"The War Against the Hospitals"
The bounds of decency have broken.
When on November 1st I posted How to Bomb a Hospital, it seemed the least I could do to help spread awareness that hospitals and other health infrastructure in Gaza were indeed being bombed, or threatened with bombing, by the Israeli military. I had hoped decency would prevail and these places of grace and healing would be spared. I was wrong.
“Over the past 24 hours, hospitals in Gaza have been under relentless bombardment” reports Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders.) “Al-Shifa hospital complex, the biggest health facility where MSF staff are still working, has been hit several times, including the maternity and outpatient departments, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries.”
The hospital’s Director, Muhammed Abu Salmiya, reports that “any moving person within the compound in targeted. A few families tried to leave, but were targeted. Now they are lying dead outside the hospital.”
Israel forces claim the hospitals are used as bases by Hamas, which the medical staff consistently deny, saying they’ve never seen Hamas in their buildings. The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs lists 20 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals as no longer functioning. It’s being called “the war against the hospitals.”
Meanwhile, in my inbox I find the New York Times running with “I have a hidden trust fund. Should I tell my spouse?” The Atlantic Monthly offers “A Cathartic Watch. Entertainment musts…” Economist Robert Reich, requesting donations for the Democratic Party says: “If there's a unifying theme of the past several weeks for me, it's that the world can be a heartbreaking and painful place.” As if the horror in Gaza is a natural function of “the world” and has nothing to do with the current administration’s lock-step military and political support of the Israeli Defense Force.
Mads Gilbert, the eloquent and clear-hearted surgeon trying to get into Gaza to help his colleagues, describes this moment as “the greatest moral collapse in Western politics in my (our) generation.” It has that bottomless sense to it, of something collapsing at the center of the Western world’s idea of itself. The promise of modernity, that as we technologically advance we become better people, less susceptible to the tragedies of war because our advances have brought us past their depravities, is met instead with cratered apartment buildings, a medieval siege, the targeting of ambulances and journalists, a “war against hospitals” and official Western silence.
It’s not surprising that it’s a doctor who has the clearest diagnosis.
I realize this newsletter is supposed to be about the living climate, and I do have some interesting posts coming up, including a look at how the collapse of water cycles in the Western Mediterranean Basin has parallels in central Chile, which also has a Mediterranean style climate and is now enduring a devastating megadrought. In the meantime, I’ll end with this quote by Eleanor Roosevelt:
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
"It has that bottomless sense to it, of something collapsing at the center of the Western world’s idea of itself" Absolutely spot on description of my sense of this moment. I suspect many of us share this. Thank you for putting words to it.