I Can't Stop Thinking About the Premature Babies at al-Shifa Hospital
By stacy lee kong
Image: Dr. Ahmed El Mokhallalati, via NBC News
Content warning: this newsletter contains references to, and descriptions of, war, violence and death.
As always, a note on language: As I have explained in previous newsletters, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. (In Toronto, there have been several antisemitic incidents targeting Jewish people at home, work and school since Oct. 7, and this week, a Muslim taxi driver was the victim of a hate-motivated assault where he was sprayed with an unknown substance.) So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to cast critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic; it’s dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers recently argued. That’s why it’s not antisemitic to call for a ceasefire—as António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, the United Nations General Assembly, 630 NGOs around the world (including Amnesty International, the Malala Fund, Medecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, Plan International, Save the Children and War Child), and the Pope are all doing. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as academics who study genocide.
It was the babies that got me. This week, 39 premature babies at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza had to be taken out of their incubators because there was no electricity to run them due to the Israeli military’s days-long siege of the hospital. Instead, the babies were moved to ordinary beds, where they lay side by side, blocked in by packages of diapers, cardboard boxes and plastic bags. Some were wrapped in green fabric, others were only wearing diapers that dwarfed their tiny bodies. In photos, they look almost peaceful, but video footage of them bawling in unison is heartbreaking. According to Reuters, which interviewed Dr. Mohamed Tabasha, head of the pediatric department at al-Shifa, on Monday, “the infants are too cold, and the temperature is not stable because of power cuts… In the absence of infection control measures, they are transmitting viruses to each other and they have no immunity. He said there was no longer any way of sterilising their milk and bottle teats to the required standard. As a result, some had contracted gastritis and were suffering from diarrhoea and vomiting, which meant an acute risk of dehydration.” By the time Reuters spoke to Tabasha, three of the babies had already died. Since then, Israeli troops have raided al-Shifa and it seems likely that Israel’s attacks will soon escalate, but there hasn’t been an updated death toll for days, so it’s impossible to know how many of these babies are still alive. (It’s also impossible to know when we’ll know; fuel is running out and Israel has blocked fuel imports, plunging Gaza into another communications blackout—one that could last indefinitely, according to the Washington Post.)
It's obviously so important to acknowledge that every Palestinian death is a tragedy, adults included, and to push back against the propagandist characterization of Muslim men as savage monsters. (Especially since Palestinian men have been proving over and over again that they are gentle, kind and compassionate.) But… those babies. Sometimes my brain can’t quite hold the big horrors—the maimed children, the medical procedures without pain killers, what must be the horrific sight and smell of decomposing bodies, stacked on the ground because the morgues are overflowing. But I can’t stop thinking about these tiny infants, who have only been here for a few days or weeks, and have only ever heard bombings and gunfire and horror. Some of their parents are already dead. They’ve never, ever been safe.
And yet these babies don’t seem to have made much of an impression on Western leaders. On Wednesday, U.S. president Joe Biden repeated the still unverified allegation that Hamas had beheaded babies in its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which he previously had to walk back, as justification for the country’s continued attacks on Gaza. No one has been able to confirm the claim that these infants were beheaded, but the fact is, Hamas militants did kill babies, and that’s inexcusable. It’s just interesting to me that Biden doesn’t seem moved to show similar empathy for the babies at al-Shifa, much less the thousands of Palestinian babies and children who have been killed or injured since Oct. 7, despite very graphic photos and videos that show exactly what is happening to them.
That disparity makes me feel very hopeless. In fact, lots of things are making me feel very hopeless this week. And, I imagine I’m not the only one. So, I’m writing the newsletter I need to read—about the purpose of hope in liberation movements, and the places we can find it right now.
It’s very valid to feel powerless and hopeless
To be clear, this is not about to be an ode to toxic positivity. (That is extremely not my vibe.) There are lots of very real reasons to feel hopeless: I remain personally disappointed by the number of journalists who are failing to cover this conflict responsibly. This week, Canadaland founder Jesse Brown posted a very long X/Twitter thread that included accusations of antisemitism against equity consultant Beisan Zubi and Toronto Star social and racial justice columnist Shree Paradkar—because they write and talk about Palestinian liberation and criticize the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. It is forever disappointing but never surprising to see who faces the most internet bullying for speaking up for the disenfranchised: almost always people of colour, often women. (Relatedly, the way queer and racialized journalists have been pushed out of legacy publications like the New York Times for criticizing the way Western media has covered this ongoing conflict is also deeply depressing.)
