In 2008, Suzanne Collins published the first book in The Hunger Games trilogy. The idea had come to her one night as she flipped through channels between reality TV, the likes of Survivor, and news channels airing the Iraq war. The images began to meld together, and the dissonance between real-life war and reality TV competitions shaped the dystopian fiction of our time.
A student of classics, Collins drew on the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, where Myros, King of Crete at war with Athens, punishes the city by forcing it to send seven youths and maidens to be thrown into a labyrinth, to be devoured by a monster. Similarly, the Roman Gladiator games which force people to fight to the death as a form of popular entertainment also came to shape the premise of The Hunger Games.
In Collins’ creation, the annual Hunger Games plants twenty four tributes from twelve districts in an arena to fight to the death. It is punishment for a historic rebellion that had wiped District 13 off the map, and then became a ritual of Pamen’s governance as a means of quashing dissent across the districts.
If the US-Israel axis is ‘capitol’, then Gaza is its most subjugated district, that is until it became the arena. On October 7, 2023 in the face of total siege, Palestinians of Gaza dared to rise and rebel. Israel’s outrage shaped the world we have lived in since. A world that turned the besieged strip into a site of death and destruction and the rest of us into its spectators.
In The Hunger Games, aid drones or silver parachutes carrying life-saving food and medicine were sponsorship gifts to tributes. In Mockingjay, the final title in the Hunger Games trilogy, these parachutes were subverted as traps and weapons to kill tributes. It was these parachutes that killed the protagonist Katniss Everdeen’s sister, when as a medic, she rushed to injured children. In Gaza, when aid was allowed to trickle in, parachutes of food fell haphazardly on desperate and hungry souls, the black tarp suffocating the body beneath it killing at least a dozen people on one day. Adding insult to injury, the contents were not healing salves, but measly packaged non-essentials.
For almost two decades, the withholding of food and essential items was systemic to Israel’s blockade of Gaza. The number of trucks bringing food and essential items in was already deliberately lacking, maintaining food insecurity for 40% of Gaza’s households.
Starvation is key to human punishment, hence the ‘Hunger’ in The Hunger Games. As in Gaza, bread is in constant pursuit. Collins named the whole world she created ‘Panem’ from the Latin ‘Pan’ for bread. Peeta (reminiscent of ‘Pita bread’) Mellark, the son of a baker, was bound to Katniss based on an instance where he threw her a loaf of bread when she needed it the most. The Israeli Occupation Forces targeted bakeries in Gaza the way it did hospitals, for the same reason, to slowly ethnically cleanse. Even in the early months of the genocide, Gazans had such little access to bread that they were forced to make it from bird and horse feed. Today, there are only sacks of flour sold for exorbitant prices that the starving kill for.
Each year, the Hunger Games arena is designed with a theme; once a forest, another time an Island, each setting bringing out its own demons like poisonous insects or tidal waves, as well as loopholes for survival like tall trees to hide in or water to cool burns. But a carpet bombed strip with little to no access to farmland or where the sea is too dangerous to cross, delivers even less options for survival, eliminating plotholes for a happy-ish ending that writers inject in dystopian worldmaking. After almost two years of daily massacres— each day getting increasingly desperate leaves starving survivors wishing for death.
The murderous fever of Israeli society blows Collins’ imagination for the capitol’s wickedness out of the water. On their down-time, Israeli forces hold barbecues as close as possible to the Gaza border to taunt starving Palestinians with the smell of food. Israeli civilians loot and raid aid from the trucks, they surround them attacking the vehicles to ensure the most starving die sooner than later.
The flour massacre in March 2024 was only the first time that the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) placed food items to lure desperate fathers, mothers, and children in, only to then blow them up. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is built on that model. A private contractor and security firm employed by the United States and backed by Israel keeps food in the south far from where Gazans are sheltering to drive the population out of north Gaza. Worse than displacement, they are met with death. It is described as a killing field, a death trap, something out of Squid Games. Each day around 30-100 aid seekers are killed.
In the prequel, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes we meet Dr. Gaul who, as a professor of military theory at the university, also headed the Capitol’s experimental weapons division concocting traps and breeding mutations. Similarly, Gaza is a testing ground for the world's most sinister creations. The fog in the Hunger Games that painfully corrodes muscle seems to depict White Phosphorus, which has resulted in burns down to the bone in Gazan patients. This is in addition to Bunker bombs and Hellfire missiles advanced-engineered to penetrate before exploding, shredding skin and bone making dead bodies unidentifiable to their loved ones who gather pieces of them in the rubble.
‘Jabberjays’ were initially bred as surveillance birds that eavesdrop on rebels in the districts. In Catching Fire, The Hunger Games sequel, Jabberjays were used to mock and torment Katniss by playing sounds of her sister Prim in distress. This is yet another practice of the Israeli forces also used in the West Bank; to unleash the sounds of crying babies and screaming women at night, not only to torment Palestinians, but to lure them out where they could kill them.
Israel’s surveillance technology shapes the contours of a universal tech-military-industrial-complex. Far beyond mobile tracking or cell tower triangulation, Israel’s “Lavender” is an AI killing machine that supposedly automates targets based on a dataset of evidence but it is wholly racist and ultimately guided by the intent to ethnically cleanse. Another tool that the Israeli forces named “Where’s Daddy?” purports to determine when a target is in a particular location so they can be attacked there. The gamification of Israel’s military surveillance of Gaza is ultimately based on the logic of dehumanization.
It is this dehumanization, beginning with the perpetrator, that seeps out to the spectator and festers as desensitization.
