benjaminteicher.com – freelance writer

Sharyn Lock at Tales to Tell:

Tonight, we collect two men carrying a little girl of 13 months. She is still warm, but EB finds no pulse. If I understood correctly, she has had breathing difficulties since she was born, and in the rocket attack that just happened, her mother held her so tight she wasn’t able to get enough air. I ask to clarify this story several times because I want to think I’ve misunderstood.

Reading this brought me back to the scene in the movie finale of M*A*S*H, where Hawkeye is haunted by memories of being trapped in the rear of a truck, as a Korean woman strangles a chicken in order to stop it from making any noises and drawing the attention of the enemy. Ultimately, this recollection is revealed to mask a repressed memory, in which it was not a chicken, but an infant that was suffocated to halt its crying.

I make this association not to reduce the sadness or horror of Sharyn Lock’s reporting. In fact this scene is for me one of the most haunting moments in television, film, and literature that I can recall, and I shuddered when I heard that it had happened in Gaza, and that these things are happening now.

I was going to title this post with ‘…on the tragedy in Gaza’ or ‘…on the massacre in Gaza’, but I simply can’t decide on what it is. The first implies that the slaughter from the sky, and now from the ground, is fate, like thunderbolts fired by the gods.

The second demonises Israelis, and I cannot really claim to understand the motives and motivations of the Israeli government, military, although I think I have some insight into the fear and paranoia of the population. After all, I live in a land composed of anxious (post-)colonisers.

So, I have two observations from this vast, antipodean distance.

Framing matter: Humanitarian vs War Frame in the reporting of the Gaza war

The first relates to media frames. Much of the mainstream press have eschewed the ‘normal’ media frame that would apply in the context of a siege, bombardment and invasion of a city. We might expect that if this battle occurred in the context of a corner of Africa forgotten by the west, that the humanitarian frame would apply, where viewers are invited to understand the events in terms of human suffering and cruelty. We would be introduced to the Palestinians as ‘victims’ and the Israeli leadership as ‘aggressors’, along the lines of, say, the Sudanese government and its persecution of the Darfuris.

Instead we have something of a more conventional war reporting frame, where human suffering features, but it is understood much more in terms of its inevitability in the context of a dispute between two parties whose truth claims we are unable to substantially verify. There is a stated equality between the military might of the Israeli military and the admittedly lethal, but rarely so, rocket attacks by Hamas militants and those from associated groups.

This is achieved primarily through the way space is given to both Palestinians and Israelis. Their claims, that on the one hand the Israelis are propagating war crimes against a virtually defenceless population, and on the other hand, that Israeli has an essential need to defend its population from aggression, are treated as equally valid even as some editorialising by journalists challenges this.

Al Jazeera adheres to the first ‘humanitarian’ frame, and expresses a moral outrage against Israel that matches that which it, and many other news organisations vent against someone like Robert Mugabe, dictator of Zimbabwe. Switching between this and other networks sometimes feels like stepping between different realities, as different worlds crystallise from the same human matter, which turns inexorably red each day that passes , no matter how it is spun.

Asymetrical Bullshit

An underside to Israel’s military might is its discursive prowess. Israel’s main defence, whenever it is confronted by journalists with the consequences every time a bullet gores through flesh or a shell buries a child in the remains of her home, is that ‘Israel only targets Hamas operatives and facilities and, regrettably, sometimes, civilians die. Hamas, however, deliberately targets civilians in southern Israel’.

I could be wrong, but from what I understand about Hamas’ rockets, is that they are very basic and crude and lacking the precision to damage Israel’s military infrastructure in any case. So many of them fall in the middle of a street, a field, and terrify, but rarely result in death.

It is horrific that someone could fire a rocket with no knowledge of who might be annihilated as a consequence. But this fundamental truth should not confuse us, and obscure the asymmetry between the army of one nation, and the provisional fighting force of whatever we can call the non-state within which the Palestinians eek out their existence.

So, if the Israelis really want the Palestinians to stop targeting civilians with their rockets, then a provision of any ceasefire agreement must ensure the transfer of military hardware from the Israeli military to the authorities in Gaza and the West Bank. With these precision weapons in Palestinian hands all sides will have confidence that the Palestinians will be able to respond to ongoing Israeli aggression and cruelty in a way that does not harm civilian populations.

