Living with fear and searching for hope

A boy is crying out in pain; only his head is sticking out. The rubble has trapped the rest of his body. Rescuers are trying to pull him out with their bare hands. One more day in Gaza. The year is coming to an end, but the pain is not. I change the channel, but the image persists.

With slabs of stone on his back, the head of a child looked like a turtle—an animal known for carrying its own home wherever it goes. Where will the "human animals" of Gaza go when the "lawn is being mowed" thus? The invaders want the "turtles" to move to the nearby deserts. "The life of refugees is not great, but millions of others throughout history have learnt to move on," says my once-favourite comedic icon, Bill Maher. He referred to Fiddlers on the Roof to mention how the Jews took it rather sportively while being pushed from one place to another. Norman Finkelstein, my new hero, thoroughly exposed the fallacy of Maher's claim. Finkelstein appears to be one of the few voices that resist the land-grabbing and systemic eviction, which are part of the vendetta mission triggered by the Hamas attack on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of 1,200 people. Even after the deaths of at least 21,822 Palestinians (according to Al Jazeera), there is no sign of let-up. The year 2023 will go down in history when it comes of age, leaving behind its naive understanding of liberal humanism.

Mr History has just graduated from its primary school, where it has stopped counting its fingers and colouring books with etched-out figures. All the sanitised information presented before it is beginning to have a reality check. People are revisiting all the provided morals. Henceforth, we are reprogramming all the politics of liberal democracies. The margin is rumbling. The lexicon is growing outside the authority of Oxford or Webster. Urban Dictionary coined the term "Israeled" to explain the appropriation of something that rightfully belongs to others. It applies when someone asks you to share your belongings but then tries to exclude you. The Palestinians are touted as the new Nazis by the Israelites as they demand their land back. Earlier, we heard the Russians calling the Ukrainians Nazis as a pretext for invading their land. Words no longer simply have consequences; they now retroactively assign actions. Words do not refer to meanings anymore. They refer to the process of meaninglessness as words chase actions, and actions hide behind words.

The apparent freedom on social media gives you the false security of being free. The users do not know that they are all fish with hooked baits where the wheel-fisher will reel them in sooner or later. You can swim as much as you like, go as deep as you want, with the bait hooked in your mouth—you are never free.

Lucky is the man who does not use words. The cloak of fear enshrines the golden silence. Speaking up will inevitably lead to exclusion or annihilation. The fear of exclusion is so overwhelming that it extinguishes any glimmer of hope. The academy, which is supposed to be the bastion of free thoughts, no longer teaches hope. Even a country that is proud of its constitutionally protected freedom of speech cannot speak, thanks to various cash-strapped lobbies. Money gives you airtime. It decides how much you can or cannot say.

The apparent freedom on social media gives you the false security of being free. The users do not know that they are all fish with hooked baits where the wheel-fisher will reel them in sooner or later. You can swim as much as you like, go as deep as you want, with the bait hooked in your mouth—you are never free. The angler has crafted a bait for us all. It is our human weakness to fall for bait. Adam did. Samson did. It takes a clandestine video for a politician to jump ship. A sanction on the hidden funds is what brings down the powerful. The powerful will mow down any form of dissidence, evict lands, and disperse people. It will shift battlegrounds and wage proxy wars. Someone else's problem will become your problem. Your assets will become your liabilities. The cheap labour which you thought of as your asset was a bait that is being pulled by those acting gods.

The year 2023 will be known as the year when we learnt to live with fear. The residue of the Ukraine war is far from over. The manipulation of the dollar rate, the food supply chain, and the oil crisis—rolled into a development democracy called Manichaeism. All these mega projects: should you be indebted or be in debt, forever? Perhaps 2024 will tell.

For now, let's move on and get along with one little thing called an election, where you need the right number of people to show up. Numbers are a tricky game in democracy. Human rights and global police alike frown upon ruling over the majority with the endorsement of a minority. Our candidates in this election have therefore become fruitful and multiplied. Under different guises, they hope to encourage voters to exercise their rights without fear.

But one cannot hope for the same in Palestine. Now that history has graduated, the kindergarten myth of two states is all but dispelled. If one state persists, its democracy will have to dodge the charge of apartheid. The state of Israel needs to diminish the number of indigenous Palestinians. They will follow the playbook of the Vanishing Americans in North America and Latin America. Already they cite 10/7 as their 9/11.

Hope comes in the form of human stories. Where histories fail, stories survive. One such story of survival was narrated by the provocative short film Condom Lead (2013). When I watched the film on Netflix, I did not know how to process the dark humour. The plot is sinister: a flat filled with balloons, representing the attempted intimacy of a couple that was disrupted by an act of Israeli aggression. Every time the couple wanted to share love, a bomb would wake up their child, and their contraceptive would remain unused. The contraceptive becomes a powerful metaphor to suggest that the Palestinians are not trying to procreate; they are just seeking an intimate, peaceful union, which is constantly being bombed on. The film ends with balloons filling up the nightly sky amid the sound of raining bombs.

After October 7, history is for grown-ups. We don't have to sugar-coat reality with metaphors. The stone slab on a child is real. The bare hands of a father and a brother are not enough to free him. If we are to move towards 2024, we need more people to lend a hand. But to join hands, we must first pull the bait out of our mouths. And once our mouths are free, we will be able to voice out what we have been thinking all along.

Happy New Year!

Dr Shamsad Mortuza is professor of English at Dhaka University.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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