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Last Sunday night, as I was getting ready for bed, my friend Ali, who lives in the southern Hebron Hills of Palestine, sent me an email saying, “Israel is burning alive people sleeping in refugee camps.” I sent it. I clicked on the accompanying video and couldn’t believe what I saw. Hell was burning, people were running around screaming, and bodies were crackling and writhing in the flames. Still hooked up to an IV drip, she reaches out for help. I waited to share the video until the next morning when the event was reported by a reputable news outlet. The images were too gruesome to be real and looked as if they had come straight out of a movie. But they were real. It was an Israeli airstrike. The attack occurred near the grounds of al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Bala, central Gaza, and killed at least four people. Who was that man you saw burning alive? His name was Shaban al-Darrow, and he was a 19-year-old software engineering student.
In the 24 hours since this attack, my social media feeds have been filled with videos of this attack and reactions to it. A reel posted on Instagram by Palestinian journalist Saleh al-Jafarawi has been shared more than 455,000 times. The CNN Instagram post has been viewed more than 1.2 million times. My Palestinian friend Randa, whose grandparents were born in Gaza, said the incident was clear evidence that Israel was waging a war of “annihilation.” Survivors of the attack said the fire was caused by a gas cooking canister. Israel said in a statement that a “secondary explosion” was the cause.
Looking the Shock in the Eye, an Israeli social change organization where I also volunteer in the West Bank, shared Al-Jafarawi’s video and said, “It is not acceptable to burn men, women, and children alive.” It is not a policy of extermination, it is a policy of loss.” of humanity.” After more than a year of war being live-streamed to the world, footage of this particular horror is breaking through the noise on social media and crystallizing into something bigger, something different, something symbolic of both pure brutality and One thing was clear to me. Israeli government and military attacks and the nightmarish nature of Palestinian suffering in Gaza. Will Shaban al-Darrow become a symbol to Israelis and Palestinians what Emmit Till is to Americans?
Lynching of black Americans was by no means a new phenomenon when 14-year-old Emmitt Till was kidnapped, beaten, and murdered by two white men in Mississippi in August 1955. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an estimated two to three black people were lynched each week in the South. Before Till, more than 500 people had been lynched in Mississippi alone. But the sight of Till’s severed face, seen by tens of thousands of mourners at his funeral in Chicago, would be seen by millions more in newspapers and magazines across the country. It provoked a different reaction in the United States.
Simeon Wright, a cousin who was with Till the night he was killed, spoke of the importance of Emmitt’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to hold an open casket for a memorial service. “She said it herself. She wanted the world to know what those men did to her son because no one would have believed it if they hadn’t seen the pictures or seen the casket.” I wouldn’t have believed it either. And when we saw what happened, this motivated a lot of people who were… “on the fence” against racism. It encouraged them to join the fight and do something about it. That’s why a lot of people say that was the beginning of the civil rights era…(Now) we have all people on our side. ”
Indeed, four months later, in December 1955, black activists including Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks organized a bus boycott of Montgomery. For more than a year, between 30,000 and 40,000 black residents, four-fifths of the city’s total black population, took part in ongoing sociopolitical action that ultimately led to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against segregated busing. It was ruled that it was unconstitutional.
As Till’s story makes clear, shocking images alone won’t bring about change. Change occurs when specific events, often referred to by social movement theorists as “whirlwind moments,” galvanize people, usually in moments of crisis, to envision and implement new political realities.
This is what we need in Gaza now. We need to see and believe. To be completely disgusted and filled with anger. And to stand up from the fence and take decisive collective action. Israeli human rights organizations B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Physicians for Human Rights, and Gisha say the Israeli military may have already begun the forcible removal of Palestinian civilians from northern Gaza through increased siege and starvation of the population. He warns.
The war between Israel and Lebanon is escalating, with more than 2,000 Lebanese now killed at the hands of Israeli forces, and just two days ago, four Israeli soldiers were killed in a Hezbollah drone attack on a military base in the country. One person was killed and about 60 others were injured. Israel. And local violence can easily escalate. Israel’s retaliation against Iran for recent missile attacks appears imminent. The United States is sending 100 American troops to Israel to operate a new missile defense system that could draw American soldiers directly into a devastating war with Iran.
In the Jewish and Islamic traditions, we believe that all life is a universe. Killing one person is equivalent to destroying the entire world. However, in our mass media culture, certain lives take on more symbolic significance while others remain virtually anonymous. Emmitt Till came to represent not only the thousands of black people who were lynched, but also the millions of innocent people still alive. There is still time to protect their precious lives from the scourge of racism. In this sense, one life lost can lead to the salvation of an entire nation, a spiritual galaxy, if we choose to do so.
In the video Ali sent me, the screams of onlookers were so loud that I couldn’t hear what Shaban al-Darrow was saying as he stretched out his hands from his hospital bed, engulfed in flames. –If you have enough air in your lungs–just say something. But for me, a thousand miles away, watching this video with all the other news, I hear a clear message: stop the killing, stop the war, let the Palestinians live. Because every life, whether it burns out on social media or fades away in silence, is a whole universe.
Therefore, in order to remember the world lost and protect the living, we must make this moment a watershed in quelling the inferno that threatens to engulf Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and the entire region. . The memory of Shaban al-Daluh brings us back to our common humanity and ends this war, the war that began on October 7, 2023, and the war that lasted for 100 years between rivers and seas. I hope it will be.
