I remember my grandmother saying: “When all of us who have experienced the war are no longer alive, you will start all over again. You have to have lived it to fight for it”. Now we are there. I can’t log out, I don’t sleep well. How should one deal with people being exterminated on live TV and social media? Should you eat breakfast as usual? Responding to emails about the budget, HSE courses, a personnel conflict and a Christmas party while pretending nothing happened? Talk to the neighbor about the backyard looking a bit messy now that all the leaves have fallen? Did I put away the summer clothes as I had planned? I’ve been walking around with basic nausea since October 7th. I became physically ill when the attack by Hamas on people dancing or eating breakfast in their homes was exposed in all its cruelty. The thought of the hostages’ fear of death gave me chills. At the same time, I immediately became cold with the thought of what severe consequences this would have for the civilian population in Gaza. But I wasn’t prepared for how bad it was going to be, and I definitely wasn’t prepared to follow graphic descriptions of human suffering in real time minute by minute. The nausea won’t go away. Palestinians at the ruins of a building after an attack on the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza on November 2. Photo: AFP I find it uncomfortable to listen to the cool distance in debate studios, while people die on live TV. I am served analyzes by military experts, discussions about who is most to blame, who will benefit most from a ceasefire. Which is worst. Who is most right. Rhetorical discussions about whether it is really a war crime or not. Some say ethnic cleansing, others shout genocide. But no matter what label we give it, it is undoubtedly the mass murder of thousands of fellow human beings, with the whole world as spectators. Including children, infants and fetuses. And I can’t stand the fact that not everyone in the world agrees that it’s not okay anyway. That it must be condemned by everyone everywhere. Do we have no rules left? I don’t want to be neutral to suffering. None of us should be. For who are we then? At Doctors Without Borders, we are not neutral to our patients’ suffering, which is very often man-made. We will never be neutral to the pain and sorrow of fellow human beings. We will always side with the little sister crying on her dead mother’s chest on an overcrowded hospital floor. With the woman in labor bleeding out in the ruins of her home without a midwife. With the grandfather who dies of kidney failure because the dialysis machine lacks electricity. With the young man who has to amputate his foot without anaesthetic. Right now, my Palestinian colleagues are in great danger of losing their own lives, while trying to save others, because Israeli forces are razing Gaza to the ground. Yesterday I was sent a photo taken by our emergency physician Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nejela showing the board inside the surgical department at Al Awda Hospital. Instead of showing an overview of which patients they are going to operate on, something completely different is written in blue marker: From a blackboard in the surgical department at the Al Awda hospital in Gaza. Photo: Mahmoud Abu Nejela / Doctors Without Borders «Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us.” The picture was taken two weeks ago. Yesterday everything got even worse. Our staff at Al Shifa Hospital witnessed people being shot at while trying to flee the hospital. Now we have lost contact with them. All I want is to scream in the forest. Cry in the shower. So then I do it. I am privileged to have a shower to cry in and a forest to scream in. I am privileged to be annoyed by everyday things: Waiting for the bus that is late in a street that is safe. Not being able to sleep because of the tow truck scraping the pavement and not because of the sound of bombs. Being as privileged as me and as us comes with a responsibility. I feel something crack inside me now. Between us humans. In the world. Rules I thought we all agreed on no longer apply. The unconscionable blockade of Gaza is not only a violation of international humanitarian law, it is a crisis for humanity. None of us, and especially not the leaders of the world, can support or stand silently by and watch this cruel indifference to human life. In four weeks, we will open slot ten in the Christmas calendar. Behind it we find the marking that it has been 75 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed. It was written by wise people who wanted to make some rules and basic principles for us Earthlings, so that we would avoid going off on each other again. Avoid dividing the world into them and us. In the bad and the good. Those rules weren’t written for a sunny day, because then it’s easy to uphold them. It is when it is really difficult, when it costs us something, that it is most important to respect them. On my wall hangs Article 1. It says that we are all born with the same human dignity and human rights. And that we are equipped with reason and conscience. Are we? Isn’t it rather the case that it is becoming clearer and clearer that politics is designed based on the opposite: that all people are not worth the same amount? Do we no longer agree that every one of the 1,200 Israeli lives brutally taken away in Hamas’s attack on October 7th is worth as much as every one of the thousands of Palestinian lives brutally taken by Israel in Gaza? That keeps getting lost every hour of every single day? Not all children are worth the same amount either. The children who are killed and wounded and bleeding in Gaza do not have names. We don’t get to know what their favorite teddy was. What dreams they had. How they look when they laugh. This is in stark contrast to the stories told from the other side of the closed border. All children are not worth the same amount now. I believe that one of the main reasons why we accept atrocities committed against others is that we divide the world into them and us, where some are good and some are evil. And those who are evil, we don’t need to worry about, they are not worth it. It’s as simple as that. But I believe that we all carry the capacity for evil. The distinction between good and evil, hate and love does not go between them and us. Nor does it go between states, ethnic groups or religious communities – but across every human heart. It’s about a choice we all have to make all the time, every single day, about which side we want to stand on. Hearing about Norwegian Jews and Muslims who experience threats and are afraid tears like an icy November wind along my spine. We must all take care now; protect each other and our own humanity. There are no others, only us. Again, I remember my grandmother’s words: “When all of us who have experienced the war are no longer alive, you will start all over again. You have to have lived it to fight for it.” And now we are there. It is up to us to fight. I am furious. Many feel a rage and a righteous anger, and we must use that to act. Speak up, scream out. Not by hammering away at each other in online echo chambers, but by actively standing up for human dignity, daring to say something. In social media. In debate studios. In a leadership position. Around the dinner table. To our children. The attacks on the civilians in Gaza are an attack on all of us; when our common humanity faces a fall – then we all fall. What we choose to say and not say in the face of what is happening in Gaza now, we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. What do you choose? A Palestinian woman with her child in the ruins after an Israeli attack on the al-Maghazi refugee camp in Gaza on November 6. Photo: Abaca
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Grandmother’s words – Utterance
