by Saleh Aljafarawi, AKA Mr. FAFO
Gaza City, March 5 – This past Sunday, Israel announced it will cut off all aid deliveries to us, after Hamas refused a new ceasefire and prisoner-release proposal. Our stockpiles are fine, for the near future, which raises the dilemma: share images of emaciated children immediately, or give it a few more days for credibility’s sake?
As we all know, the specifics of the events are secondary to the propaganda that can be generated from it. Even at the height of the fighting since October 2023, food and other supplies were never seriously lacking in most of the Gaza Strip. Certainly not in Hamas/UNRWA warehouses. The fact that Hamas hoards the supplies and only provides them for a price has had no measurable impact on global perception of the “Gaza famine.” A picture of a starving baby is worth ten billion facts.
The question for the moment, then, involves weighing the reception of such renewed images right now, in the wake of Israel’s announcement, against the common-sense realization that starvation does not, in fact, kick in when supplies are cut off, but when one runs out of them. Which we won’t for months, at least. So do we strike while the public awareness iron is hot and the cutoff of aid trucks is still current headline material, or do we wait, say, a week or two, and hope everyone “forgets” that not enough time has elapsed since the aid cutoff for anyone in Gaza to suffer privation as a result, bringing the images minutely closer to vaguely-potential facts, and establishing greater veracity, or whatever that word means?
I know what I favor, and you probably know, too: my entire career on social media involves in-the-moment exploitation of suffering real and imagined, so I say, milk the announcement for everything possible right now, consequences be damned. No one expects truth from us. Our entire cause is an exercise in suppressing facts with feelings born of collective failure and wounded entitlement.
Nevertheless, the argument that waiting has its benefits deserves consideration. Ultimately, the decision lies with our leadership. I can see them choosing both, actually: some of us, uh, content creators will get the green light to start “documenting” starvation right away – whether by repurposing images from, say, Syria or Yemen, or by using dolls, actors, or people with unrelated conditions – and others will receive instructions to put out their content later. In most contexts, people would react skeptically, but, thank Allah, all skepticism goes out the window when Jews stand accused.
We have the good fortune to count them among our enemies.
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