Gazonto is a frantic, homemade bouillabaisse stewed from the horrors of daily headlines in an overheated digital canteen. It’s also my latest video, imagining what Israel’s ongoing bombing of Gaza would look like if it were taking place in Toronto.
Gazonto is made from scraps of social media junk culture: Google maps of Parkdale, Rosedale, Willowdale online photos of Bluffers Park Beach, Scarborough Injury Rehab Centre, Caplansky’s Deli. It’s cellphone witnessing, as people record the pancaking of their own homes and families and places of worship. Bomb cams. Bono. Red dots.
Can this crude animated collage make us imagine an iota of the terror of being trapped in a walled city with nowhere to hide, where no square inch is safe when the bombs start falling?
Making Gazonto, I was shocked at how effortlessly Gaza maps onto Toronto: from the Credit to the Rouge, from Eglinton down to the water, we share a similar amount of shoreline, a similar population density, similar humidity. We swim, jog, laugh, love, go to school and work, sit in cafés and watch the same World Cup matches. The difference, of course, is that there are bombs in the sky over Gaza.
The idea began with a report about online video games launched within weeks of the assault on Gaza: Whack The Hamas, Iron Dome Missile Defense, Bomb Gaza. On what planet can coders coolly exploit the entertainment potential of the killing of innocent civilians in real time?
It continued with the Israel Defence Force’s purposeful release to the Washington Post of a video of a “knock on the roof’ warning telling Gazans, in Hebrew, to evacuate within minutes before the bombs begin falling. On what planet does an army boast about such terror tactics, thinking they present its humanitarian face?
It continued with Stephen Harper’s release of his “Through Fire And Water” ad extolling his unswerving, unconditional support for Israel even while the rest of the world condemned the bombing of the UN’s Jabalia Elementary Girls School. On what planet does a world leader ignore the bombing of a schoolyard?
The answer, of course, is this planet, where video war games generate more profits than any other entertainment genre, where U.S. cops kill a black man every 36 hours, where nine-year-old girls accidently shoot their instructors during Uzi training sessions, where Israelis congregate on hills above Gaza at sunset, sipping cocktails as they watch and cheer the bombs.
This planet, this country, this city: how do you bring the war home to Toronto, especially in a country that anaesthetizes itself against empathy with smug platitudes and hypocritical gestures, a place where not a single party leader speaks out meaningfully against this?
On July 30, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, the Gaza doctor who lost three daughters in the 2009 attack on Gaza, proposed that Canada airlift 100 badly injured children here for urgent medical treatment since Gaza’s hospitals had become repeated IDF targets.
Ontario’s minister of health said yes, SickKids said yes, but Harper and his foreign affairs minister, John Baird, refused, claiming it was too “risky.” Instead they proposed that Canadian doctors should go to Gaza to treat the wounded. Okay.
On August 6, London, Ontario, emergency room doctor Tarek Loubani tried to do just that – and was promptly arrested, jailed and deported by the Israeli authorities for his efforts. The Canadian government’s response? They told Loubani they can’t “assist in facilitating the entry of Canadians into the Gaza strip.” Through fire and water, they didn’t blush.3
John Greyson was arrested in 2013 on his way to Gaza and held in an Egyptian prison for seven weeks.
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