The tubes connected to my arm are melting. I am surrounded by flames moving closer and closer like an angry mob waving torches above their heads. Except there are no people around. I have been yelling for help at the top of my lungs, but no one can hear me. Or if they do, perhaps they are afraid, like the man who never learned to swim and knows that if he jumps in to save someone drowning, there will be two victims rather than one. And it’s true: I’m not at all sure that anyone can stop this raging conflagration in time to save my life.
I thought I was safe in this place. Who would attack a defenseless man, a patient sick enough to be lying in a hospital bed? And yet it has become clear that my death is imminent, for the flames are marching inexorably toward me, like zombie soldiers or robots programmed to kill. Will anyone know what happened to me? The injuries I sustained when my home was bombed were life threatening, and that is the only reason why I am here. I was the only survivor of the missile strike: my wife, my two daughters, my baby son were all killed. And now, it seems, they’ve come to finish the job: the erasure of my family and its history. The end of a lineage.
Does anyone care? With so much rhetoric spewed out by politicians about human rights, how can the whole world stand by, condoning through silence and inaction the plight of me and the others, all confined to hospital beds? I see across what was a corridor, before the wall separating us crumbled to the ground, that the men in the next room who were screaming have stopped making any noise. All that is left is the sound of the flames flickering and flaring as they lap up the sizzling flesh of the now silent bodies.
I will be next. I cannot walk, much less run, and no one will answer my pleas for help, for the crackling flames have grown louder, and my voice is now weak. I have raised my arm up to wave to anyone outside who might be looking for signs of life. But it appears that we have been abandoned, preemptively written off in the annals of history as just so much more nameless “collateral damage.” Yes, our killers have crafted a lovely tale according to which they are good, and the enemy embedded amongst us is evil. But what could be more evil than what is being done to me right now?
It’s growing hotter and hotter. I am struggling to breathe, coughing out smoke while trying my best to inhale enough oxygen to keep me alive. The tubes dangling above my body remind me of the wires attached to hooded prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But I am not wearing a hood, and our killers are much cleverer than the ones in Iraq. Here in Gaza they are destroying all evidence at the scene of the crime. Any photographer who stood near enough to capture a picture of what we are enduring could not withstand the heat and would wither away along with the film in his camera. They don’t even need to shoot him in the head.
In a few minutes, there will be nothing left but carbonized bones and blackened rubble smoldering under a thick blanket of smoke. This method is far more efficient than that of the Nazis. They disposed of people first by poisoning them, and then hid the evidence by cremating the corpses, which required able-bodied persons willing (no doubt coerced) to shovel lifeless human beings into huge stoves filled with hot coals. The victims were reduced to ashes so that there would be no trace of what had taken place at the so-called work camps.
Here in Israel, they’ve hit upon a streamlined, one-step final solution. No one will know, so how could they care that I was a person with a family and dreams and aspirations whose life was stolen from him. No one will ever be held accountable for my death, for the government officials of this land claim to be defending the state of Israel by eradicating Hamas from the face of the earth, even though that has turned out to include subjecting the patients in this hospital to a holocaust no less vicious than the one endured by their relatives eighty years ago. Rather than standing trial at the Hague, our killers will be adorned with medals. Their speeches will be met with resounding applause before the congress and parliament of other governments, the leaders of which will pledge undying support to a “just” cause. The men who sat around a table and plotted our demise will not be denounced as despicable murderers, as were the officers in attendance at the Wahnsee conference. Instead, they will be praised as noble heroes.
I am aware that you may take offense at my comparisons to the Nazis and the moral equivalence I draw between my aggressors and those who provoke them to kill. And I admit that there are more charitable interpretations from which to choose. I’ll offer you two: Collective punishment or callous disregard for human life? That will, alas, be the final question I pose to you, the imaginary reader of my imaginary text, as God alone is my witness. Inch’allah!
