Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Arwa Damon
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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From Arwa Damon’s perspective, there is a very deliberate campaign underway to move attention away from the war in Gaza. “You inflict so much psychological pain, or you create circumstances where people turn away because apathy starts to grow, or because what they’re looking at is so overwhelming that they feel hopeless in the face of it. That’s a strategy to shift the spotlight and world attention away,” she tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede.
Damon has witnessed the impact of this current conflict up close, having made several trips into the Gaza Strip with her humanitarian organization International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance (INARA) — as she described in her award-winning second interview on The Lede, “On The Ground In Gaza.” Recently, however, she was denied entry by the Israeli government. Many other humanitarian workers and organizations have also been denied entry since early February, which adds up to “collective punishment and humanitarian assistance being used as a weapon of war,” Damon says.
“You need to recognize that you will give up a part of yourself that you probably will not be able to define, and you need to be okay with that.”
For Damon, the focus on the war in Gaza too often comes down to labels, rather than its human impact. “Here you have the world’s largest democracy, the United States, refusing to back down from its support of another country that identifies as a democracy, which is Israel,” she says. “If a country’s going to call itself a democracy, it is hypothetically saying, ‘I am going to uphold democratic principles,’ which include certain moral and legal positions.”
Its continued support of Israel’s devastating Gaza campaign undermines everything the United States has claimed to represent over the past decades, Damon tells Al Yafai. “Aren’t [they] supposed to represent, in theory, what a better world would look like? A world with free speech, a world with freedom of choice, freedom of movement, freedom of opinion?”
For her own part, Damon has learned that she will never be able to fully leave behind what she has seen in the conflicts she has witnessed throughout her career, from Gaza to Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s something she tells people who want to follow her into journalism or humanitarianism. “You need to recognize that you will give up a part of yourself that you probably will not be able to define, and you need to be okay with that,” she says.
Further listening:
The Emotional Fog of War — with Arwa Damon
On the Ground in Gaza — With Arwa Damon