To see or not to see

It was his daughter who told the radio a few months ago, regarding the release of the biography: António Gedeão—aka Rómulo de Carvalho—didn't watch the news on television. Nowadays, it's commonplace, either because it's migrated to cell phone screens or because many, admittedly, don't want to get depressed. "It's all misfortune," they say, or something similar. What's relevant in Cristina Carvalho's story is, therefore, the almost prophetic aspect of her father's behavior: decades ago, before private channels or stations broadcasting 24/7 news, the internet, cell phones, and a video camera in every inhabitant's pocket, the advent of television news was enough for the poet and physics and chemistry professor to refuse to watch, not out of surrender, but while there was perhaps still time. Watching suffering through a screen, comfortably seated in our homes, would, he might have said, trivialize it, trivialize it, make us indifferent to it. Insensitive.

For many years now, the war between Israel and Palestine has become a kind of faded wallpaper in our increasingly colorful media landscape. It was there in the days of black-and-white television, then it transitioned to color, from 4x3 to 16x9, from the box to the large flat plasma, from RTP's single channel to the multi-screen chaos of our contemporary lives. Journalists themselves have long since become considerably immune to it: an episode in the Arab-Israeli conflict only warrants a cover story after a certain number of deaths; below that, it's "business as usual." Lest the public complain that "they only bring war."

On October 7, 2023, in a series of raids coordinated by Hamas, terrorist groups invaded Israel and attacked everything in their path, resulting, within hours, in the deaths of 1,139 Israelis, mostly civilians, thousands injured, and 251 prisoners taken hostage. Since then, Israel, whose security services inexplicably failed to notice the preparation of this attack, has understandably responded to the aggression—to the point of exceeding all limits of understanding.

The response led by Benjamin Netanyahu's government had two objectives: to rescue the hostages and to end Hamas; after nearly two years, it achieved neither. Meanwhile, it killed more than 60,000 people, mostly civilians, women, and children, destroyed the entire infrastructure that supported the life of a society in Gaza, including much of the arable land, and forced more than 1.9 million people to flee their homes and live in dislocation, on the run, without knowing their fate, threatened with permanent displacement to another land, another country, or even disappearing slowly along the roads and through the camps, without even entering the official death toll.

But for a long time now, numbers have seemed to no longer matter. Just as for a long time, it has not mattered who started the war, but who doesn't want or know how to end it. Ever since Netanyahu and his supporters have managed to lose the understanding of even those, like the columnist, who have always sided with Israel against those who never tolerated the existence of a country for the Jews and preferred to hide behind the role of victim, in the cowardice of terrorist attacks, shielded by the shadow of the community they should defend, refusing support for the formation of a legitimate army and the understanding that would lead to the establishment and coexistence of two nations.

There's always an excuse. Schools and hospitals are bombed because they serve as Hamas hideouts. The Red Cross is attacked because suspected Hamas members were there. Humanitarian aid is cut off because it's intercepted and resold by Hamas. Reports from international institutions are discredited because they're in league with Hamas. A Catholic church in Gaza is bombed, and for the first time, an apology is made, not mentioning that the priest was suspected of being a Hamas member, because even Netanyahu realized the absurdity of this: the only Catholic church in Gaza is shot at by mistake because everything has already been shot at.

Every day another unbelievable image arrives on our plasma screens, elegantly spread out in front of the sofa. Machine gun fire is unleashed on lines of hungry people, waiting for a dose of rations. Human beings are lured into food traps as if they were rats—and I appreciate the historical allegory. People are killed by hunger, thirst, humiliation, and indignity. A few days ago, the executive director of UNICEF told the United Nations Security Council that an average of 28 children have died every day in Gaza since the war began. More than 17,000 have already died since the enclave was besieged, cornered, and we remain indifferent. One child's death is a tragedy—the language lacks the words to describe what 17,000 must be.

But the United Nations is no longer useful. Just as the European Union's appeals are useless. Nor are the Pope's. Nor are the occasional guilty pleas from the US administration, asking for a calming down. Netanyahu and the Israel that supports him have read the current situation, like Putin before them: a void in the international order, a secular, military, historical, and moral sede vacante . The wars in Ukraine and Gaza even help to cancel each other out; they reinforce immunity. Another war on the news. Choose yours or simply turn off the TV.

In 2015, the image of a dead boy, Alan Kurdi, washed up on a beach in Turkey, awakened the world to the urgent need to open its doors to migrants fleeing the war in Syria. Every now and then, an image is so powerful that it can break the circus and push all others into the background. In this age, when some indulge in the Nazi-like shamelessness of advocating the end of empathy as a competitive advantage, will there still be an image capable of changing the history of Gaza?

We say goodbye by email, we start and end relationships by text message or simply disappear, we swap the psychologist for GPT chat, and we fall in love with perfect avatars, created by artificial intelligence, whose only drawback is that they don't exist. We cheerfully say we're more afraid of suffering than of dying. So we prefer not to look. We look away. We turn off the television. In Rómulo de Carvalho's time, perhaps this would have protected us from something; now, it's just cowardice. We don't want this weight on our conscience. We don't want to discover how powerless we've become. We live in a time when, in a few square kilometers, 28 more children were killed every day. We read the news. And then we scroll.