Let us not pretend to be shocked. Another day in Gaza, another airstrike, another list of the dead that includes a journalist. This time it is Al Jazeera cameraman Ahmed al-Louh, along with five others, killed in what the Israeli Defence Forces describe as a “targeted strike” against a “terror cell.” The officials confirm. The families weep. The world scrolls on.
We have become connoisseurs of horror, savouring the details of each atrocity before moving to the next. The death of a journalist is meant to sting more. They are supposed to be our eyes, our witnesses. But in an age of 24-hour news cycles and algorithmic fatigue, even the witnesses become wallpaper. The Roman Empire’s bread and circuses have been replaced by carnage and clicks.
What distinguishes this moment from any other in the long, miserable history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Nothing, save the name of the deceased. The pattern is ancient: a more powerful force uses overwhelming violence against a less powerful one, and the world tuts before returning to its lunch. The Victorian-era intellectuals would have recognised this as the “logic of empire,” a cold calculus where some lives are deemed expendable for the sake of order. Today, we call it “security concerns” and “counter-terrorism operations.” The vocabulary changes; the blood does not.
Why should we care about this particular cameraman? Because his death is a synecdoche for a larger intellectual decadence. We have lost the ability to hold two truths in our heads at once: that Israel has a right to self-defence, and that its methods have become grotesquely disproportionate. That Hamas uses human shields, and that Israel’s bombing campaigns kill far more civilians than militants. That every war crime committed by one side does not excuse those committed by the other.
But nuance is too exhausting. It is easier to pick a side and hurl slogans. The far left calls it genocide; the far right calls it a necessary evil. The rest of us scroll away, numbed by the sheer repetition of tragedy. This is what happens when a conflict becomes eternal. It loses its power to shock. It becomes a background hum, like the sound of a refrigerator or the drone of distant artillery.
I am not here to offer solutions. I am here to point out that we have seen this before. In the 1930s, intellectuals lamented the “banality of evil.” Today, we face the banality of reported violence. The Al Jazeera cameraman’s final footage will be preserved for posterity, but posterity will not learn. It will merely add his name to a list that grows longer by the hour.
The real tragedy is not that six people died today. It is that tomorrow, six more will die, and we will have already forgotten the names of these six. That is the price of civilisation we have built: comfort purchased with the suffering of others, and a collective amnesia that ensures the cycle never ends.
So go ahead, read the report. Feel a flicker of outrage. Then move on. It is what we do. It is what empires have always done.
