Why ‘tragedy’ is not the right word to describe the deadly strike on the World Central Kitchen convoy
Tragedy, as Iris Murdoch informed us, obscures the nature of real events
: A portrait of Damian Sobol hangs among Polish national flags, flowers and candles at a temporary memorial in front of a train station in Przemysl, Poland. Sobol was among the workers for World Central Kitchen who were killed in Gaza by an Israeli drone strike. Photo by Getty Images
By Robert Zaretsky April 7, 2024
“It’s a tragedy. It’s a serious event that we are responsible for and it shouldn’t have happened and we will make sure that it won’t happen again.”
In these remarks to reporters last Thursday, the Israeli military’s spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, was responding to the IDF’s drone strikes on a World Central Kitchen convoy which resulted in the deaths of seven aid workers. The “tragedy,” in this account, was the series of mistakes made by Israeli officers that led to the death of these seven innocent men and women. Moreover, Hagari implied, this cascade of errors could have been avoided and, indeed, will be avoided from now on.
On Friday, by way of emphasizing this guarantee, an internal army investigation was completed, leading to the dismissal of two officers and reprimands to senior officers of the Southern Command. These actions, according to another spokesperson, Peter Lerner, was evidence of the army’s “humility to acknowledge errors, the courage to make amends, and the resolve to learn from them.”
Yet the continued outcry reveals that the inquiry not only failed to draw the curtain on this tragedy, but that the real tragedy has little to do with the mistakes made last week by Israeli officers. Their actions, which had such appalling consequences, seem to have been the stuff not of malign design, but of bureaucratic incoherence. Even if it had been the former, it would have been criminal, but not tragic. This is because real tragedy has, strictly speaking, nothing to do with real life.
Instead, as the Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch insisted, we have tragedy, by which she meant art, to avert our glance from the unspeakable horrors of life in Israel and Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Murdoch’s death. By the time of her death in 1999, Murdoch had already been undone a few years earlier by Alzheimer’s disease. Her last significant work was not a work of fiction, but instead one of philosophy, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, published in 1992. Though the book is less a sustained argument than a cascade of brilliant insights, the subject of tragedy repeatedly erupts across its more than 500 pages. This is not surprising: Murdoch was not just an avid reader of the ancient Greeks, but, as a relief worker for the newly-born United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, was an astonished witness to the rubble and ruins of postwar Europe. “How irrevocably broken so many lives have been in this war,” she wrote to a friend in 1946. “Nothing, nothing, nothing ahead for these people.”
In her fiction as well as her philosophy, which she taught for several years at Oxford, Murdoch remained preoccupied by the tragic dimension to our lives. She believed that what is truly tragic — the unspeakably awful events, individual and collective, that unfold in the world — is truly incapable of being expressed through art. “We need only to reflect seriously upon really terrible human fates to see that they exceed art, are utterly different from art,” Murdoch observed in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, listing “bereavements such as we all suffer, oppression, starvation, torture, terrorism, the father murdered in front of his child, the innumerable people who at this moment die of hunger in deserts and suffer without hope in prisons.”
Though written more than three decades ago, this passage could have been written yesterday about the terrible fates that have overtaken the lives of men, women, and children in the current conflict. This includes not just the lives led and lost by Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, but also the lives being led and lost by Palestinian civilians ever since. Those who were murdered in front of their children during the massacre by Hamas, and those now suffering without hope in the tunnels under a strip of territory whose cities have been reduced to a desert and where fathers and mothers watch their children die of hunger in conditions imposed by Israel.
The very word “tragedy” is, for this reason, tragically misleading. It is a term, Murdoch suggests, that belongs only to great art. Most of us have a deeply ingrained reflex to look at certain events, like those now unfolding in Gaza, and blurt “It’s a tragedy!” But this obscures, Murdoch worries, the true dimension of such events. Not only does it housebreak an event whose enormity would otherwise break us, it also makes us into simple spectators, thus unmaking any moral responsibility we might have for these events. As Friedrich Nietzsche quipped, we have art lest we perish of life.
This explains Murdoch’s repeated insistence that real life is not tragic — or for that matter, why even, or especially, Auschwitz is not a tragedy. (This is not unlike Hannah Arendt’s claim that the evil that led to Auschwitz was perfectly banal.) Of course, this is also why Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Shakespeare’s King Lear are tragedies. Though the latter play was once thought too unbearable to watch — so much so that Nahum Tate’s adaptation with a happy ending long proved more popular — Murdoch makes a vital point: Shakespeare saves us by killing Lear. Just imagine, she asks, “if Lear is left alive at the end, if we were left with a sense of his consciousness, bearing this terrible knowledge, continuing to be.
Much has been made of the near absence on Israeli media of stories and images of what had been taking place in Gaza. This absence is shocking, but not surprising. It is also not surprising, as Murdoch notes, that even such images, including those in Bear Witness, the documentary film made by the IDF of the Hamas massacre or the one made by Israeli filmmakers on the Supernova festivale, occlude the true horror of what took place at such events. Suffering is nearly impossible to contemplate. Even if it is “something seen on television,” Murdoch warns, “even if we think it is ‘very important,’ we arrange to be hardened enough to forget it fairly promptly.”
In the end, can we imagine Lear still howling, howling, howling as the curtain comes down? Or, in the end, can we imagine that there is no end for those mothers and fathers still howling, howling, howling as they grieve for their child who died in Israel on Oct. 7 or are now dying in Gaza? Perhaps only when we learn “to see things we dost not.”
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