Like Schrodinger’s famous cat, I am trapped in a box. I have been stuck in this box since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war on my homeland, Gaza.
So many people know I am inside it, but none can tell if I am alive or dead.
Everything in life seems to follow a certain binary system, from electrons, which spin in one direction or the other, to human beings, which can be either alive or dead. Still, this does not seem to apply to me, because whether I’m living or dead at any given moment is unknown. I am no longer part of this binary of life and being, it seems. So, what am I?
What makes physics interesting is that the process of solving most of its problems starts with the word “imagine”. So let’s imagine our own version of Schrodinger’s thought experiment. Let’s imagine everyone on Earth has been put inside a box, but our box has paths that lead to one of two labelled outputs -“life” and “death”.
For those of us in Gaza, the paths to “life” have repeatedly been blocked since the Israeli occupation began in 1967. We have all been pushed into paths that would lead to a single outcome: death. Israel has famished us, limited our access to water, shot at us, bombed us, prevented us from accessing healthcare It has pushed us onto the paths of death in every way it can.
In this box in Gaza, any path I take would eventually lead to my death. Like Schrodinger’s cat, I am locked in a box that will eventually kill me.
Luckily, I am not dead.
Yet.
But am I alive? I am writing this, surely, but I cannot leave the box. The only outcome available to me is death. So I’m afraid I cannot say that I am alive either.
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