This week, Ramsey Nasr struck a nerve with a simple observation: we know the Israeli victims by name, the Palestinian victims merely as a statistic. His text is shared en masse. ‘A name is a recognition of humanity.’
Michael MartinOctober 20, 2023, 7:00 PM
“When I tell you that a Palestinian family of 28 died after an Israeli rocket attack, it hits you differently than when I tell you Yousef’s story,” says Abdallah Hasaneen (23) from the southern part of the Gaza Strip. He is a writer at the NGO We Are Not Numbers, an organization that has been trying to tell the stories behind Palestinian statistics since 2015.
Yousef Maher Dawas, 20 years old, was one of his colleagues. He was killed last week after an air raid. “Yousef had one big dream in his life: to travel to Jerusalem,” says Hasaneen. “But he never left the Gaza Strip. He not only wrote victims’ stories, he spent almost all his time supporting human rights organizations. Yousef should not become a number himself now.”
It fits in seamlessly with the text that writer and actor Ramsey Nasr read this week during the talk show Khalid & Sofie on the Dutch broadcaster BNNVARA, and subsequently included in an opinion piece for this newspaper. From a thorny question – ‘Do Palestinian lives have the same value to us?’ – he exposes a discrepancy in this conflict. After two weeks we know the names and stories of the Israeli victims. “Rightly so,” says Nasr, but “Palestinian lives are usually mentioned in numbers.”
According to Nasr, son of a Palestinian father, it clearly reflects “how we divide our compassion”. That message, which further scrutinizes the political response and media reporting, is going viral on social media. The video has already been liked 200,000 times on Instagram. Subtitled in English or Arabic, it also finds an international audience.
Ramsey Nasr. Image Erik Smits/Lumen
The broader message therefore touches on a feeling that is eating its way to the surface, in light of the ongoing bombing of the Gaza Strip. A sense of “double standards,” says activist and artist-entrepreneur Jaouad Alloul, who was moved by Nasr’s message.
When Alloul immediately started looking for the names of Palestinian victims, he quickly hit a wall. How does that actually happen? The Israeli news site Haaretz contains a detailed list of 683 victims of the Hamas attack, but a Palestinian name register cannot be found.
According to Heide Vercruysse, who works at the Palestinian NGO Bisan Center for Research and Development, the reason is not far to seek. “There is no time for extensive lists of names, people are pulling victims from the rubble with their bare hands. Moreover, there are few means to get stories out. Without electricity it is extremely difficult to reach people.”
Abdallah Hasaneen confirms. “There is no shortage of stories, but everyone is concerned with only one thing: survival. The conversations we are having with each other now are about what our own death will look like. My cousin told me he no longer sleeps on the ground floor of his building. Then there is a greater chance that he will end up under the rubble during a bombing and slowly suffocate, instead of dying instantly.”
Every Name Counts
The dry sum of deaths and victims that is going on is in stark contrast to what is currently happening in Barracks Dossin in Mechelen. There, the ‘Every Name Counts’ project is currently trying to restore dignity to the 25,843 people who were imprisoned there during the Second World War through a simple act: visitors read their names out loud.
“Numbers and lists say something about the scale of a conflict, but they do not touch the essence of humanity,” says Tomas Baum, director of Kazerne Dossin. “The meaning of a name lies in the recognition of that humanity. Just like an image does, or the story of a person who, like everyone else, cherishes a future or struggles with small and large problems.”
Palestinians are sheltered in a school in Khan Younis. Image SAMAR ABU ELOUF/NYT
Leo Lucassen, director of the International Institute for Social History, writes on about humanity and the structural asymmetry of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
This asymmetry is both historical and current, and touches an open wound within many Muslim families, says Jaouad Alloul. “The idea that the world is blind to the injustice we see belongs to a collective ideology. I have been very aware of this since my childhood. This awareness now has broad support.”
According to Baum, that is part of the strength of Nasr’s message. “He can express those things because of who he is, which helps a broader group to relate.” He also points to an open letter to Joe Biden, which was signed by more than forty Jewish-American academics, writers and artists. They say: “It is possible to condemn both the actions of Hamas and the historic and ongoing oppression of Palestinians.”
“At a time when there is enormous pressure on people to choose a camp, they put humanity first,” says Baum. “And humanity cannot actually be divided into camps.”
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2023-10-20 17:00:23
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