The emotional intensity of these videos was overwhelming. The clips never told me anything about these Gazans. They only plunged me for a few excruciating seconds into what was surely the most awful moment of these human beings' lives.
When people put up posters with the faces of Israeli grandparents and babies kidnapped to Gaza, that was a plea for recognition; when others tore them down, that was a denial of that recognition.
The year since Hamas's brutal massacre and the carnage wrought by Israel's response has reduced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its most elemental feature: a demand for recognition.
The horrid debates about whether rape occurred on October 7 were an argument over recognition. There were pleas to be seen and then the purposeful, often malicious refusals to see.
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