On October 9, two days into the current Israel-Hamas war – in which the Israeli army appears intent on semi-obliterating the Gaza Strip – the website of the New York-based magazine Women’s Health published some guidelines on “How To Cope With The Trauma Of Violent Images And Videos Of Hamas’ Attack on Israel”.
It is unsurprising, of course, that the potential for trauma has been detected solely as a reaction to Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel and not to, say, the past 75 years of Israeli violence and ethnic cleansing of Palestine – the cumulative depraved barbarity of which is what prompted Hamas’s actions in the first place.
After all, Israel’s carefully crafted monopoly on victimisation and the attendant dehumanisation of Palestinians means that footage of the ongoing Israeli terrorisation of Gaza has never compelled US media outlets to prescribe “steps to protect your mental health”.
And yet the Women’s Health intervention constitutes a novel sort of twist on the victimisation theme, in which even the vicarious trauma that is allegedly intermittently experienced by US audiences trumps the unmitigated trauma suffered by the people upon whom Israel wages perpetual war. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.