Gaza and Rage, through the Lens of Susan Sontag
This is part two of a series on Gaza through the lens of Susan Sontag, featuring the essays "Regarding the Pain of Others;" and "Tuesday and After: New Yorker writers respond to 9/11."
Part one, “Gaza and Moral Clarity, through the Lens of Susan Sontag,” can be found here. We will be back to our regular scheduled programming this Thursday, with another new essay.
Instagram photo of a young child injured by shrapnel, from @eye.on.palestine, photographed by @nahed_hajjaj99.
Reading Sontag in the current context of Gaza, a certain undertone is evident, one not only incisive, critical, and acerbic, but also, a bit angry. Sontag’s is not a seething, ruining anger, but rather a functional one.
Collectively, anger has been a foremost emotion recently. And more foreign to my own feeling of anger has been my own desire to express it, both interpersonally and publicly. I’ve long struggled with articulating anger and have rarely allowed it to fester too deeply or too long. I often seek to diffuse it by taking a holistic approach, viewing a situation through every lens, attempting to understand another’s position or feeling, reserving my reaction for internal rumination. I’ve assumed anger to be mostly irrational, dangerous.
It has been a surprising revelation, then, to realize a missing piece of my understanding—of my own empathy—and to become intimately acquainted with a singular experience: witnessing a person or group being devalued so fully that their inherent sanctity of life is withdrawn, not only by another group or individual, but by a majority. In other words, to see an entire people dehumanized by an entire public, including our government and media. Of course, racism and injustice have long existed in the world, in our own country, and have manifested in a plethora of destructive and vile ways. But the current mass campaign of degradation against Palestinians, a complete diminishing of their humanity, of their right to life, spanning the entire political spectrum—for example, lawmakers introducing a bill prohibiting the State Department from citing the death toll of Palestinians provided by the Gaza Health Ministry, a clear dismissal of their reality—is only reminiscent of certain histories studied in textbooks (i.e., segregation and redlining toward Black citizens in America; or all of American history, pre-19th century; or even Germany in the 1940s). The resulting feeling, then, is so distressing (and in this context, perhaps, heightened by whatever distant and shallow connection I feel to another Arab) that it lies somewhere beyond anger; the primary and resulting emotion is rage, though akin to the kind Sontag expressed—a clarifying kind.
I believe there are many iterations of rage, a powerful and potentially destructive emotion. Vengeful rage has long been shown to be most harmful not to the subject of ire, but to the one carrying it. Yet we have been provided virtual access to a mass atrocity unfolding in excessive detail, its horrors intimate and exposed—tents full of refugees bombed and set alight in fire, video of their charred bodies writhing on the ground, a father holding up the headless torso of his blown-up toddler. In the same breath, we have watched others debate what should be a foundational perspective—that the intentional killing of innocents, anywhere, should be prevented, rebuked.
What else might presuppose a sense of moral clarity but rage? Perhaps sadness or sorrow, which share borders with rage. But rage, unlike sadness, is more likely to clarify like baptism by fire; rage instigated by injustice, coupled with empathy, can swiftly align one’s thoughts into order. Other emotions—including anger derived from vengefulness (a precursor to violence), or perhaps despair—might cloud or muddy a mind, can paralyze initiative. But righteous rage can propel one to act.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag acknowledged that witnessing atrocity by image does not cleanse us of painful histories, nor can it resurrect the dead. In fact, she argued, it might not actually do much to aid in another’s suffering in the moment.
These dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—and in us. Why should they seek our gaze? What would they have to say to us?
Still, Sontag found witnessing to be an essential act, from whatever vantage, near or far.
Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.
Indeed, an image cannot change what has already occurred. But technology has given us access to the experience of war directly from the victims themselves, in real time, so we are not tasked with simply contemplating images of near history or distant pasts. We have an opportunity, an obligation, to demand that the injustice we are witnessing ends.
But how? In our current climate, it can feel like we are screaming into a void—on the internet or otherwise, right or wrong. I’m unconvinced that “internet activism” holds any inherent value. But still, we must seek to channel rage productively before it turns ruinous, spiteful. While the media has functioned to obfuscate what is truly occurring in Gaza, social media—with all its ills (which I have written about in detail, here)—has played particular importance in raising awareness for the realities of war and bombardment. Images of Palestinian suffering pierce through any Western delusion of war. If nothing else, the sharing of images has ensured that Palestinian death not occur in the dark, might potentially wrest some control from the media’s overarching narrative that continuously positions Arab death as justified, unavoidable.
Many, especially on the left, have reacted uncomfortably to any clear and focused expressions of rage—protests, writings, social media posts—so much so that they often discredit them. Anger is not effective for the cause, they might say. It lacks empathy for the bigger picture. It’s harsh, or worse, self-serving. I’ve received the brunt of such criticism from both friends and acquaintances, perhaps because I’ve never been one to publicly express anger before. But in reading Sontag, I have been moved to believe that any belittling of this particular kind of rage, especially when expressed online, as “virtue signaling—” a petty endeavor that does little but seek to exult one’s own morality—is disingenuous. What option does one have but to bear witness and, in the process, urge others to do the same? Sontag writes,
Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved.
What’s happening in Gaza isn’t made of political disagreement, or a divide in which we can all seek unity through compromise. What is happening in Gaza is mind-altering mass death and suffering. There is no other way to frame images of unhinged violence, children’s bodies as mere pieces of exploded flesh on the ground, toddlers dead by precision sniper shots to the neck, babies with bellies distended by forced and avoidable famine. There is no balanced or gentle approach when the suffering is made possible by our own government, our tax dollar, our implicit support.
After 9/11, Sontag expressed her disdain pointedly, with profound moral clarity, aimed directly at our institutions, and—most useful at the time—published in one of the most prominent publications available, The New Yorker. She said,
But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
One could respond with similar disdain, now, aimed at our current American officials and media commentators. Tom Cotton labeling campus encampments “little Gazas,” and “disgusting cesspools of antisemitic hate,” as students bravely protested open genocide and apartheid, feels unworthy of a mature democracy. Hillary Clinton smugly demeaning those same protestors—including professors and scholars of academics like Edward Said, as well as Jewish students disillusioned by Israel’s practices—claiming, “they don’t know much” about the Middle East, feels unworthy of a mature democracy. Broadcast journalists, when faced again and again with a dizzying (and mounting) death toll of innocent civilians in Gaza, asking of an Arab guest, “Do you condemn Hamas?” feels unworthy of a mature democracy. Branding those calling for a ceasefire and demanding a political end to violence as “terrorists” is massively, incomprehensibly unworthy of a mature democracy. When much of the media labels protests “violent,” but few sources name who inflicted the violence (most recently, a combination of counter protestors and the police) it is complicit in false narratives, and thus, unworthy of a mature democracy.
Twenty-three years since 9/11, the largest terror attack on American soil, and 248 years after our country’s founding, and we remain desperately nascent in our own self-image, in the stories we tell and the ones we discount. Rage at injustice is a natural consequence of the conscientious, a rather empathetic reaction. Perhaps it is this sense of moral rage, along with moral clarity, that remain as necessary to preserving our democracy as tolerance, community, and cooperation.
The only way forward, it seems, is through—through painful images of violence, through the realities that others suffer, through whatever form of protest we choose, through a collective bearing witness, through the succeeding rage that will surely arise from doing so. May we express our rage with certitude, context, and history, productively, in the vein of Sontag. May it be a rage that prods us forward, a meaningful emotion that springs us to life. At minimum, may it be a rage that demands peace derived from justice, that insists upon not killing children. My God, at the very, very least.