Brown also listed many horrifying examples of antisemitic violence… which he characterized as part of “pro-Palestine/ceasefire/BDS protests.” I know, you know and Brown knows what he’s doing, but just to be clear: linking support for Palestine with antisemitic violence is a deliberate strategy that delegitimizes the very idea of Palestinian liberation, and incites hatred of Palestinians and their allies. Also, he’s making massive assumptions here. Experts and organizers have been saying for weeks that white supremacist extremists are hijacking peaceful protests to spread hate speech, so it’s just not accurate to blame Palestinians and their allies for every example of antisemitism in his thread without reporting out each one to confirm their involvement. He also mixes in examples of legitimate protest activity and characterizes them as antisemitic, which is again, both inaccurate and irresponsible.
There are also currently dozens of other ongoing conflicts around the world, and especially across the African continent. In Sudan, the Masalit people in Darfur are being targeted with mass killings, rapes and ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an Arab paramilitary group that evolved out of Janjaweed militias, which, along with Sudanese government forces, carried out previous ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in Darfur. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, competition for the region’s resources, including gold, coltan and cobalt (which are necessary for the manufacture of consumer electronics, including all of our cell phones) has been fuelling the displacement and genocide of Congolese civilians since 1996, while the world has largely looked away. (The situation is so desperate that an unverified video of a young Congolese man setting himself on fire to draw the world’s attention went viral on social media this week.) In the Tigray region of Ethiopia, civilians are being subject to “mass killings, rape, starvation, destruction of schools and medical facilities, forced displacement and arbitrary detention,” according to the United Nations. And that’s just three examples.
I personally feel overwhelmed and devastated whenever I think about how many people are suffering right now and how much neo-colonialism still plagues the places historic colonialism brutalized, especially while my life is so privileged and abundant in comparison, and while there is so little I can practically do to help. Worse, this suffering has happened countless times before and will in all likelihood continue, thanks to Western imperialism and capitalist greed. Keeping all of that in mind, nihilism feels like a pretty reasonable reaction.
The thing is, nothing ever changes without hope.
Hope is probably our most radical political act
I recognize that sentiment sounds a little Hallmark, if we lived in a world where Hallmark would ever consider acknowledging the existence of oppression and/or injustice. But it’s true.
I realized I wanted to write about hope this week because of this tweet, but a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Neurology was really necessary in helping me think through why it’s so important that those of us who believe in liberation do not give in to nihilism.
Written by Tanisha Hill-Jarrett, a neuropsychologist based out of the University of California, San Francisco, where she’s a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health and assistant professor at the Memory and Aging Center, the paper is about how the actual neurological process of imagining a better future can have positive effects on the brain health of aging Black Americans, but it also perfectly explains why social movements require radical hope.
“A vision for the future without belief that the outcome is attainable leaves little worth acting upon,” she writes. “Hope is the process of looking to the future with a desired outcome in mind and maintaining belief that the outcome can be actualized. Radical hope specifically adopts a social justice orientation and is considered radical because the hope is driven by the desire for a future rooted in equity and questions of when equity will be achieved trumps questions of how it will happen. Radical hope is a core tenant of the framework for radical healing for People of Color and Indigenous Individuals, and emphasizes Black agency and the design of new futures through a decolonized imagination. Within this framework, radical hope is the fuel that keeps the vision ablaze.”
This is not a new idea; James Baldwin distinguished between feelings of rage because of injustice, which he acknowledged he felt, and feelings of despair, which he famously said he couldn’t afford to feel. And honestly, decades later, this is still true—none of us can afford despair. In fact, media critic and disability activist Faati the Street made a similar point last month when they argued that “nihilism and pessimism are ALSO tools of oppression.” It’s so simple and so obvious, but I needed the reminder, so in case you do, too: our collective belief that nothing can or will change really only serves to uphold unjust systems, while collective belief in the possibility of a better world is the only way those systems can actually be destroyed.
