How would I tell students about Gaza? The same as every genocide

The Herald Scotland

4 days ago

As many of you know, before becoming a journalist I spent more than ten happy and successful years teaching English.
In Scotland, that means having near total freedom to build a curriculum for your students and, influenced by those who taught me, I have always believed in presenting challenging literature and new writers that students might not have encountered before.
One such author was Chinua Achebe, who is best known for his seminal novel Things Fall Apart, which remains the most widely translated and studied novel to have come out of Africa.
But Achebe wasn't just a novelist. During the Biafra war – a brutal and too-often forgotten conflict in which more than one million people were starved to death in a besieged and blockaded territory – he wrote poetry that was subsequently published as a collection entitled Beware, Soul Brother. Although many of his poems are extremely powerful, there is one that stands out more than others: Refugee Mother and Child.
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The text offers a vivid and brutal snapshot of the plight of the Biafran people, distilling their suffering into the experiences of a young mother caring for a starving child 'she soon will have to forget'. Amidst the horror of a refugee camp she holds a 'ghost smile between her teeth' as she tends to the 'rust-coloured hair left on his skull', an act carried out 'like putting flowers on a tiny grave'.
It is, above all, a stunning representation of pure love, dedication and dignity in the face of unspeakable pain.
When teaching this poem I would very often use a photo by Don McCullin to help students fully develop their understanding and responses. Taken in 1968, Starving Twenty Four Year Old Mother with Child, Biafra is one of the most harrowing images ever produced by one of the world's great photographers, and features a young, emaciated woman looking straight into the camera as her starving son tries to feed at her visibly empty breast.
Like Refugee Mother and Child, that photo shines an unflinching light on the best and worst of humanity, showing us both extremes of which we are capable.
And last week, we saw that again in the now infamous photo from Gaza. Once again, a mother holds her starving child with love and dignity; once again, she does so under the shadow of the deliberate starvation of desperate, innocent people; once again, this all happens as the world looks on.
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Horrifying images are clearly the tipping point for public outrage over Gaza
The image of a Gazan mother holding her starving child shocked the world (Image: Anadolu via Getty Images) When I taught about Biafra, students would ask why it was allowed to happen, why the world watched as a deliberate campaign of starvation was waged against a civilian population, why innocent children were left to face the most horrific suffering.
Similar questions came up when I taught about Rwanda, which I often did using former BBC journalist Fergal Keane's utterly astonishing reflective essay, Spiritual Damage. It is a text that always elicited powerful responses from students who, as with Biafra, often knew little or nothing about a genocide in which up to a million people were slaughtered, many of them hacked to death by their neighbours.
Keane writes about the smell of death seeping into his clothes, his skin, and his soul. He confronts the racism that was (and still is) used to excuse 'a final solution of monstrous proportions' as being simply a manifestation of 'ancient tribal hatred' or, even worse, just something that Africans do.
At one point, he explains that his belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil was 'whittled away' in Rwanda, suggesting a slow and painful change that took place massacre by massacre, body by body, machete wound by machete wound.
He also refers to the colonial roots of the violence, the role of German troops who 'tutored Rwandan peasants in the arts of massacre', and the fact that the Americans – who successfully demanded that UN troops were removed from Rwanda once the genocide had begun – had 'bickered over the funding of armoured vehicles' that might have saved lives. The wider implication was never lost: countries like ours didn't just let it happen, they were complicit.
Often our discussions would lead us to talk about Christine Shelley, the US State Department official who admitted that 'acts of genocide had occurred', and then could not or would not answer when asked the obvious follow-up: 'How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?'
Asked if she had been given 'specific guidance' not to use the word genocide 'in isolation', she offered a waffling, technocratic response that even today, more than twenty years on, remains sickening.
Why wouldn't they use the term 'genocide' or even properly consider the possibility? According to a then-secret, and now declassified, memo from the US Dept of Defence, legal officials were worried that doing so would require the government 'to actually 'do something''.
And that, too, is now happening again, as so-called world leaders refuse to call a genocide by its true name, and in doing so make themselves, and their countries, and all of us, even more complicit in the escalating horrors that are unfolding.
One day I might go back to the classroom, and if I do I will still teach about historic injustices, but I will also end up teaching about Gaza. Perhaps I'll use the work of Refaat Alareer or Hiba Abu Nada, both killed by Israeli airstrikes back in 2023.
And it will all happen again. I'll be asked why the world didn't stop it. I'll be asked why presidents and prime ministers justified the horror, and why they refused to use the word genocide. I'll be asked why we left children to be starved to death in their parents' arms.
And the worst part is that the answers will be the same as well.