza, when pro-Israelis spoke of enemy civilian deaths, they tended to appear as abstract statistics, defaulting to the externalities of their own actions. Some calculated that the average Israeli killing of one Hamas would result in N civilian deaths. Others have said that they want to eliminate future deaths, which means, frankly, that more deaths today are for fewer deaths in the future. This is the same rhetoric that was used when the US military dropped nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One of the just-dead Palestinian poet’s tweets in defense of Hamas militancy is that nearly half of the Israeli dead in attacks on Israel are militants. Statistics don’t have an emotional connection, but, frankly, I don’t think deliberately ignoring the other side’s victims falls under the moral issue of lack of empathy. It is more like a natural psychological mechanism.
Stereotypes and cold knowledge of all kinds seem to be receding as more victims appear and more victim-related content emerges. Regardless of one’s point of view, people are confronted with the vivid details of the images and reports. This is perhaps the most positive part of the discussion, that people have to think about what to think about the victims of the enemy.
In the comments section of my last observation, “How People Discuss the Israeli-Palestinian Warfare When the Supply of Truth is Inadequate,” someone said, “The UN doesn’t even consider Hamas to be a terrorist attack to this day, and instead condemns Israel for creating the humanitarian crisis at Big House Aliyah.”
And another netizen commented that the civilian casualties caused by the atomic bomb that the United States surrendered to Japan should also be condemned, and how this atomic bomb could not accurately identify civilians and military personnel. Under the death spiral of militarism, it seems that ordinary Japanese people have a choice whether to spiral up or spiral into the ground. Whether to let the condition slowly deteriorate and poison the world or to cut off the root of the disease in one stroke and never have any future problems, how to choose the long-term pain is better than the short-term pain.
I’m glad he’s going to ask that question. The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima killed an estimated 300,000 people, directly and indirectly. Most of them were civilians. Among them were the Korean royal family, laborers and foreign students from China. The popular theory at the time was that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima to end the war quickly.
When mass deaths began to occur in Gaza, I was also discussing with friends on social media what you would choose, hypothetically, if you had to decide whether or not to drop a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. I was serious, and in order to figure this out, I specifically sought out a book that examines post-war Hiroshima reflections on the war, Hiroshima Traces-Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory by Japanese American scholar Lisa Yoneyama
This book examines the history of how the people of Hiroshima dealt with the nuclear explosion after the war. It is certainly something that all sectors of Hiroshima and Japanese society have to be involved in.
Nobuzo Hamai, the mayor of Hiroshima who came to power in 1947, took the lead in planning a series of memorial spaces such as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Plaza. During the war, it was originally planned as a public space to show the fruits of the prosperity of Imperial Japan’s Greater East Asia. The space deliberately preserves some of the ruins of the nuclear explosion. The mayor said that what disappears visually will inevitably disappear psychologically. Immediately thereafter, the memorial space became a tourist attraction, a place for events, and, in other words, a marketplace for selling the memory of the nuclear bombing.
Using these spaces as a base, the survivors of the nuclear explosion and various social activists, intellectuals and literary figures have engaged in reflections on the nuclear explosion. In short, the trauma created by the nuclear bombing was not converged into hatred for the perpetrators, but was deliberately sublimated into a plea for peace for humanity. Thus, the pain borne by the people of Hiroshima was transformed into suffering for humanity. The victims, the people who experienced it, were given a more sacred meaning and mission, and became the victims of mankind’s misuse of nuclear weapons.
It is not easy to make victims into qualified sufferers, or even anti-nuclear evangelists.
In Ms. Yoneyama’s book, she mentions the awkwardness of survivor narratives. Some people think that the narrator is just a tour guide for those peace tourism sites. I actually experienced a similar embarrassment myself when I visited a peace memorial space in Hiroshima in 2006. A survivor of the Hiroshima bombing sat across from me and several other Chinese journalists and told her story. She spoke a few words in Japanese, and the Japanese interpreter who was traveling with her spoke Chinese for us. It was obvious that the storyteller was very skillful, and the two of them worked well together. I was just a little bit uncomfortable with this way of listening to the story, and I was always lost in thought. I don’t know how many times she told others about the horrors she had suffered. Maybe this kind of narration was already her job. Soon my attention was drawn to her hand, which had three large rings on it, one kind of one that seemed to be ruby.
Repeatedly speaking about the pain became a mechanical exercise. For those who lived through the nuclear explosion, the experience of fear at that moment was so unique that it could not be accurately and truthfully conveyed through paraphrasing or other means. There are too many parts that are unspeakable. I believe this is a phenomenon that exists in this Palestinian-Israeli war, and indeed in all human wars and suffering.
However, the selling of memories and reflections by victims to the public is still effective, and is something important and honorable. An example of this is Suzuko Numata, a Hiroshima social activist mentioned in the book. Allow me to briefly introduce her story.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, Suzuko Numata, a 22-year-old clerk at the Ministry of Transportation in Hiroshima City, lost her left ankle in a nuclear explosion, and later had her left leg amputated due to delayed treatment. A month before that, her fiancé, a soldier in the Japanese invasion army, had been killed in action in Southeast Asia.
The physical and psychological trauma, along with the social discrimination against disabled people and victims of nuclear radiation at the time, led to a depressive episode and a suicide attempt. Among the 17,000 survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, similar experiences are not uncommon. Ms. Numata then became a high school teacher for more than 20 years.
Around 1980, Ms. Numata, who was close to 60 years old, was accidentally involved in the anti-nuclear and anti-war movement in Japan and became an influential social activist.