In writing The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins was not only interested in the concept of suffering as spectacle, she was dissecting the role of the viewer and the act of viewing as an extended part of the arena. What does spectacle make of a witness?
In a rare interview she said: “We see so many images coming at us on TV over the internet, you know, on your Blackberry, whatever. You see so many images that they all begin to have a sameness to them. Are you really distinguishing the different things you see on different channels if you're flipping through quickly?”
From the start, mainstream media quickly spewed Israeli propaganda, and the chasm between what citizen journalists were reporting on their phones and what news channels were broadcasting was so jarring that the media is recognized as a key player in the genocide. Inside the arena, Palestinians filmed footage in an attempt to save themselves on a world stage fundamentally rigged against them. A global audience became dutiful about following social media accounts from the ground, calling it “bearing witness”. We vowed to keep our eyes on Gaza and to use social media to amplify their accounts.
In the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, for the 10th Hunger Games, we see the capitol’s production behind the Hunger Games, and how desperately they needed an audience. Students were assigned to mentor the tributes and new features were added to the games to engage spectators such as tribute interviews and sponsorship gifts. Spontaneously, the tribute from District 12, Lucy Baird, showcased her singing voice. Her mentor, a young Coreilenus Snow (the future president and villain of The Hunger Games), sees her talent as a way to appeal to the public. This gives the games a whole new dimension, as sponsors play a direct role in the fate of tributes in the arena.
Otherwise cut off from access to the outside world, Palestinians also turned to the only tool that could change their fate: the frequency between their lens and our screen; their suffering and our compassion. At first they asked us to speak out, to protest, to make demands of representatives, to amplify and raise awareness, then as Israel wrung its fists around their neck: they turned to crowdfunding campaigns for evacuation, then shelter and medicine, and finally, desperately for food and water. Their ability to gain followers and get followers to care through the content they share could be the difference between life and death. In an attempt to survive, and document their survival, they bore their souls. They broadcast weddings and first baby baths. They published diary entries, filmed a day in the life, screamed for us to listen, lay alone under covers and wept into a blue lit screen.
A genre of food content took shape: Subsistence cuisine, or how to find and make food under the man-made famine. One account would mimic the trend of adding a voice-over to a pleasant culinary scene by setting a table on the rubble of their home, another would adapt recipes for mass production, cooking with extra-large pots to make lentils and rice for thousands of kids. A child would make precious desserts while sharing an update about her family. Others who volunteered or worked with NGOs prepared packages and distributed them across the camps. We commended their resilience only to remember they had no choice- but what do we know of living a life of no choice?
They plead. We play God. We debated whether to help a family evacuate or facilitate a meal for those staying, whether to give a large sum to one campaign, or small sums to several. Much of the time we would scroll past, some unable, others unwilling, to spare more.
We have fallen into a trap of watching on without urgency. Scenes of human suffering have become daily routine and Gaza had to adapt to our attitude. Another trend to catch our waning attention developed. They would add 5 second clips from viral RSM videos online such as an innovative toy or kitchen utensil to their videos that suddenly breaks to a face gray from war quickly speaking in broken English, saying: ‘Don’t scroll. Don’t skip. It's a matter of my life and death’. They ask us to press all the buttons on the Instagram toolbox to keep them from getting shadow-banned on their only lifeline, one that wishes to silence them.
The expression ‘May the odds be ever in your favor’ is the Capitol’s tagline, almost a greeting they say to tributes before the reaping. The expression was coined by Dr. Gaul who personally stacked the odds against them. Collins’ preoccupation with the Hunger Games as concept was not simply for the cruelty of an authoritarian regime, or the heroism of a life pushed to the brink, but apathy, or the dialectic of desensitization and dehumanization as society is exposed to the institutionalized and systematic extermination of an ‘other’.
This is the age of military-tech industrial complex and for the first time in history, you can watch a genocide being livestreamed on a hand-held screen, and the screen itself, is part of the killing machine. While it has encaged the victim inside the screen, it also encages the watcher behind the screen. We are jumping through algorithm hoops. We feel helpless and siloed as we have lost the ability to effectively organize and mobilize. Those in power have conditioned societies towards an individualism and consumerism that restricts out ability to act collectively in resistance. Social media gets praised by the mainstream for its ability to lead to movements, but in truth, as we see clear as day, technology is a counter-force to resistance. Social media activism is not just insufficient, ridden with the bystander effect and compassion fatigue, it is part and parcel of the war.
An Israeli official recently boasted that they have effectively normalized the genocide because with each massacre we, the public, have become more desensitized. This is part of the production. While the war takes place inside the arena, the product of that war, its footage, is a psychological war waged against us, forcing us into passivity and submission. This submission is the basis of a terrifying future.
For someone who wrote a trilogy on hunger and war, Collins is shamefully silent, as are the actors (save one or two) who performed as characters in the movies. But even if she is not pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist, there is no other way for Collins to write this story but to have resistors be protagonists and oppressors be antagonists. This is an undeniable truth of all stories. We see this with the new Superman; despite sure efforts, he could not but be likened to a pro-Palestinian.
The book Sunrise on the Reaping, a second Hunger Games prequel, has come out and it apparently sends the message that resistance is a long road that eventually bears fruit. It hones in on the story of Haymitch Abernathy which mirrors the story of Katniss Everdeen, but whereas her attempts succeeded, twenty-five years before her, his attempts failed. I continue to grasp onto hope, whether from the large screen or the phone screen. But as things on the ground get steadily worse, I see more clearly that it is time to step out from behind the screen. The arena is at your doorstep, and the lines between capitol and district are as fluid as the line between complicity and rebellion.
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