The banal comprehensibility of Gaza
Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does
“Incomprehensible,” my friend commented.
“I don’t even know how to fit this in my brain,” another said.
They were both commenting on this report that came out yesterday, stating that the Israeli army had ordered the evacuation of the Rantisi Children’s Hospital in Gaza so that they could bomb it.
Side note: Part of what’s happening right now is an information war, and Quds News Network is firmly on one side of that information war. Take a tweet from them with a grain of salt.
That said, the fact that Israel’s army has been targeting hospitals is not at all in question. Rantisi hospital itself has been bombed three times, with one of the bombings specifically targeting its solar panels and water tanks.
Incomprehensible…
But the bombings themselves are not the point of this essay.
The point, instead, is my friends’ reactions. It’s the seeming incomprehensibility of an order like the one above, an order that’s so beyond the Pale—evacuate your sick kids so we can bomb you—that we don’t have ways to fit it in our brains.