We are good reasons to have hope
To that end, here are some reasons I am finding to feel hopeful:
Even while Palestinians are experiencing constant, terrifying, and almost indescribable atrocities, they are consistently modelling community care and humanity. They are ensuring their most vulnerable loved ones don’t get left behind as they flee Israeli airstrikes. They are sacrificing time with their families, and sometimes their very lives, to help others. They’re risking death and/or dismemberment to save animals. In a world that seems to constantly be telling us that we should eschew community in favour of individualism, I really appreciate every piece of evidence that people actually don’t give into their most selfish impulses, even in the most desperate situations.
@crutches_and_spice Thoughts on questions for media literacy and 🍉.
♬ original sound - Crutches&Spice ♿️ :
I also think there’s hope to be found in the fact that so many people around the world are still paying attention, and not just to Palestine, but also increasingly to Congo, Sudan, Tigray and more. Social media is definitely part of this; TikTok and Twitter in particular offer the opportunity for oppressed people to speak directly to the rest of the world, and especially to share photos and videos of what they are experiencing. This not only creates opportunities for empathy, it also offers a counterpoint to biased media coverage and politically- and economically-motivated statements from our elected officials, not to mention all the actual propaganda.
I admit, I do also think there’s a less noble reason: our lives don’t look like the ones we were promised, and it's that suffering that permits us to actually see the inequality our society is built on. Writer and disability rights activist Imani Barbarin made a similar point this week. “When I ask people to reflect on their media literacy, one of the questions that I have is… what’s happening to people? And I think a lot of times that can offer more answers than we give it credit for,” she said on TikTok. “Promises about student loans were broken, people can’t afford to put as much food on the table as they normally have because of inflation[,] it’s much harder to get a job. This many people paying attention to Palestine… didn’t happen merely because of social media. It happened because the promise of what America is has been broken repeatedly, and while a shiny façade has been built to distract us, it’s no longer enough.”
I think that’s true, even though I don’t love what it implies, which is that soft lives and comfort make it harder to look outside ourselves. But either way, now that we have begun to do so, I don’t think we’ll be able to unsee not just what is happening in other parts of the world, but also how these conflicts are connected via colonization, Western imperialism, corporate greed and white supremacy. I mean, people continue speaking out against injustice, even at the risk of professional and personal consequences. Kids are protesting on Roblox. And, progressive Jewish groups are leading protests calling for a ceasefire (as they’ve been doing for years), which takes so much bravery, integrity and moral clarity.
Unrelated to all of this, I’ve recently had some conversations about the astrology-tinged self-help mantra that ‘the world is always working in our favour.’ As I said to a friend recently, I don’t really believe that. (If we’re being honest, I am more inclined to believe that if the world can do something to annoy me, it will.) But at the same time, I do believe in other people, and especially their capacity for goodness.
To bring it full circle, this week, Al Jazeera posted a video of doctors, what looks like volunteers and even one young boy carrying those premature babies at al-Shifa to a different part of the hospital that still has electricity. They’re still not in incubators, but at least they have a better chance of survival. And isn’t that image—a line of people, gently carrying extremely fragile babies to a slightly safer place—the ultimate expression of hope?
And Did You Hear About…
This super interesting feature on ‘brand safety’ experts, and how they likely contributed to Jezebel’s demise.
Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to America,” which has been gaining traction on TikTok this week, especially after The Guardian removed it from its website on Nov. 15. This Rolling Stone article explains its newfound popularity, while mis and disinformation researcher Abbie Richards offers some insight into whether the trend is organic or not.
The Washington Post’s profile of court reporter Meghann Cuniff, a.k.a. Meghann Thee Reporter.
@tiffanydoingthings, who pokes fun at the TikTokers who make Very Serious Life Advice Videos™️. (This one is my favourite.)
The false promise of ‘deinfluencers.’
Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter! Still looking for intersectional pop culture analysis? Here are a few ways to get more Friday:
💫 Join Club Friday, our membership program. Members get early access to Q&As with pop culture experts, Friday merch and deals and discounts from like-minded brands.
💫 Follow Friday on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and even (occasionally) TikTok.
💫 If you’d like to make a one-time donation toward the cost of creating Friday Things, you can donate through Ko-Fi.