By Max Jones / ScheerPost Staff Writer
A frightened little girl trembles and screams “in terror after mistaking thunder for an Israeli airstrike.” – Times of Gaza
Most of the people — and especially the children — who survive this genocidal slaughter will forever be traumatized. Children are meant to play, to be loved, to be accepted and protected. The children of Gaza will never get to be children.
Most will never get to be adults either. Like this little girl, they will be stuck in the past, unable to experience something as simple as rainfall and thunder. When the rain falls and the thunder booms, their scars will take them back to their terror — the only thing that once separated them from the explosions destroying their homes, the blood and gore of their friends and relatives, and the reality that at any moment they might be killed.
I urge you to not look away from this poor girl — look openly enough and you will see yourself. The times you were afraid and no one was there. The times you needed someone to assure you that things would be ok, and no one did. The times you needed to be accepted.
*****
A four-year old girl, Rahaf Ziad Abu Suweirih, died the other day in Gaza when Israeli bombs shelled her home — but the bombs did not kill her. Her little heart stopped, incapable of handling the horrors imposed upon her by Israel’s genocide.
As I said above, children are meant to play, to be loved, to be accepted and protected. The children of Gaza will never get to be children.
Rahaf Ziad Abu Suweirih’s body knew this so well — and thus, knew that Rahaf should never have experienced the terror, violence, and abandonment that Israel’s genocide forced her to endure — that her tiny heart spared her.
Her loved ones will mourn her death. They will try to make sense of the pain they feel, and how anyone could weaponize such hatred against something so innocent. The scars her death left them will remain tender for the rest of their lives. A story true for all the survivors of Gaza.
But death is not merely an inducer of pain. It is also a protectorate; a unifier. It reaches up from the deepest depths of the soul to hug the broken human when no one else can. It takes all the fragments that the tribulations of life shatter and pieces them back together. It is death that can lift a blanket over the abandoned child, or the terrorized adult, and give them permission to rest when the world cannot.
This is especially evident in Gaza, where children cannot be children. They have to be survivors. Fighters. Being a child in Gaza only makes easy prey for the hunters playing blood sport. For a child, who again, is only meant to play, to be loved, accepted and protected, this creates a living hell that they have to believe is traversable, either by themselves or the adults they look to for guidance. Of course, no one can navigate the constant and unpredictable patterns of bombs, death and terror. But for the child, what choice do they have between believing the lie that they can control something, or succumbing to death itself?
The reality is that Israel creates an uninhabitable space for Gazans, a “labyrinth of death,” that no one could ever survive without the chance of luck. As Chris Hedges describes in his “Nero’s Guests” speech,
“Run. And when you run in terror to one part of Gaza, we will make you turn around and run to another. Trapped in a labyrinth of death. Back and forth. Up and down. Side to side … We toy with you like mice in a trap.”
But protecting one’s self, and one’s children, from the bombs of genocide means denying reality and believing, in one way or another, that you still possess some control of your own fate. To survive, the victims cannot accept that they are effectively “mice in a trap.” They must create different versions of reality in which they can prevail. In other words, they must become multiple people living different fantasies — all to protect their physical self.
While these different realities may protect the survivors from death, they will not cease to exist once the war is over. This will send them scrambling in search of the unity that they were forced to abandon. In fleeting moments, they will find places of refuge that unite their broken spirits. These places will tend to the wounds that their traumas left them with “treatments” of comfort and solace.
Yet in time, these places will obscure the unity they at first grant. Whether the survivor finds shelter in the fuzzy feeling of a white opiate, in a bottle of liquor, in a toxic relationship, or any other pathology that detaches them from the pain of reality, the survivor will end up mistakenly believing that they are only complete with the help of the “treatment” that temporarily soothes their pain.
This lie will lead them into a new trap: one much harder to see but just as real as the “mice trap” of Gaza. Without realizing it, they will never stop searching for the person that they were never allowed to be, and they will cling to the places that offer the illusion of fulfillment.
Thus, while initially the division of the self enables survival, in time it eats the physical body from the inside out. The vices — or the lies — fragment the survivor further, no matter how whole these comforts might make them feel in the beginning.
For those in the West, there is observable proof of this phenomenon in places like Skidrow and Vancouver’s Eastside. There, the streets are covered in tents, occupied by homeless people. When approached, most of these unfortunate souls are uncertain of where they are, talk to multiple non-existent people at once and are strung out on hard drugs. According to Dr. Gabor Maté, who worked with many of the addicts on Vancouver’s Eastside, almost all of them have experienced deep trauma that led them to their drug of choice. Similarly, they nearly always claim that that drug once fulfilled a need that was empty before its discovery.
One patient, when asked by Maté, “What does the heroin do for you?” told him:
“Doc, I don’t know how to tell you this exactly. It’s like when you’re three years old, sick, shivering with fever, and your mother puts you on her lap, wraps you in a warm blanket, and gives you warm chicken soup — that’s what heroin feels like.”
Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal (212)
In pursuit of this comfort, the addicts faced “the ultimate forfeit: their lives,” according to Maté.
Yet still, despite the suffering it causes, the fragmentation of the self, no matter how great it becomes, is still nothing more than the spirit’s desperate attempt to provide the protection — and acceptance — that the world denies it. It is not a “demon,” as it often is described, but an angel that is stuck in the moment of trauma that birthed it.
Those angels cannot be exterminated by any enemy, no matter how evil. Despite what they face, they will reach out and find a way to hold those that cannot protect themselves. They will manifest in everything from a bottle of liquor, to a father holding his child under the rubble, to the decelerating beat of a petrified baby’s heart.
No matter where they appear, they will never abandon us. Even if the entire world already has.
NOTE TO READERS: This was originally published at Max Jones’s Substack. If you’d like to support him, considering subscribing here. Thank you.
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Max Jones
Max Jones is the producer for The Chris Hedges Report, and a staff writer and video producer for ScheerPost. After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Southern California in 2023, where he studied communications and screenwriting, his journalism has been published in Unlimited Hangout, ScheerPost and republished at Popular Resistance. He has been featured on the Kim Iversen Show and Redacted with Clayton and Natali Morris. He has also interviewed a wide range of figures such as John Kiriakou, Ray McGovern and David Hundeyin. He continues to write fictional stories for the big screen, has directed an independent short film and produced multiple viral videos for both The Chris Hedges Report and ScheerPost.
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