Whose Deaths Are Mourned – and Whose Are Not
Some lives are mourned in detail, while others are absorbed into statistics.
We live in a world where militarism, war and death are regular occurrences. What interests me in writing this piece is not writing about military adventurism per se (which most governments indulge in), nor war itself, but how we understand and comprehend the language used to describe death. Government institutions often describe death in security terms – counterinsurgency, national sovereignty, and above all, the claim that some entities pose a danger to governmentality itself. Much of this language of power is amplified by television and print journalism which reduce death to daily briefings, thereby inventing a terminology that strips emotion and grief from it. A cursory look at some of the places in the current moment will make my position clear. Take, for example, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, and Israel. The geography changes, but the language, the grammar, and the choreography of death do not. Mass media tells us about the accumulation of bodies, but it also teaches us a language that trains us to cope with it. News channels announce the numbers, sometimes show us the faces, and then politely set them aside so that the world can continue with its day-to-day chores. We are told this is what realism looks like.
But realism, it turns out, has a hierarchy.
The question we should be asking, in this cacophony, in the midst of condemnations by powerful world leaders, is this: are all deaths equal? It does not take much effort to see that the answer is a big NO.. Some deaths matter more than others. Some are ushered into the room with ceremony, named, photographed, and mourned. Their grief is made felt, visible; it is allowed to spill, to stain, and to interrupt prime time and our consciousness. Others, meanwhile, are counted, stacked into infographics and statistics. They are wrapped in a vocabulary that makes killing sound like a governmental inconvenience and mourning an unnecessary exercise. These deaths do not interrupt. They do not shock our consciousness.
Israel and Gaza make this obscenity impossible to miss.
Let us say this clearly, because clarity is the first thing power tries to steal. Israeli lives matter. Civilian lives matter, and rightly so; the world responded to those killings as it should have – with grief, mourning, and unequivocal condemnation. The horrors were televised through mainstream media and social media alike, repeated over and over, using the language of care, intimacy and sympathy. We were told in no uncertain terms that these lives were precious and irreplaceable. Which they were.
But then the horrors began to unfold in Gaza.
Not in ones and twos. Not discreetly. The deaths in Gaza were violent, televised 24x7 into our homes. Images of children buried under concrete, of men and women, old and young, of families erased in a single strike. And yet, as the numbers climbed, the language began to normalise. It did not invoke the preciousness and irreplaceability of these lives. The grief evaporated. I must add that Palestinian deaths were acknowledged, but only in the way one acknowledges, say, bad weather. We were told that these deaths were regrettable, unfortunate, yet nonetheless expected. It was, perhaps, for the first time in our living memory that the horrors of a genocide were televised directly into our homes – into our living rooms and kitchens – and the consciousness and moral character of citizens were tested. Much of humanity, including those who for centuries have told us, in no uncertain terms, that human rights matter and have championed them, began to watch these images while sipping coffee, having a nice meal, or even while going to sleep. People scrolled through these images and videos on their mobile phones day in and day out, yet we could not jolt our consciousness and call a spade a spade – that Palestinian lives matter.
We are told that these deaths are collateral damage. But what is collateral damage, and why do governments love this phrase? Precisely because it pretends to be neutral – a bloodless phrase for blood-soaked facts. It suggests accident, inevitability, a tragic side-effect of something nobler happening elsewhere. Collateral damage has no parents, no names, no grammar. It does not cry; it does not interrupt meetings. It is the word power uses when it wants to keep its hands clean while everything burns.
To understand this, let me turn to Gaza-Israel for a minute and see how this works. Israeli deaths are narrated as loss, as precious and grievable, whereas Palestinian deaths are narrated as fallout. Israeli lives are mourned. Palestinian lives are managed. Grammar does the killing quietly. Airstrikes happen. Operations are conducted. Civilians die. No one kills them. Death simply occurs, like a clerical error. And repetition does the rest. Once death becomes familiar, it becomes tolerable. Once it is tolerable, it becomes forgettable. The numbers grow larger, but the space they occupy in our imagination grows smaller. What we are witnessing is not just war, but the slow training of conscience. Judith Butler once wrote that not all lives are considered grievable, that some deaths register as losses while others fail to count as loss at all. Gaza is what that theory looks like when it leaves the page and enters the world. Palestinian lives are not denied outright. That would be crude. They are acknowledged just enough to be dismissed, counted just enough to be closed.
I want to widen this for a moment, because Gaza is not the only place where this hierarchy of death operates. Take Ukraine, for example. The deaths there matter to me. They should matter. But the way Western power has framed those deaths tells us something else as well. We are told, repeatedly and without hesitation, that Ukrainian lives matter. Their deaths are mourned, narrated, and personalised. Russia is vilified, rightly so, for its treatment of Ukrainians, and a clear moral language is mobilised to condemn that violence. One begins to wonder whether it is the death itself that is being valued here, or something else. Why does this moral compass falter when it comes to Israeli brutality in Gaza? Is it because such condemnation is inconvenient, or because it does not fit comfortably within the dominant Western narrative? Is it, perhaps, proximity, familiarity, or even colour that determines which deaths invite outrage and which are absorbed quietly?
Now look at Iran. The deaths during protests under the Iranian regime are rightly condemned and grieved. But the Iranians who died during the war, or under sanctions, or as part of long military confrontations, are reduced to statistics. They are not mourned in the same way. Their deaths do not shock us. Why do these Iranian deaths carry different values? What decides this difference? Who decides it? Does the West, implicitly or explicitly, teach us which deaths matter and which do not, which lives deserve grief and which are to be quietly absorbed?
The violence in Gaza is real violence. It is not only the bombs and the missiles that perpetuate this violence, but also the mass media and the way it uses language and then moves on. We have entered a time when real people, like gamers in a simulation, are ready to shoot, decide, and move on. When deaths are not grieved, they do not demand explanation. When they do not demand explanation, they do not demand justice. They become the acceptable price of someone else’s security.
What is most chilling is how normal this feels now. How calmly we accept that some lives will be mourned in detail, while others will be absorbed into statistics. How easily we learn to feel the correct amount of sorrow. This is not balance. It is discipline. A moral discipline imposed by power, enforced by language, and internalised by us. The question is no longer how many have died. The numbers are obscene enough. The real question is this: whose deaths are allowed to stop the world, and whose are meant to pass quietly, without consequence, like collateral damage.