You've probably seen the images. During his address to the UN Security Council at its headquarters in New York, Palestinian representative Riad Mansour recalled the massacres of children perpetrated by the Israeli government and army and burst into tears. "It's unbearable," he said, banging his fist on the table. "How can anyone tolerate such horror?"
Tears have become a common, and often distorted, code in modern-day communication. Some politicians sometimes get emotional, or pretend to be, when they want to gain the sympathy of the electorate, and absurdly cry over soccer players, sometimes even snotting their noses and drooling, to announce their retirement, or their contract renewal, or the purchase of a soccer ball, or any other soccer-related nonsense. Crying and laughing are specifically human forms of expression, so they generate mimicry among those of us who belong to this species. Crying, like laughter, is contagious and produces empathy and endorphins.
However, the cries of Palestinian ambassador Mansur emerge from the everyday media comedy. Mansur is 78 years old, was born in Ramallah, and has been a permanent observer for Palestine at the UN (first as an assistant, then as a full member) since 1983. Such a long diplomatic career could have silenced him in the face of violence, especially as a political actor in a conflict that has always been bloody. It's possible he has hardened himself. But the inconsolable tears he shed this Tuesday, in a solemn setting like the UN Security Council, are a response and an antidote to cynicism. Also, to those who allow themselves to mock Mansur's pain, and that of the thousands of people who, in Gaza and throughout Palestine, have been not only murdered, but also trampled and humiliated to the most vile degree, by the far-right Israeli government, and by an army, if not an army, while they commit atrocities against the civilian population.
It is not true that the horror of Gaza will never be seen: we can find similar degradations in the tragedy in Yemen and Sudan, at the very least, but evidently the geopolitical and economic implications of these conflicts are not the same as those in Palestine and Israel. However, Gaza acts as a new emblem of the barbarism to which we should never descend, unless it comes at the price of having to consider the human experiment a failure. By committing this genocide, Israel illegitimately tarnishes the memory of the Holocaust, thereby multiplying the scope of its crime. The memory of horror can never serve as justification for a new horror. In contrast to the laments of the permanent observer Mansour, the insistence of those who still appeal to Israel's right to defend itself against Hamas terrorism reminds us that, beneath the baseness of murderers, lurks the baseness of the flatterers of murderers. If Riad Mansour's laments still tell us anything, perhaps cynicism has not yet completely destroyed us.