The discovery of a ‘transsexual gene’ has been a cause for elation among many people in the fight against discrimination. The research shows that society has begun the slow crawl towards accepting those people who fall outside the rigid distinction of male and female.

While it is tempting to view such discoveries as an unambiguous victory, there are risks. If as a consequence of this research, we only accept transgendered people on the basis of biology, then this scientific mindset will lead us towards a new phase of discrimination.

Transgendered people continue to face discrimination by the law, in the workplace and in health care. As a result of such discrimination, many have been forced to conceal identities which feel so close to their sense of who they are.

It is little wonder then that members of the transgender community when scientists announced that they had uncovered a ‘transsexual gene’.

Sally Goldner, spokesperson for TransGender Victoria, says that the findings give transgendered people significant muscle in fighting discrimination

‘I think it’s pretty solid evidence…. You say, well if we exist and we need to live the way we need to live then we are entitled to relevant legal protection,’ she said.

Associate Professor Vincent Harley led the team that studied a gene closely related to the workings of the sex hormone testosterone in males. They found that this gene is longer and less active in male transsexuals and that this may limit the emergence of a masculine identity during the development of the brain.

Associate Professor Harley argues that the research constitutes a ‘biological basis to transsexualism’.

It is heartening that these researchers are working to legitimise gender diversity through their scientific endeavours. Yet we risk further discrimination if we allow the subtleties of gender to be absorbed into an inflexible scientific landscape.

The research only studied ‘transsexual’ people – people who clearly identify as a member of the opposite sex to that which they were born with.

Associate Professor Harley’s ‘biological basis’ does not apply to the more broader category of ‘transgendered’ people. This category includes all people who feel that their gender does not accord with their biological sex and express this in different ways.

As such, the research threatens to establish a whole new set of hierarchies and a whole new class of people who are excluded by society and the cool, detached eye of science from which it takes its cues.

What are the implications of the research for who feel that they were born into the wrong sex but who are found not to possess this particular gene?

And what about those transgendered members of the community who either reject gender altogether or who exist along its seams, never settling on either side?

When we focus entirely upon a ‘biological basis to transsexualism’ when mounting a case for legal and social recognition, then we exclude those people who do not conform to the dictates of genetic science. The social, legal and medical discrimination will unfortunately continue for such people.

There are good reasons for transgendered people to argue that their identity has a biological basis.

According to Sally Goldner, society can no longer deny transsexualism nor discriminate against it once it becomes a scientific reality.

‘You can’t get rid of it through silly ideas like conversion therapy and to know that obviously it is something that is part of our hardwiring, so to speak,’ she says

Unfortunately, while such scientific evidence may wield a powerful blow to those who discriminate against transsexuals, it strengthens the basis for legal discrimination against others who lack a scientific basis to their identity.

The dilemmas that we face are not exactly new. In fact, they belong to the long running and hard fought ‘Nature vs. Nurture’ debate.

In this debate, combatants take an identity of one sort or another and seek to attribute it either to the biological make up of an individual or the social environment in which this person developed.

Rather than affirming nature over nurture or vice-versa, why not make respect for difference, whatever its basis, the backbone for overcoming discrimination?

Instead of questing after scientific causes, we should interrogate the mindset which forces people to walk the high wire binary of of male and female, gay and straight, black and white and so on.

We may never find a biological basis for the desire to live in a world in which identity is a matter of free choice, but it’s worth fighting for anyway.

It was seven-thirty in the morning when the papers rang asking for comment. Boris promised politely that he would respond once he had found his bearings. And to this end, he stood up, shaking away the glittering vestiges of his nocturnal unconscious as he slowly eased into the morning emptiness left in their wake.

Boris pulled a yellowing gown over his shoulders and stepped into his slippers. He caught himself in a mirror on his way out into the lounge room. When, he wondered, just when had he begun to look so curmudgeonly. Shaking his head he plodded into the kitchen. He brewed espresso on the stove, preferring not to eat on that morning.

The phone rang out several times over the hour as it passed, but Boris ignored it. He drank his coffee black on the balcony, banishing the desire for a cigarette back down into some barren corner of his gut where it could be acknowledged without breaking the four and one half months of discipline that had passed.

The images in question were four large photographs of a sexually mute human body. The angles he had chosen were baffling, and he had selected photos from a model whose delicate young body evoked the under age.

