“Look what’s happening in Gaza!” », a stranger commands you on social network X, over a video that you know is going to be terrible. The impulses are contradictory. Can we ignore this Palestinian father who has just found his child under the rubble? The strangled words of this Israeli mother who is waiting for her two daughters taken hostage? Can we send them with an anxious or nonchalant nudge towards oblivion?
“Looking is all I can do, as if I owe it to the people who are going through this: at least pay attention”, says a reader who takes care to compensate for each testimony, written or video, with one from the other camp. Does “looking barbarity in the face” necessarily mean seeing everything, knowing everything? Children’s beds bathed in blood, living rooms hanging in the void, “how the rave party near Gaza turned into horror” (Lemonde.fr), or if an Israeli baby has “was put to death in an oven” (Liberation.fr) ? To what extent is horror an integral part of the information?
The degree of violence reached by this conflict questions the practices of information professionals, as deciphers it the American magazine The New Yorker on November 28, and challenges even the sensibilities of the most seasoned. “For the first time in my adult life, I can’t watch – or read – the news, Simon Jenkins confessed on November 7an editorialist for the British daily The Guardian yet experienced in war fields. Normally, I would find it shocking not to know what is happening elsewhere in the world. We owe it to common humanity not to ignore inhumanity wherever it occurs. » And yet he admitted: “There has to be a limit. (…) I don’t see how incessant depictions of real-time horror instill any virtue. »
Parasite judgment
Since October 7 and the Hamas attacks, then the Israeli strikes on Gaza, everywhere in the press, psychologists advise to be careful of violent stories and images and trauma “vicariants”, that is to say secondary, that these can induce. Faced with the invasion of social networks in our lives, notifications on our smartphones and “all news” channels, the idea of breaking away from current affairs has taken on a virtue: it would be wise to stay away from it . “Quit the news” has become a classic theme personal development: the information would be toxic, negative, often “fake news”; they parasitize judgment, monopolize our precious time, traumatize us.
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