Aversion Therapy
by Sam Thielman
The Israeli government treated the attacks on kibbutzim close to the Gaza border on October 7, 2023, like a starter pistol. The fantasy of extermination, it soon became clear, had an unshakable hold on the imaginations that commanded the IDF, and within days, Netanyahu’s cabinet was talking about depopulating Gaza, gleefully defiling the memories of the socialists who had been killed by Hamas militants. The dead had worked to provide services already desperately needed in Gaza and opposed the cruelties of their own apartheid state; they were useful to the Netanyahu and Biden governments exclusively as a sort of primer for a deep, deep well filled with cadavers.
Now we live in an era of enforced spectation; a kind of global aversion therapy that makes movie stars and pop idols of the dead and the dying—they are the new subjects of push notifications, of airport television, of social media. I think many of us, even as we condemn the genocide itself, have told each other that the most graphic and searing videos and photographs we see promoting crowdfunding campaigns are fake or mislabeled; as savvy consumers, we can spot a trick to part us from our hard-earned money when we see one. As Americans living in constant fear of scams and con artists, we must be constantly vigilant. But as the years of siege and murder have dragged by, perhaps you, too, have noticed that these pictures begin to describe a kind of narrative arc. The story they accidentally tell is harder to dismiss.
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