“you can fold yourself up/into halves/quarters/or more/and still/you won’t be small enough/for the ones who feel/entitled to your space/so fuck it/unfold” Parm Kaur

I was reminded this morning of that famous photograph of Lee Miller taking a bath in Adolf Hitler’s bathtub. At the end of the second world war, Miller and fellow photographer David Scherman wandered through the dictator’s abandoned apartment, and he captured this photo of her taking a bath. It stands as a powerful marker of a rare moment of triumph of human bravery over pure evil. In 1945, Miller’s employers at VOGUE published a collection of her pictures from the worst of the war and the Holocaust. The collection was titled bluntly Believe It. Viewed alongside the bathtub image, Believe It is a grim catalogue of the evil that necessitated a years-long global conflict.

Most of us believe it, right? I mean, those of us with even half a heart and brain know that the Holocaust happened and it was evil. That’s never been in serious question in any of the left-leaning social justice spaces I occupy. Those are the spaces from which the loudest, most unceasing defenses of Palestine have always emerged. Those calls have never been based in a rejection of history and hurt. Now, as we find ourselves in the seventh month of this brutal war between Israel and Hamas, any voice that speaks up about the injustice of what has been visited upon Palestinian people – for generations, for literal lifetimes – is accused of antisemitism.

I am not blind to what Jewish people have endured, and continue to endure. I am also not blind to how our visceral knowledge of their pain has been weaponised, time and time again, to justify all the pain Palestinians have been put through.

I was reminded of Lee Miller because there’s a new biopic about her work during the war due to be released this year. There’s also an upcoming TV series based on the novel THE TATTOIST OF AUSCHWITZ. The biopic and the series join pages upon pages upon reels upon reels of documentation and art processing, witnessing, trying to understand, reminding us about the Holocaust. This is a pain that exists without question and dispassion within mainstream media. It is not the only pain that exists in the history of the world. Somehow, though, the pain of other peoples, often brown and black, seems up for debate. As I write this, in this country, on this continent, there are prominent white politicians who feel comfortable and safe enough to talk about the benefits of colonialism. In my daily life, I occasionally encounter an older white person who will tell me, without a hint of humour, that they are from Rhodesia, the bloody, racist regime of settler rule that was overthrown in the war of independence waged in the country of my birth.

Early in this current chapter in the Israel-Hamas conflict, an Israeli friend posted awful videos of Israelis being gunned down by Hamas forces. She explained that she was trying to illustrate that “they hate us”. She has never needed to explain it before. But now, she emphasised the pain and fear, in order to prepare for what was coming – the show of force from Israel. Back in October, I flinched but kept scrolling. Now, I wonder: when has Jewish pain ever been questioned by people who are actually, seriously committed to social change and justice? In open, good faith discussion, when has the cost of anti-Semitism been up for discussion?

Why, then, does it always seem acceptable to question the pain of Palestine? Does this faux ambivalence make it easier to act as if Palestinian disenfranchisement and death are acceptable sacrifices to ensure a single Jewish state as insurance against violent anti-Semitism? It seems obvious, to many, that we are absolutely at the place where the brutal machinery of the Israeli state is resembling the scenes the Lee Miller captured during the second world war. It is obvious, to many, that a world where this can happen, after all the reminders, after we have stated ‘Never Again’, is an unsafe one for all of us.

In the end, the people who live with the fear and the pain are the ones who never forget, even as they are shot to death by Hamas fighters, or bombarded by the Israeli Defence Forces. Those of us, from far away, who think suffering in any form, visited upon any body, is ever justifiable or acceptable as mere political cost, are the ones who need to be reminded.