As long as Palestinians are alive to record and share their suffering, the duty and dilemma of witness will remain. As we look, we must be aware that our outpouring of emotion has its limits, and its own dynamics of power. Grief and anger are appropriate, but we must take care not to veer into solipsism, erasing the primary pain by supplanting it with our own. As the Mojave poet Natalie Diaz has observed, empathy is “seeing or hearing about something that’s happened to someone and . . . imagin[ing] how I would feel if it happened to me. It has nothing to do with them.” Or, put more succinctly by Solmaz Sharif—“Empathy means / laying yourself down / in someone else’s chalk lines / and snapping a photo.”

Rather, we—those outside of Palestine, watching events through a screen—ought to think of ourselves in relation to the legacy of the shaheed. Our work as witnesses is to be marked; we should not leave it unscathed. We must make an effort to stay with what we see, allowing ourselves to be cut. This wound is essential. Into this wound, imagination may pour—not to invade the other’s subjectivity, but to awaken awe at the depth, privacy, and singularity of each life. There, we might glimpse, if sidelong, how much of Gaza’s suffering we will never know. This is where real witness must begin: in mystery.

Perhaps the fundamental work of witness is the act of faith—an ethical and imaginative leap beyond what we can see. It is a sober reverence of, and a commitment to fight for, the always-unknowable other. This commitment does not require constant stoking by grisly, tragic reports. Rather than a feeling, witness is a position. It insists on embodiment, on sacrifice, mourning and resisting what is seen. The world after genocide must not, cannot, be the same. The witness is the one who holds the line of reality, identifying and refusing the lie of normalcy. Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate.

In Kharkiv, the capital of the region, I met with Andriy Kravchenko, a prosecutor who works with Ukraine’s security service, the S.B.U., in identifying and charging suspected collaborators in newly liberated territories. He walked me through the Ukrainian criminal code for Article 111(1), the law governing collaboration, which Zelensky enacted in mid-March. “In general, collaboration is defined as any purposeful act that harms the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our state,” Kravchenko said.

In practice, that can mean many things. The most obvious cases are those in which a person took up arms against Ukrainian forces or was involved in spying or sabotage to aid the Russian war effort. But assessing culpability can get murky at the level of local governance. “We’re looking for people who worked for the benefit of the Russian occupation,” Kravchenko told me. “But does that apply to a welder or carpenter who maintained buildings or equipment for the occupiers? Or people responsible for critical infrastructure?” There wasn’t an easy answer or policy, he said.

A further complication embedded in Ukraine’s law on collaboration is the question of motive. “Was a person moved to act out of personal belief or under the barrel of a gun?” Kravchenko said. “The first would be a crime, the second not.” In Izyum, government workers stopped receiving their Ukrainian salaries in March. Those who agreed to work for the Russian-backed administration often point to the unforgiving financial reality of occupation. “We have so many of these borderline situations, where it is hard for an investigator to prove not merely collaboration but criminal collaboration,” Kravchenko said. “It requires painstaking work.” He told me that it will likely take years for all the trials stemming from months of occupation to make their way through the courts. “But, believe me,” he added, “every case will be looked into. No one should sleep too comfortably.”

Data shared with Rest of World by the community health center of Bahodopi shows that, since 2018, upper respiratory infections have been at the top of the list of diseases in the district — nearly 7,000 cases in total — with health workers claiming that the dust from the industrial complex is the main culprit. There were 928 upper respiratory infection cases in 2021, higher than the 855 cases reported the year before. Health workers told Rest of World that in 2018 and 2019, as IMIP expanded to add more steel factories and coal-fired plants, the construction had led to even more dust. In those two years combined, they counted a total of 5,153 respiratory infections.

…

A few days before leaving Sulawesi, I experienced first-hand some of the consequences of the industrial activity that villagers had spoken about. It started with an intense pain in my left eye, which I initially brushed off. But the pain only grew, and rapidly developed into a severe eye infection. 

Later, in Jakarta, doctors said that the infection was likely caused by the dust and other air pollutants that I had been exposed to in the industrial areas I had visited. The infection was so severe that it damaged my cornea, and I was bedridden for weeks, unable to see. Today, months after our visit, I’m still waiting to fully regain the function of my left eye, which can only be restored by a cornea transplant.