SHELL-SHOCKED
DISPATCHES FROM A WAR: ON THE GROUND UNDER ISRAEL'S GAZA ASSAULT
Author: Mohammad Omer
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
Pages: 320
Price: Rs 450
The Israeli Defence Forces' actions in the Gaza Strip deserve wider readership than newspaper reports, but if Mohammed Omer's purpose is to do so, he skips the context altogether. So you read the daily reports about what the Israelis are doing in the strip and the mounting cost in human lives and misery, but at the end you would be left wondering why the Israelis are doing what they are doing.
Omer warns you about this early on. "There are differences between local and international journalism. The local variety needs no wider context, just the images of the human carnage and desperation is enough. We know the context and history. We live it. International media needs to answer more questions and add historical context."
Shell Shocked is structured as a diary of a war where the violence visited upon a people can only serve to outrage. Men, women and children for whom the ordinary life is that of a human shield: children's corpses stuffed into vegetable refrigerators; a family rushing out of their home after a phone call from the Israeli ministry informs them that the building will be obliterated in three minutes; donkeys machine-gunned by Israeli soldiers under instructions to shoot anything that moves.
Yet if after having turned the last page you feel you haven't got the full story, who would you blame? The reporter doing his job as he knows best, or the editor who is expected to see whether a book hangs together? The publisher's note that the pieces are "accounts of the 51-day war in 2014 when Israel directly attacked Gaza, and its aftermath" makes a heroic assumption about the rest of the world's familiarity with the region and its developments, with or without CNN. This is a book that needs timelines, maps, pen portraits - the bells and whistles of modern publishing. Unfortunately, it has none.
For me, Gaza is just a name. If I bring myself to read a book on what is happening there I would like the more than occasional bird's eye view alongside the reporting from the ground. On the ground, though, Shell Shocked does a superb job. These are tales of loss and very human despair. And they will serve a future historian well when the story of Palestine needs to be pieced together from archival sources. But for someone like me, who lives in the time it happened but on a different part of the planet, the picture after reading the book is incomplete.
References to US arms sales to Israel or Egypt's stance on the Palestinians after Mohamed Morsi, the country's first elected President, or the structure of Hamas are fleeting and serve mainly to tease. Googling for them is no fun when reading a book meant principally to inform. A two-month snapshot of a conflict that has been raging for over half a century tells me very little unless I know the story beforehand. Which I don't. And Shell Shocked doesn't make me much wiser.
Except, you could ask yourself, as I did, why don't we know the Palestine story better? Yes, the events in Gaza are too far removed from life on the Indian sub-continent. But is that the only reason? Or could it be, as Omer puts it in the introduction, "the Palestinian narrative is under-represented in the media and when it is to be found, it is generally as an addendum to a defence of Israel's rights"?
And he takes that narrative to the frontline, as it were. Omer could have left Gaza to pursue his journalism elsewhere, but he chose to stay and tell this story. "For 51 days in the summer of 2014 we endured unspeakable devastation. With each attack we emerged more tightly squeezed together, more resilient and determined. We are united by this will to survive and rebuild our lives. There was a hope briefly that perhaps that that summer was the final major attack - that never again would the people of Gaza be forced to succumb to such suffering. Hope, but not much faith."
As a fellow journalist I can appreciate Omer's decision to stay on the big story despite the personal costs. But I can't help questioning his tradecraft. News reporting is meant to get all sides of a story, and Shell Shocked has no Israeli version. Admitted, being both a victim and an observer is unlikely to get you access to the other side, but Omer could have served his fellow victims better by trying to tease more information out of the Israeli war machine. The eye-witness accounts of carnage in Gaza would have nested better against developments in Tel Aviv. Who ordered the strikes, and why? Of course, that is way beyond the scope of a spot report -especially when the reporter is not sure whether he can reach his computer before the lights go out - but some of Omer's considerable journalistic talents could have been directed at news that took a step back and reviewed the war as it progressed. The book would have travelled better had he done so.
