The Moral Litmus Test of Our Time: Gaza, Ghosts, and the Things I Carry

Cherub-cheeked infants cooing, milkless-mouthed babes of famine silenced by siege. Some things live under the skin—like lullabies, like the sound of drones overhead. Like the tender stillness of babies swaddled safely in cribs, or wrapped in burial shrouds and placed neatly in rows amid the gunsmoke. Coddled in the luxury of plenitude, we are complicit in the violence—of imperialism, of starvation—perhaps, forgetting that it’s geography, not destiny, that determines whether our child sleeps in a crib or a coffin.

How can we justify this? We can’t. I can’t. While some sleep soundly through a livestreamed genocide, I am awake and aware. I rock my baby, watching reels no mother should ever see, thinking about the distance between comfort and conscience—between what we carry and what we choose to set down. I find it difficult to nurture my own babies without thinking of the children being slaughtered in a distant land, of mothers being rendered childless, their wails echoing out from the rubble like ancient songs of mourning—half prayer, half scream. It would be easy to say that this isn’t my pain to carry—but I can’t set it down. I must bear witness to it, if only to hold it up to the light.

There is no question that Gaza is the moral litmus test of our time. It has to be. This is when our collective humanity undergoes a pulse check. As a human, and as a mother, how will I rise—and how will I fail? How can I stand idly by? And how can I change it?

I swallow sorrow and nurse my baby in the morning twilight while watching footage of a father carrying the shattered pieces of his child in a blanket. I lay my baby down and gaze at my husband sleeping soundly beside me, realizing that as the day begins anew, they will make new memories together. The very thought softens the terror tangled in my chest. The sick relief of knowing it’s not happening to us. The soft unboxing of guilt wrapped in privilege.

I wish I could do something—anything—to diminish the suffering. I see photos of Gaza’s emaciated children, bones protruding, skin wasting away. And the limp bodies of young boys, shot dead while clutching bags of flour, trying to bring something home to their families—now, nothing returns. Meanwhile, I kiss my baby’s rosy, plump cheeks and wipe dribbled milk from the corners of her mouth. My son plays beneath a creamy blue sky in our cul-de-sac until I call him inside for dinner. My eldest daughter arrives home safely from school, breathless with gossip and schoolgirl crushes—each detail spilling out with a familiar fervor I too once knew. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed by how much they need me. Motherhood is sometimes lonely, often frustrating, and always tiring. It’s easy to feel like you’re a machine operating on rusted gears. But the solipsistic haze quickly dissipates when I remember that as the children of Gaza become ghosts, mine are fed, safe, and free. My children and the children of Gaza are not so different, save for the circumstances of where they were born. I carry this duality in equal measures of gratitude and grief.

There is a part of me that will always be haunted by the unbridgeable realities that exist between my life and the lives of so many Palestinians who will never know peace. I feel as though I need to ration my joy for them, to restrain my happiness in protest against an indifferent world. Even laughter itself feels like a betrayal of the mothers who grieve.

All children deserve our protection. All people deserve a chance to live free of oppression. Complacency is complicity. I can use my voice, and look for opportunities to turn my anger into action—protesting, donating, and supporting companies and causes that demand a free Palestine. Even so, I know I can’t fix it. But maybe my greatest contribution is in the act of mothering itself. In teaching my children to hold the horrors of the world with clairsentience, to care deeply, and to never normalize injustice, I can make a small bit of difference. Maternal care need not only be soft; it can be both nurturing and radical. It can be revolutionary and catalytic. The lessons I share with them can live in their bones too, leaving behind a residual ache for a more sovereign existence. Perhaps that is how healing begins—one generation refusing to forget.