The Babies Don't Have the Energy to Cry

A future is here, unevenly distributed

I have not had much time or energy to write this year because I now have a cherubic baby boy. He is growing like a (chubby) weed, and he requires basically constant feeding and care as a result. When babies need something, the only thing they can do to communicate is cry. It is hard to listen to, and all I want to do is make him feel better. In my brief periods of downtime, I often scroll social media, where each day I am met with documentation of newfound depths of genocidal horror.

More than five months after Hamas’s surprise attack, Israel is not only continuing to bombard the beleaguered Gaza population, but is blocking food and medical aid from getting in—a war crime that is putting over a million people on the precipice of famine. Over 30,000 Palestinians have died already, nearly half of which were children. Around 17,000 other children have been orphaned or separated from their parents, and around 1,000 have lost limbs—“the biggest cohort of pediatric amputees in history.” Imagine how traumatized all of the children in Gaza are. I have read descriptions from doctors about amputating children’s limbs without anesthesia, seen photographs of impossibly emaciated children slowly starving to death, and watched videos of grieving parents saying final goodbyes to the bodies of their swaddled children. Nick Maynard, an Oxford surgeon who went to Gaza, recounted his harrowing experience:

"One child I'll never forget had burns so bad you could see her facial bones. We knew there was no chance of her surviving that but there was no morphine to give her. So not only was she inevitably going to die, but she would die in agony. What made it even worse was that there was nowhere for her to go and die. So she was just left on the floor of the emergency department to die."

Babies are so malnourished they ”don't even have the energy to cry” and many are already dying from starvation.

I cannot comprehend how anyone can defend this. It is the most transparently evil thing I have witnessed in my lifetime, and nothing could possibly justify it. There is a permanent moral stain on everyone involved in perpetrating and allowing these atrocities, which are unfolding in full view of the entire world. This is not something we are reading about in history books, it is an ongoing political choice being aided and abetted by my government. Despite some tepid hand-wringing, the Biden administration has continued to support and defend what Israel is doing by providing billions of dollars in munitions and the robust political protection that the most powerful nation in the world can offer. They have resorted to providing aid via tiny airdrops and constructing a temporary port rather than doing anything to materially challenge or hinder Netanyahu’s government, which is rarely even disguising its intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza anymore.

Israel is the subject of two cases at the International Court of Justice accusing it of genocide and apartheid. The IDF is gleefully and openly documenting all manner of war crimes for the world to see on social media, and dispatches from on the ground reveal horrific human rights violations and unfathomable horrors like children murdered by snipers. Humanitarian aid trucks are shot at by the IDF and blocked from getting into Gaza, where the population currently accounts for around 80% of all people in the world facing famine or catastrophic hunger and is experiencing a “medical apocalypse.” The subtext, and often explicit text, of this genocide is that Palestinians are subhuman: their lives and pain do not matter, and they have no rights, dreams, or feelings of any intrinsic value.

All human beings deserve dignity and care, but the unambiguous innocence and vulnerability of children means that their outsized suffering reveals in stark clarity the abject cruelty of Israel’s campaign of barbarism. Witnessing the pain and misery of the children of Gaza was disgusting and heartbreaking to me before my son was born, but now it hits a little different. I have broken down crying on multiple occasions thinking about it. I can now viscerally imagine what it would be like if that baby was my baby. What if his mother could not produce milk because she was malnourished and we could not get baby formula? What if we had to cradle his lifeless body after a thermobaric bomb sucked the oxygen from his lungs? 

A man holding a baby amidst the rubble of Gaza (UNRWA)

It is startlingly easy in this world for violence and cruelty to be perpetuated and justified against certain groups of people deemed disposable by the powerful; our humanity is contingent on circumstance. Where we are born, the conditions we encounter, and the threats that we face are the subject of forces beyond our control. If we do not build something different, more and more people will be vulnerable to violent abandonment as the planet warms, ecosystems degrade, and the physical and political terrain of our world destabilizes. The tactics, policies, and weapons might be used on other people over there at first, but it never stays that way. 

My son was relatively lucky to be born in a state controlled by Christofascist corporate cronies and gentry who just banned IVF and teaching about “divisive concepts” (i.e. racism) as they refuse federal funding for low-income families to buy groceries and Medicaid expansion, attack public libraries, defund public schools, and wield state power against labor union organizing. He deserves a much more caring and just world, as do all the babies in Palestine and everywhere else with their entire lives ahead of them. For now, I count my blessings that he cries.