What Gaza really needs from you this Christmas

‘Hello, I am Rudy again…’ she says ‘I don’t forgive anybody who see this video without sharing it …’ Rudy is probably 4 or 5. She has dark hair and long eyelashes and she speaks in broken English. Her face isn’t familiar to me, but her script is. Hers is one of the thousands of Instagram videos I have seen of Gazans, pleading for their lives. She, like all the people who post day in, day out, ask me to at least watch the video to the end and to press the 4 buttons. By this she means, ‘like, share, comment and save to collection.’ I now know that if I watch the video all the way through, if I watch it 3 times and if I leave a comment of 9 words or more, I can help this video to appear in other people’s feeds, so it gets the attention it needs. So she can get people to donate to her fundraiser. 

There are of course variations to the script. Sometimes a Gazan will tell us ‘If you ignore me, you kill me.’ If it’s an adult often they will appear with their child, pleading on their children’s behalf. Sometimes it’s a group of children, begging us to donate to their family, phrased to the effect of ‘Please help me and my family of 5/family of 4/ family of 9’ and so on and so forth. As if they know that we might be more willing to help them if their family is big enough. 

Quite often when I see these videos I have no idea what to say in the comment section. Sometimes I go for a rather watery ‘I hope you get out of Gaza soon, sending you lots of love.’ It’s not much, but it means I am doing what the algorithm demands of me to make this girl’s life and all the other lives that appear in my feed, matter. How odd that we call it a feed. It feels grotesque somehow to think that Palestinians are feeding anyone or anything when they are either on the brink of, or experiencing, full-blown famine. 

But I am often as mechanistic and calculating as the algorithm. Watching and sharing these videos has become a daily chore for me that I complete in the same perfunctory way as washing my face or brushing my teeth. I feel bad about this: how hard it is to connect with the videos. But I wonder if that sense of performing a function reflects what the Gazans have been reduced to. The robotic tone, the repeated asks, as if they don’t believe that anyone is listening and the fight has all but gone. They know they have to perform for us, to bend to our voyeurism, to compete not just with the algorithms but people’s ever-waning attention spans. They are the poster children for capitalism. 

And because I am born of capitalism, I often ignore their follow requests. Because I sense myself as a resource, as a repository of cash, that cannot fulfill their needs. It is not that I don’t want to donate, but realistically - I tell myself - I can’t donate to them all. It feels cruel even to message back and excuse myself like a normal human should - it sounds and feels hollow. What do I mean by can’t? If I was more frugal in my day to day life, if I spent less on food, if I was less wasteful, if we gave up our car, if we had a smaller house, I could give so much more than I do. But I am dependent on this lifestyle fuelled by capitalism and the creature comforts it affords me. 

And then this rabbit hole that I disappear down, is the hole that is created for me and everyone else by our society. It tells me that I exist as a transaction and that my individual actions and mine alone will help bring the world out of crisis. That there is no state responsibility, that it all comes down to the individual and where they wish to dedicate their time, their money, their attention.

George Monbiot once said that we cannot buy our way out of the climate crisis. And he was right. But we also cannot buy or individualise ourselves out of the genocide. Ultimately, we can only save a couple of lives and alleviate a tiny bit of suffering with our individual bank accounts. What we really need is for governments to end this genocide and to end it now. By that I do not mean that we shouldn’t give or we shouldn’t care - we can and we must. But we have to do it while pushing for a better world, one in which a person’s life is not dependent on an individual’s ability to stump up the cash. 

We have to demand a world where crowdfunders and charity donations are redundant. Where people don’t get to define themselves by their philanthropy, because altruism is expected, it is baked into the very structure of how we function and who we are. 

That’s why the biggest act of giving this Christmas is using your pen, your keyboard, your voice and your body to demand an end to this horror.