Children and Nothingness

Across the front page of the print version of the New York Times this morning (July 25), starvation in Gaza was connected to the Epstein scandal as nothingness. Far from a sudden conversion to Heideggerian existentialism, this nothing is the blankness at the center of white sight.

The page was dominated by a photograph by Palestinian photojournalist Saher Alghorra, taken the day before. Taking over half the space above the fold, it occupied the space usually taken by the lead headline. It shows a woman in a cloth headdress holding a terribly emaciated baby against a chiaroscuro background.

Below, there was a headline in regular font: “Young, Old and Sick Starve to Death in Gaza: ‘There Is Nothing’.” Across from the photograph in all caps bold: “FRENETIC SEARCH OF EPSTEIN FILES AND NOTHING NEW.” Twice nothing is nothing: move on, there’s nothing to see here. Or more exactly, while this may be visible, it remains unspeakable.

White sight places everything under permanent surveillance but it sees “nothing” when it suits it to do so, when to see the unspeakable would challenge its own assertions of supremacy.

Gaza: “There Is Nothing”

Alghorra’s photograph depicted 18-month-old Mohammed Zakaria-al Mutawaq, being carried by his mother Hedaya al-Mutawaq, 31. She was quoted by the Times but elsewhere she can be seen speaking, describing the horror of not being able to find food for her infant, the realization that he is being starved.

In the version above, I have redacted all but the child’s left arm (left in for scale). The photo editors have highlighted the chiaroscuro effect created by the contrast of light and dark, and muted the pink tone of her dress. The result is a photograph chosen for the front page because it fits into the iconographic tradition of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus.

Here’s a detail from Velazquez’s Adoration of the Magi (1619) for comparison. I don’t mean that Alghorra had the visual tradition in mind but that the NYT photo editors did. The proof of this assertion is that they cropped it to make it more evocative of this iconography.

There’s no intent at the paper of record to suggest that Jesus was Palestinian: settler colonial mythology figures him as a white US male. Instead, the iconographic effect takes the violence out of context and situates it as painterly mythology. It wants viewers to think that this is an act of God. Its intended affect would be: “what can you do?” It is unspeakable.

To dispel that affect, look if you can at the uncropped version of the photograph that Alghorra posted to his Instagram feed (warning: very distressing). The photograph as intended clearly situates the event in a refugee camp, with a faded military-style tent. Another better nourished child can be seen playing on the tent floor.

In Alghorra’s post, this is the third of six photographs. The first two depict other women carrying starving children—or more exactly, children starved by the genocidal occupation. Then we see children crying out for food and water, holding out bowls, presumably to a kitchen. Next, tired looking young men carry skinny sacks—perhaps flour?—through piles of rubble and dirty puddles. The sequence ends with a child’s funeral.

Inside the NYT, several of these photographs—except those of starved children—were reproduced, but out of order so as to disrupt the intended meaning. In Alghorra’s visual storytelling, this isn’t a divine intervention, it’s an all too human catastrophe. His story is entirely speakable. Active starvation leads to entirely avoidable and unnecessary death, taking infants and children first. It’s genocide made visible and white sight blanks it.

What can we do? We can get find ways to get food from well-provisioned Israel or even the UN warehouses nearby into the camp. That’s entirely possible and even now, food and water would save these and other children, but, writes the Times, “there is nothing” (quoting A’eed Abu Khater, another Gazan, about the struggle to get affordable food). In the age of AI writing, ”there is nothing” comes with the suggested text “we can do.”

Ludicrously, Israel will now “permit” foreign nations to parachute in food to Gaza, as if it was some faraway isolated place and not right next door to as much food as is needed. And then the IDF will target any person attempting to gather air-dropped food, as they have killed 1100 others already.

Epstein: “Nothing New”

Meanwhile hundreds of FBI and Justice department officials scoured their archives to try and find ways to connect leading Democrats to Jeffrey Epstein and fulfil the conspiracy theory held by so many far-right activists. Interviews are going on between the Justice department and Epstein’s collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell, no doubt entirely to the same end.

I was at college with Maxwell. No academic genius, certainly, but she’s no fool. I’m sure she will be only too willing to name, say, Bill Clinton as a client of Epstein’s sex trafficking in exchange for her freedom.

The same stock photos of Maxwell and Epstein circulate once again, even as their many victims are obscured and pushed aside as “nothing new.” Powerful figures like former MoMA chair Leon Black, who was multiply accused of raping women at Epstein’s house have used their expensive high-end lawyers to prevent cases from even coming to court. Nothing must be said, nothing has happened.

What makes it impossible to close the Epstein case is the perfectly reasonable sense that people have that they are being lied to. From the Catholic church to elite private schools, there has been all manner of child abuse and sexual assault of young people within institutions.

Even when, albeit reluctantly, these institutions finally admit wrongdoing, there is very little retribution or punishment for those responsible. QAnon and other conspiracy theorists flourish in this gap between what people see and what they are told. They offer what institutions cannot or will not: an explanation for the unspeakable.

That’s not to excuse or condone these campaigns. The tell comes when they continue to refuse to listen to young people themselves. When queer and trans youth, most notably, speak about their need for gender-affirming care, they become unspeakable, mere puppets of woke ideology.

Make Something From Nothing

Can something come from these nothings? How can the unspeakable/revulsion connection be short-circuited and made into a speakable revolution? One step at a time.

Conventional media platforms insist that the Epstein issue won’t harm Trump and that the visible genocide won’t damage Israel. Perhaps not—Trump is a known perpetrator of sexual violence. But France just recognized the Palestinian state, the first permanent member of the UN Security Council to do so.

That’s something, but it’s not the kind of something that I want. The somethings I want see and describe Palestinian children as human beings, not icons. It would mean that children, and children’s experience, can both be spoken and that this speaking gets heard as the difficult-to-say truth rather than as motivated lies.

A few weeks ago, Virginia Guiffre, who was courageous enough to accuse Epstein and Prince Andrew took her own life. In the made-for-TV movie, speaking your truth sets you free. But it doesn’t, not entirely.

In the past month, I’ve given three presentations in London based on To See In The Dark, in which I’ve looked English people in the eye and talked about how their private schools, where I was abused, trained their students to be colonial officials who were capable of committing violence precisely because it had been used against them.

It’s an exhausting, draining performance. People often say they find it moving or brave. That’s as may be. When you finish speaking, you look around and you see still-powerful institutions built on these histories of violence. It’s not nothing to speak back to them, it’s definitely something. But it’s not yet enough.

In the 1970s it was commonplace on the Left in the UK to demand the abolition of private schools, the House of Lords and the monarchy. The current Labour government will end the hereditary component of the Lords but not abolish it. The other two demands are now seen as impossible.

To move back towards the abolition communism to come, let’s recall those demands and more. In the US, it’s past time to think through the truth of the slogan “the whole damn system is guilty as hell.” A colonial governance designed to permit slavery will not save us. All our institutions—the master’s many houses—from Columbia to the Smithsonian Institution and the say-nothing Democratic party are unspeakable.

Perhaps the first something to find is that acceptance of this comprehensive failure.