In the 1980s, Japan’s economy had taken off, Japan had re-emerged as a great power, self-confidence was high, and conservatism and nationalism were on the rise. Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone paid homage to Yasukuni Shrine, and a sense of crisis provoked a backlash from the liberals. The peaceful protest movement in Japan reached an unprecedented climax.
In those days, a trip to Hiroshima to be baptized by nuclear war was a popular program at various high schools. Teachers took children to visit the site of the nuclear explosion, visit the Peace Memorial Museum, etc. During the same period, the average age of the survivors of the nuclear bombing was over 60 and they were facing retirement. No longer having to worry about making a living, self-reflection and emotional pacification became the biggest homework in life compared to the discrimination of those around them. Many of them became narrators, telling the fear of death and nuclear bombs to the younger generation who came on school trips. Ms. Numata was certainly one of them. It’s just that she did a little more. Going overseas to speak, meeting with survivors of the Nanking Massacre, survivors of the Malaysian massacre, survivors of Korea, and survivors of napalm bombing in Vietnam.
In Malaysia, where her fiancé had fought, Numata saw the other side of history. The 11th Regiment of the 5th Japanese Division was stationed in Malaysia and carried out massacres on a large scale. The headquarters of this regiment happens to be in Hiroshima. In Numata’s recollections, young girls loved the soldiers of the 11th Regiment. And, when they heard the news of the surrender of Nanking and the surrender of Singapore, she and other citizens would celebrate by marching with lanterns. And in Malaysia, people also celebrated when they heard that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been nuked.
Ms. Numata became one of the key figures in Hiroshima’s reflection on the war. I think this has something to do with her ability to connect her own victimization with other victims. Through these connections, one can look for the hidden but unmistakable realities of war that are overlooked. People usually overlook the civilian victims of the enemy. Without the nuclear bombing and subsequent reflection, Ms. Numata would not have considered her fiancé an evil war criminal, a murderer.
As I read Ms. Numata’s story in the book, I am also reminded of the shock I received at the Speechless Pavilion in Japan. The Speechless Museum is in the mountains of Japan, on the outskirts of Matsumoto Castle. It has two display halls, the first of which is cross-shaped. There are paintings hanging on the walls in the Speechless Museum. The paintings are the works of college students at Japanese art schools from decades ago. The labels in the lower right corner of the works state the author’s name, date of birth, date of death, and cause of death, such as dying in battle in the Philippines in 1944, dying of gunshot wounds in a field hospital in northeastern China in 1945, and so on.
Art is beauty, and what these college students are learning is to observe everything in the world from the perspective of beauty, to form their own unique feelings and opinions, and to make them into works through professional techniques. I can feel part of their emotions, from landscape paintings, self-portraits and more. It’s very real and still fresh. All these presentations tell me that they are alive, beings with normal minds. I saw no evil. If there was no war, most likely the authors and I could sit down for a glass of wine and a chat.
But then, while looking at the paintings, I had to wonder if I had lived at a similar age in those days, a strong possibility is that I was hiding across from these authors. We were holding each other’s weapons, figuring out how to kill each other, without mercy, without psychological barriers.
Of course, I think they are evil. I would have celebrated the atomic bombing of Ms. Numata and her close neighbors like the Malays did. I wonder if any of those authors are Numata or her classmate’s fiancé.
On December 7, Rafaat Alareer, a Palestinian English professor and poet, was killed by an airstrike. His Twitter account had been posting since late October and featured, among other things, accusations that Israel was a Nazi, a lie-monger, defense of Hamas, the tragedy in Gaza, interactions with other people, and so on. Two of the most notorious of these statements were the one where he replied under the one about Hamas cooking Israeli babies in microwaves, with or without spices. As a prominent Palestinian, this one was widely attacked. But I saw that he actually had a reply claiming that you Israelis are lying. Taken together with the rest of this author’s tweets, I think his statements are more inclined to be sarcastic digs at the other side for fakery, and that he doesn’t believe that Hamas would do something so evil. Not that he really hates Israel enough to support Hamas to do something anti-human.
His tweets are classic documentation of the victims of the war in Gaza, documenting two months of a poet’s anger, despair, paranoia and bitterness. Another of the poet’s tweets that made him world-famous was a prophecy-like poem.
“If I must die.
You must live
To tell my story
To sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings.
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
While looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze-
and bid no one farewell
Not even to his flesh
not even to himself-
♪ sees the kite, my kite you made, ♪
Flying up above
And thinks for a moment an angel is there
Bringing back love
If I must die
Let it bring hope
Let it be a tale.
After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, there was an explosion of literature in Japan, such as the novels of Kenzaburo Oe and other writers. Among the survivors of the bombing there was also the poet Sankichi Tōge (峠三好). The latter’s most famous poem is, “Give me back my humanity.
In Alareer’s poem of absolute farewell, something common can be seen. It’s like he’s making a will with a friend to help take care of his children. Instead of anger and hatred, there is sadness and attachment.
Is it possible for a peace memorial to appear in Gaza, as in Hiroshima. Upon entering, one can see poems by Rafaat Alareer and, of course, there should be poems by Israelis as well. If that doesn’t work, put up the words Give Me Back My Humanity. On one side of the pavilion, there is an outpouring of Israeli victims, and on the other, Palestinian victims. Put up some more messy relics or something.
People enter this pavilion and face the reality of the victims of war. I don’t know that this will make people let go of their anger and hatred. Of course, it may well be unrealistic and naive. Or maybe it will take a hundred years, but who knows.
In a way, memorials are really markets where memories are traded. It’s one thing for people to package the past as a memory commodity to be sold in a memorial; what happened in the past is one thing. How real people should remember the past and which memories they accept is the important thing. It’s better to hear more about the memories of the victims than hate memories.
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