Like Schrödinger’s famous cat, I am locked in a box. I have been stuck in this box since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war against my homeland, Gaza.
Many people know I’m inside, but no one can tell if I’m 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, who can be alive or dead. Yet this doesn’t seem to apply to me, because it’s unclear whether I’m alive or dead at any given time. I’m no longer part of this binary of life and being, it seems. So what am I?
The Gaza Box
What makes physics interesting is that the process of solving most of its problems begins with the word “imagine.” So let’s imagine our own version of Schrödinger’s thought experiment. Let’s imagine that everyone on Earth has been placed in a box, but our box has paths that lead to one of two exits labeled: “life” and “death.”
For those of us in Gaza, the paths to “life” have been repeatedly blocked since the Israeli occupation began in 1967. We have all been pushed onto paths that would lead to only one outcome. : death. Israel starved us, limited our access to water, shot at us, bombed us, prevented us from accessing health care. He pushed us onto the paths of death by every means possible.
In this box in Gaza, any path I took would eventually lead to my death. Like Schrödinger’s cat, I am locked in a box that will eventually kill me.
Fortunately, I didn’t die.
Again.
But am I alive? I’m writing this, surely, but I can’t leave the box. The only way out for me is death. So I’m afraid I won’t be able to say that I’m alive either.
Apparently, my existence is now identified by the superposition of simultaneous states of life and death. I live in a lifeless life, and all possible paths lead to my death.
Time bomb
As part of his thought experiment, Schrödinger locked a cat in a box, with a device that would kill it when a tiny bit of radioactive substance randomly disintegrated and emitted radiation, but it was impossible to tell when . In my situation, Israel placed me in a box with any house I could shelter in, then turned those houses into time bombs that could explode at any moment.
At the end of October 2023, Israel alerted two of our neighbors in Khan Younis that their homes were going to be bombed. One of these houses was right next to ours. So my family decided to flee to my aunt’s house, waiting to see what happened.
Initially, we thought our return would be in a few hours, or a few days at most. But we couldn’t come back for months.
On December 5, 2023, we had to flee again when Israel bombed my aunt’s house. In search of relative safety, we moved south to Rafah.
When Israel advanced on Rafah in early May 2024, my family and I had no choice but to return to our neighborhood. Perhaps out of respect for the chaos, the two houses initially threatened by the Israelis remained almost intact, but the rest of my neighborhood was rubble. Our house was heavily damaged, but it is still standing.
We were back to square one – our neighbor’s house remains under threat – Israel can bomb it at any time, without further warning, as it had already issued its warning last year. But this time, my aunt’s house was not an option: Israeli destruction, apparently arbitrary and random, had razed it.
Although we were forced to flee our home several times between July 1 and August 31, following orders from the Israeli army, we always returned home.
This means we must remain vigilant 24/7, but we have no better option.
What compounds our torment while living in our half-destroyed house, waiting for the next “evacuation order”, is that the only toilet left standing is at the closest point to our neighbor’s house, the time bomb that Israel is waiting to explode. In our Gaza box today, avoiding going to the toilet is biologically dangerous; its use is particularly dangerous.
I learned from a few friends that we are not alone in living with anxiety because of a threatened but not yet razed house nearby. Many houses that were threatened before Khan Younis’ invasion remain intact, or at least standing until now. Neither their owners nor their close neighbors returned home. We all know that destruction is coming, but we don’t know when.
Perhaps Israel does this on purpose, to keep us in suspense, because it clearly enjoys playing torturous psychological games with us. Schrödinger’s cat was lucky, I doubt he ever understood the arbitrary fate that awaited him.
Balance point
After 14 months of war, the scene in Gaza has become extremely chaotic. However, some paths can be followed even in chaos. Recently I noticed that my movement is similar to that of the Quantum Harmonic Oscillator (QHO). I go up, I go down, I go back and forth, I come back to the balance point. My oscillations can give me a property of life, to the extent that they can lead me straight to death.
I go up and down like an elastic spring every time I carry gallons of water from the ground floor to the roof using the stairs in my house, which are about to collapse after a bulldozer Israeli uprooted all my trees and stuffed them underneath. I do this every other day.
In the QHO, electrons can also take a sort of staircase. This is called the scaling operator and is how electrons move between energy states.
It can be divided into creation and annihilation operators. Imagine you are climbing a ladder and the rungs can propel you upward or break and plunge you to your death. A creation operator propels the electrons to a higher energy state on the orbit scale. An annihilator operator drops them further down.
However, when I imagine myself as an electron, it is not the stairs I climb that are the creation operator – it is the water, because it creates the ability to move from a lower energy state to a higher energy state, to be more intense. thirsty to less thirsty.
In such difficult conditions, annihilation operators are multiple and unpredictable. Every time I go to the market, I take a detour. I do this to avoid the annihilation operators – it’s not easy to wear my worn slippers on the flattened and bumpy main road – not to mention the waves of dust created by the crowds.
However, as I was on my way to the market, an Israeli drone, perhaps the ultimate annihilation operator, suddenly appeared. She targeted a man in the head a few seconds after he passed with his motorcycle.
As with the QHO, the creation and annihilation operators can appear simultaneously. Recently, Israeli helicopters have expanded their area of activity and struck targets east of Khan Younis, where I live. This happened twice while I was busy with my creative operation: carrying water.
Yet I continue to do the same things, take the same paths, hoping to collect the shrapnel of what remains of my life, and move from daily death to daily life.
Again, I know I’m not alone in this. There are two million boxes in Gaza that have the same probabilities, because we are all subject to the same conditions.
Despite everything I’ve said about ladder operators and increasing energy states, none of us can reach the top to open the box.
In Schrödinger’s cat experiment, everyone asked if the cat was alive or dead, but no one actually opened the box to see. If they had, the overlay would have collapsed and the cat would only have died if they didn’t open the box in time.
We are not cats. Please open the box!
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
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