War Cuts The Heart Out Of Humankind

“No one in our neighborhood has been untouched by the violence. We are a society that has been traumatized,” Anisa said to me in the evening.“Take my neighbor for instance. She lost her mother in a bombing and her husband is blind because of another bombing.”

The stories fill my notebook. They are endless. Every society that has experienced the kind of warfare faced by the Iraqis, and now by the Palestinians, is deeply scarred. It is hard to recover from such violence.

I am walking near the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. My friends who are showing me the area point to the fields that surround it and say that this land has been so poisoned by the United States dropping Agent Orange that they do not think food can be produced here for generations.

The US
dropped
at least 74 million liters of chemicals, mostly Agent Orange, on Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, with the focus for many years being this supply line that ran from the north to the south. The spray of these chemicals struck the bodies of at least five million Vietnamese and mutilated the land.

A Vietnamese journalist Tran To Nga
published
Ma terre empoisonnée
(My Poisoned Land) in 2016 as a way to call attention to the atrocity that has continued to impact Vietnam over four decades after the US lost the war.

In her book, Nga describes how as a journalist in 1966 she was sprayed by a US Air Force Fairchild C-123 with a strange chemical. She wiped it off and went ahead through the jungle, inhaling the poisons dropped from the sky.

When her daughter was born two years later, she died in infancy from the impact of Agent Orange on Nga.“The people from that village over there,” my guides tell me, naming the village,“birth children with severe defects generation after generation.”

These memories come back in the context of Gaza. The focus is often on the dead and the destruction of the landscape. But
there are other enduring parts of modern warfare that are
hard to calculate.

There is the immense sound of war, the noise of bombardment and
of
cries, the noises that go deep into the consciousness of young children and mark them for their entire lives.

There are children in Gaza, for example, who were born in 2006 and are now 18, who have seen wars at their birth in 2006, then in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now, 2023-24. The gaps between these major bombardments have been punctuated by smaller bombardments, as noisy and as deadly.

Then there is the dust. Modern construction uses a range of toxic materials. Indeed, in 1982, the World Health Organization
recognized
a phenomenon called“sick building syndrome,” which is when a person falls ill due to the toxic material used to construct modern buildings.

Imagine that a 2,000-pound MK84 bomb lands on a building and imagine the toxic dust that flies about and lingers both in the air and on the ground.

This is precisely what the children of Gaza are now breathing as the Israelis drop hundreds of these deadly bombs on residential neighborhoods. There is now over 37 million tons of debris in Gaza, large sections of it filled with toxic substances.

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Every war zone remains dangerous years after ceasefires. In the case of this war on Gaza, even a cessation of hostilities will not end the violence.

In early November 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
estimated
that the Israelis had dropped 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, which is the equivalent of two nuclear bombs (although, as they pointed out, Hiroshima sits on 900 square meters of land, whereas Gaza's total square meters are 360).

By the end of April 2024, Israel had
dropped
over 75,000 tons of bombs on Gaza, which would be the equivalent of six nuclear bombs. The United Nations
estimates
that it would take 14 years to clear the unexploded ordnance in Gaza. That means until 2038 people will be dying due to this Israeli bombardment.

On the mantle of the modest living room in the apartment of Anisa and Yusuf, there is a small Palestinian flag. Next to it is a small piece of shrapnel that struck and destroyed Yusuf's left eye. There is nothing else on the mantle.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research . This article was produced by Globetrotter and is republished with permission.