Theory Brief #18: Eyeless Gaze on Gaza

We know the facts about the war on Gaza. But facts alone don't make for actionable truth.

We live in a hyper-factual age, where we know more, with greater speed, about more things than ever before in history.

But this has been offset by the counter-emergence of an opposite movement: post-factuality. Free-floating conspiracies now proliferate on the strength of their social-semiotic, not factual, contents: it doesn’t matter whether Haitian immigrants eat cats in Springfield (they don’t, of course), as Trump claimed in the September 2024 presidential debate; what matters instead is that espousing this claim reinforces a tribe of believers united around a leader. There is a kind of everyday religiousness to post-factuality, where new dogmas spring up and fall away—from Pizzagate to the “stolen election” to Springfield’s cats—even amidst a glut of information.

But the hyper-factual deluge of information has another paradoxical effect: the paralysis of political will.

We might call this the Hamlet effect. In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet knows well what he must do—and yet he’s unable to act, caught instead in volitional stasis. Hamlet points to our late-modern predicament where “enterprises of great pith and moment” nevertheless “lose the name of action” (Act 3, Scene 3)—for though we, like Hamlet, know that we have “cause and will and strength and means” to act, we nevertheless “let all sleep” (Act 4, Scene 4). We are paralyzed, despite objective grounds for action.

To make sense of this, it might be helpful to introduce a distinction between facts and truth.

Facts record what in some sense “really happened,” bracketing for a moment the impossibility of pure, unmediated facts (recall that the word “fact” derives from the Latin fabricere, which means exactly what it sounds like: facts are in some sense “fabrications” or constructions). We can think of facts as attempts—always potentially problematic and contestable, to be sure—to capture instances of happenings in reality.

Truth goes deeper and farther. Truth is that which is actualized out of the virtual, roiling chaos of formless data and is registered or inscribed on the symbolic order. The true makes out of mere factuality the basis for social action.

When climate scientists meticulously amass data about rising temperatures and changing atmospheric conditions, they are accumulating so many facts about climate change; their frustration results from the fact that so little of this work seems to penetrate into the sphere of truth, in which the world might act upon an increasingly unassailable factual record. We have the facts about climate change; what we lack is the next move into the higher-order domain of actualized truth.

The Sightless Seers

In 1936, Aldous Huxley published a novel, Eyeless in Gaza, whose plot has nothing to do with the real-world, geographical Gaza, but whose metaphorical title derives from Milton’s 1671 poem, “Samson Agonistes” (Samson the Champion), in which Samson is described as being “Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves.”

So, who today might be “eyeless in Gaza”?

The historian Yuval Harari, writing in Haaretz, sees the story of Samson as being directly applicable to the plight of Israeli hostages, for Samson is the “tale of a Jewish hero kidnapped to Gaza, where he was held in dark captivity by the Philistines, and severely tortured.” The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, meanwhile, drawing on the same narrative strand, thinks both Israel and Hamas are “blinded by their acts”: “Hamas expected to deliver Palestinians from the Israeli yoke,” which, clearly, it failed to accomplish, while Israeli right-wing policies are tragically “reinforcing anti-Semitism all around the world”—and, paradoxically, as the journalist Amos Harel notes, “endangering Israel’s security,” despite its intentions to the contrary.

But a third option presents itself: perhaps it is we, the world’s onlookers to the war on Gaza, who are eyeless. Though in full possession of our ocular faculties, we have failed to register what is happening there at the level of symbolic inscription and make it part of our “truth,” to be acted upon in bringing about an end to the war.

There is to be sure a great deal of factual recording of events on the Gaza Strip—even though we should consider just how muted the Western media’s response has been to its essential disbarment from the enclave. In February 2024, more than 50 journalists called for “free and unfettered access to Gaza for all foreign media,” addressing both Israel and Egypt. But the media have largely been remarkably silent about their enforced absence. Instead, the media appear content to rely on second-hand information, official Israeli accounts, semi-verifiable first-person accounts, and on-the-ground video recordings harvested from social media.

Maybe, then, it is the Western media that is “eyeless in Gaza,” happily relying on the vision of others. This also allows for a certain degree of disavowal. Since Western media outlets have not themselves been able to verify their second-hand reports, they can engage in a degree of journalistic hand-washing: their very absence permits the continuous sowing of doubt about Palestinian casualty figures, for instance, from the “Hamas Ministry of Health”—a rhetorical game that Dominic de Villepin, the former French foreign minister, resoundingly critiqued on French radio recently.

But if the New York Times, or the London Times, or El País, or Süddeutsche Zeitung, or Le Figaro, or Corriere della Sera, had their own reporters on the ground in Gaza, would the war end more quickly? If CNN set up its cameras in Rafah, could the IDF continue its actions with relative impunity? Israel does seem to depend on its warfare not being seen by and through the Western media’s own gaze. And one consequence of Israel’s bombardment is to make it so unsafe that few Western media organizations can send their reporters to conduct reporting of their own. A cessation in hostilities in Gaza might also mean the beginning of a concerted Western media presence there, with all the dangers to power this entails.

But this is perhaps placing too much faith in facts. Might not the problem instead be a lack of actualized truth rather than facts as such? Information has flowed, thanks to non-Western outlets like Al Jazeera, the UN’s continuous reports, NGOs like Doctors without Borders, and the more than 100 Palestinian journalists killed so far. We know largely what has taken place; the overall factual picture is relatively clear.

From Facts to Truth

The problem lies in transforming mere facts into actionable truth. We don't need more facts about Gaza; rather, we need to recognize and internalize Gaza's truth, embedding it into the West's symbolic order, where it has long been absent. Only when facts are integrated into the symbolic order can they become actionable truths.

While Ukraine rightly received an outpouring of sympathy after Russia's 2022 invasion, leading to some of the largest military and fiscal aid packages in the post-Cold War era, the fate of Gaza’s civilian population has been met with something of a collective shrug by the major Western states. Instead, tens of billions of dollars (and hundreds of millions of euros) worth of financial support and munitions packages have flowed to Israel. While the defense of Ukraine quickly became the West's truth, Gaza remains ignored, even as more than 40,000 Palestinians have died since the terrible October 7th attacks.

This war would end in short order if the UN Security Council decided to send peacekeepers to police and protect the Gaza Strip, or if the U.S. cut aid to Israel. Perhaps it would help, too, if networks like CNN could safely conduct round-the-clock (and non-embedded) broadcasting from the enclave. But even with all eyes on Gaza, we still need mechanisms for turning sight into action.

The facts are clear—the truth, less so.