In Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, the numbers are appalling: almost 31,000 dead, including 12,300 children; more than 72,000 wounded; more than 8,000 missing under the rubble. Eight-five percent of the population of 2.3 million internally displaced. Nearly half of Gaza’s homes destroyed or damaged. Dozens of hospitals and hundreds of schools and religious sites attacked. Children starved to death. Thousands made orphans. The list of atrocities, cruelties, and indignities goes on and on.

It feels like too much because it is too much. Even one death, one injury is too much. It has been too much for more than 75 years. Israel’s eliminationist campaign against the Palestinian people, aided and abetted by the United States and others, is intolerable and reprehensible. It is a preannounced genocide and an intentionally imposed famine, broadcast in real time. We are all spectators to the apocalypse; it is no longer possible to say that we didn’t know. What does it mean to consume the wholesale destruction of a people and their land?

Admittedly, for my own well-being, I limit my intake of visual media of the genocide. When others cannot turn away, such is an exercise in privilege. But that does not necessarily imply malicious intent. To subsume oneself in the minutiae of misery does not alleviate that misery, it merely extends its reach. What matters is what one does when encountering misery – how does one react and respond? Towards what end? How does one comprehend what one is seeing, and what is the result of that comprehension?

When I do see images, I often think of my son. He is fifteen months old now. I remember seeing the premature babies removed from incubators gasping for air in a crumbling al-Shifa Hospital in November. I thought of my son, born one month premature. I see the photos of malnourished children in Kamal Adwan Hospital and think of my son, imagining if I could not provide him with enough food to eat. I think of my son years from now, when he is older, asking me what I did during this time. I hope I can provide him with an acceptable answer.

I think about empathy and its challenges. About what Saidiya Hartman, in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, labelled as its “precariousness” (25). She writes, “The ambivalent character of empathy – more exactly, the repressive effects of empathy – can be located in the ‘obliteration of otherness’ or the facile intimacy that enables identification with the other only as we ‘feel ourselves into those we imagine as ourselves.’ And as a result, empathy fails to expand the space of the other but merely places the self in its stead” (26). When I imagine myself, or my son, in the place of a Palestinian in Gaza, how guilty am I of this? When well-meaning organizations produce, essentially, trauma porn, in an attempt to garner empathy for Palestinians in Gaza, how guilty are they of this? When we share photos and videos and words that conjure the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, how guilty are we of this? Are we not weaponizing misery in an attempt to pull at heartstrings, or worse, to elicit donations? Are we not creating a “facile intimacy” that obscures the authentic experiences of those we are empathizing with in the name of commonality or relatability? Do I really need to think of my son when seeing a child in pain in order to make that pain something I can connect to?

For me, these are not easy questions, and they do not have easy answers. On one hand, and despite how this culture of celebrates the suffering of the other, I believe it is a quite normal human function to relate to others and their experiences. We have mirror neurons, after all. On the other hand, to only be able to extend care if one can imagine being in the place of the other does necessitate the displacement of the other, of the rendering of the other into an object to be moved aside so as to step into their position and thereby access empathy. Hartman was writing about chattel slavery and noted that empathy is “nonetheless entangled with this economy and identification facilitated by a kindred possession or occupation of the captive body, albeit on a different register” (28). Empathy, therefore, requires to some degree an investment in the system that produces the capacity for its production. The turning of persons into objects as vehicles for empathy is indeed a slippery slope. The contingency of othering as a condition for empathy contributes to the maintenance of a system that allows for genocide in the first place. So, what is to be done? How are we to relate to the suffering of others in a way that respects their authenticity, wholeness, and individual personhood?

In “Terror: A Speech After 9-11,” Gayatri Spivak calls for “radical alterity,” “an otherness that reason needs but which reason cannot grasp” (102), for “persistently de-transcendentalizing the radically other” (111). This is to hold a secular, as opposed to transcendental or religious, understanding of the other as an independent actor and full human being motivated by their own thoughts and concerns, independent of our apprehension of them. As such, the other is valued and merits consideration simply because of their existence, not out of any form of relationality. Here, empathy has no role, there is not a search for commonality, there are instead autonomous beings passing through their own experiences, their own beinghood serving as enough to warrant consideration.

A second approach, at odds with Spivak’s, can be found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. As I wrote in a previous piece years ago, Levinas “reminds us that seeing the face of the Other inspires in us a sense of ‘infinite responsibility’ and obligation for them. For to see the Other is to see ourselves and establish communion. In Totality and Infinity, he wrote, ‘In the face the Other expresses his eminence, the dimension of height and divinity from which he descends’ (262). If the Other holds that eminence and divine origin, so too must that be contained in us. If we can see that in the faces of others, so too can they see it in ours.”

Secular or transcendental, I see those as two exits from the empathy trap. More pressing of a concern, however, may be the utility of empathy. In the context of Palestine, is empathy what is called for? Aside from parsing its problematics, what does it motivate? I would argue instead that what is needed is active complicity in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. As with any action, it is important to understand the motivations behind it, hence the interrogation of empathy. Yet in the face of genocide, this is a question that must be quickly resolved so that one can take the next step into action, for that is what this moment demands.