Gaza our eternal shame

I remember when I read the novels “Bare Bread” by Muhammad Shukri and “Eastern Mediterranean” by Abdel Rahman Munif, during the years of hunger and tyranny, I was crying and cursing the twentieth century and its people, the century of freedom and human rights, repeating to myself: “What shame for this century in which there are still hungry people?” And another is devoured by the Pharaonic torture machine?

I thought that this was a remnant of previous centuries, but it seemed that I was living in an illusory hope. How could it not be when we see wounded Gaza?

I believe that there is nothing worth writing about Gaza except spreading our laundry saturated with dirt, mold, and unpleasant odors. We are the children of this time, the children of the twenty-first century in any corner of the earth, and we see death nesting in every corner of Gaza, the great grave, the destruction that it has not witnessed by contemporary humanity, flattened buildings, body parts scattered here and there: hands and arms, amputated feet and legs, heads flat and faceless, bodies lying on their stomachs covered in dust, children, women and men fleeing from bombing with faces covered in dust, the screams of children, women and men above the rubble, their calls for help. We dug them out with nails in search of neighbors and relatives, ambulances pulled by donkeys, non-stop funerals, mass graves, corpses wrapped in plastic, the towering numbers of dead and wounded, what the rubble hides, cold, hunger, thirst, and the multiple pains of those whose death date was postponed. Red earth with the blood of martyrs.

Gaza... the living scene that does not move us, the scene that reveals our death and our end. Today we are nothing but robots, the creation of machines, the result of artificial intelligence. We only see the world as virtual places and events. The pictures of Gaza before us are nothing more than black and white paintings in an old gallery, or they are pictures in a fictional movie on another planet that are watched for entertainment and to pass the time.

The pictures of Gaza are just data that cannot be seen by intelligence, nor by software and computer algorithms. Our world, the world of machines and buttons, the world of wood and metal, cannot see them. The pictures of Gaza are created by games and players, the sick and the obsessed, the deaf and the blind.

We are all the work of each one in his own way and with his own shabby weapons, from bombs to silence and indifference. So Gaza is a shame to us all. Our eternal shame that will not be erased. Our shame, which will be reinforced later by descendants who apologize for our primitiveness, betrayal, and inhumanity, our shame, which will be recorded in books, audio and video, which will make us immortalized as reprehensible, defeated by history and humanity.