In search of a future

Viktor Frankl wrote in the classic Man's Search for Meaning that the worst time in the concentration camp was not when they arrived, not when they were chosen, not even when they were beaten at random. It was the moment a prisoner stopped imagining a future. Not despair exactly but something quieter. A man who could no longer see himself forward in time, who could no longer picture himself in the after, began to die in ways the body registered before the mind admitted. Frankl called it in his book 'the loss of meaning'. By this, he did not mean the emotional loss of hope, but the loss of a story in which his pain would be seen, acknowledged, and put into words in the history of humankind. It's the witnessing part that the world has been systematically missing in Gaza.

This is not a piece on who started what, or about proportionality in the legal sense, or about the competing territorial claims that predate most of the people that are dying today. Those arguments exist and people are having them. This is about something the geopolitical vocabulary handles poorly: what prolonged, unwitnessed suffering does to the internal life of a population, and why that matters for every "day after" plan currently sitting in a drawer in Washington, Riyadh and Brussels.

The international order has created sophisticated machinery to produce invisibility. The UN Security Council's veto system makes it possible to discuss and debate the most significant acts of violence forever and ever. Media cycles close before the rubble is fully catalogued. In Gaza, where over 50,000 people have already lost their lives and much of the land is in ruins, the rubble continues to pile up. The terms of "complexity", which are used with good faith by diplomats and analysts, serve whatever purpose, as a fence around naming. Aid corridors are negotiated as a substitute for accountability, caloric sufficiency offered in place of political standing. The result is a lot of data with little weight in terms of consequences.

Frankl's distinction matters here. Witnessing is not the same as watching. The footage exists. The casualty figures are updated. Journalists' work has been done exceptionally and at exceptional personal sacrifice. For Frankl, witnessing means receiving the observation by a structure that can respond, and that the suffering is placed in a framework of meaning greater than the suffering itself. Hannah Arendt, writing about statelessness, identified the deepest wound as not the loss of specific rights but the loss of the standing to have rights at all. That is the condition Frankl feared most. Not suffering but suffering without a witness.

That is why all reconstruction plans are doomed from the start. You cannot build civic architecture on a population that has been taught, repeatedly and at enormous cost, that their future is not a variable anyone is solving for.

Resolutions are passed. Statements are issued. Conferences are convened with genuine urgency and catered lunches. But there is a difference between the performance of a witness and the thing itself. A system that produces documentation without consequence, outrage without obligation, has not witnessed anything, it has just processed it. Gaza is sick and tired of the latter.

The greater good here is not a ceasefire, though that is necessary. It is the restoration of a category: that these are people whose future the international order is organised to protect. Otherwise, all ceasefires are pauses.

Frankl survived and wrote his book and became, himself, the witness his suffering had lacked. That option, of retrospective meaning, of the record eventually correcting itself, requires that a future exist in which the correction can occur.

The record corrects itself, always, but only for those who survived the wait.