Boris had been well-advisedly late to the opening the previous evening. The offending photographs were seized by police men and women who watched soberly as the muscular young hands of the gallery loaded them into a van.

He had been publicly condemned on the late news bulletins, but the issue had only now seized the public’s attention with the dawn of a new news cycle.

On the radio later that morning he was asked if he were a pornographer.
‘Certainly, I shouldn’t think so.’
‘But you are sexualising children.’
‘I’d prefer to leave that up to the children.’
The interviewer grew frustrated by the lack of a winning sound byte.
‘So you are not responsible for taking sexual images of children then?’
He had no desire to answer with a convenient half-truth.
‘The images are what they are. It’s possible that someone might find them sexual. Although surely those who condemn me as a pornographer are saying much, much more about themselves.’

The interview ended on this rhetorical note and Boris’ heart sank slowly.

Later in the morning he heard a news bulletin where his terse comment was tacked onto the end of a story in which he had been verbally disembowelled by a newspaper columnist. Boris was decired as a ‘disciple of the postmodern cult of relativism’ and a man ‘desperate to make a statement’ who puts ‘children at risk for the sake of his own artistic ego’.

Boris pictured his next major work. IT would be a sketch, antamoical almost, of an an animal eating itself, but then again, this was one of the world’s oldest images.

Nobody had so far said it in words, nor put it in print, but as the sun took its mantle in the midday sky, straight reporting moved into reportage and analysis. His critics subjected his ouevre to a harsh, populist glare and the dots of his artistic past slowly connected into the form of the deviant his artistic past.

As he bit the skin around his fingers an old comrade called him, offering to take him to lunch. Boris accepted.

Boris had edited a student newspaper with Jacob many, many years previously. He was now a successful, although not altogether well known writer of sketch-comedy. He’d also released a collection of jokes and tales that he had garnered during his travels of the Baltic states.

They went to an expensive restaurant on the harbour. Boris felt underdressed in the flannel shirt and jeans that he had thrown on. His friend ordered a plate of oysters and a game hen. Boris had no appetite, and settled on a roast pumpkin soup.

His friend grinned all the way across his flat face, but said nothing. Instead, he decided to allow Boris to set the tone and boundaries of the conversation.

They spoke idly of Kosovo until the food arrived.

It was as he crunched oyster shells in his hands that Jacob’s patience finally abandoned him. ‘You’ve really put your foot in it this time, Boris. Well done.’

Brois drew together the shards of his bravado, but they dissolved in a sigh.

‘This is what I had wanted. What I had set out for when I started the work. I should feel, I don’t know, exhilarated or something, but er…’

Out in the street with his lens pressed against the restaurant window, Boris spied a newspaper camera man. He watched his finger poised over the lens, settling again and again on the trigger, like a cat’s tongue lapping up milk.

Boris felt a splash on his palm. A woman in a navy suit had spat in his soup as she passed their table.

‘You’re a dirty old man,’ she said with her coat bundled under her arm.

Jacob looked thoroughly amused. He scrunched up his face apologetically.

‘Sorry old mate, if I’d known’.

‘No, it’s quite alright.’

The woman lingered.

Jacob addressed the woman. ‘Look, what is it that you want? Perhaps my friend can order me another soup for you to spit in.’

She grimaced, and walked away to pay her bill.

Boris looked around. A few diners eyed him cautiously. A man nearby gave him a wink and a thumbs up.

He thanked his old accomplice for the lunch and left the restaurant, leaving the soup and its sputum to grow tepid.

Back at his flat, Boris wilfully ignored the flashing lights on his answering machine. He slumped onto his couch, his middle-aged paunch stretching out the flannelette lines.

Hang it, he thought. He leapt up from the couch and began to rifle through desk draws and cupboards for a cigarette. He found an old crumpled packet of tobacco in the small hollow beside his microwave. The tobacco was dry and stale but would do. He rolled a cigarette with his fingers and patiently he pressed its tip onto the electric stove top until it combusted.

Out on his balcony again, he smoked. And he wondered, as the controversy swirled around him, if there should have been something different to the easy gloom of the Autumn afternoon? Something more urgent, perhaps, to the twittering of birds anticipating the twilight. Something more consequential to the clouds above and the blue-brown fuzz of the city skyline.

No, there was no such weight. Controversy existed elsewhere, in some other cerebral dimension. The world, its earth, air and water, knew nothing of it.