Opinion In Good Faith: Why the image of a donkey in Gaza broke me
A donkey-drawn cart creaked forward under the weight of a fleeing family: Three children clinging to their parents, bags of belongings teetering at the back, and the donkey pulling on, battered and thin.
People walk along a tent camp for displaced as the sun sets in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip. (AP Photo) From childhood, I carry a memory both tender and vivid of the gentle clip-clop of tongas outside railway stations, their worn wooden wheels turning patiently, drawn by horses whose names we never knew. We would climb aboard as a family, and those slow rides offered a sense of rhythm, simplicity, and wonder.
Recently, that memory came rushing back to me as I saw a photograph from Gaza. A donkey-drawn cart creaked forward under the weight of a fleeing family: Three children clinging to their parents, bags of belongings teetering in the back, and the donkey pulling on, battered and thin.
That image broke me. Not just for what it shows of human suffering, but for the silent resilience of the donkey, an animal often mocked and neglected, yet carrying the unbearable burdens of war and its aftermath.
And then, another image came to mind of Joseph and Mary fleeing on a donkey into Egypt with the infant Christ. There is an old carol that speaks gently to a tired animal, ‘Little donkey, little donkey’, urging it onward along a cold and difficult road, promising rest at the end of the journey.
In Gaza, there is no such promise. There is no Christmas or the joy of singing for a new year. The good donkey moves not toward Bethlehem but through rubble and smoke.
The donkey does not speak, does not choose, does not understand the abstractions in whose name wars are waged. Yet in its mute endurance, it exposes the obscenity of a politics that blesses destruction while speaking the language of security and destiny.
Anonymous and indispensable, the donkey becomes the last symbol of unconditional care and the innocent voiceless victims in a place where modern systems have collapsed, a silent labourer of war for whom there is no manger waiting at the end.
The donkey’s laborious journey through devastation serves as a scathing indictment of our technological hubris and the vacuous rhetoric of international intervention. This image would not be out of place in the works of Franz Kafka or Samuel Beckett, where the fragmentation of reason reveals the mute yet resilient persistence of the powerless as the sole bastion of hope. The contrast between the donkey’s steadfast companionship and the abandonment of humanity by the machines of war lays bare the bankruptcy of our claims to civilisation.
In Gaza, the donkey indeed emerges as a silent comrade in the struggle for survival. What devastates me most is the helplessness of it all.
The image of children sitting in the cart, innocent and wide-eyed, on their way to nowhere. The father walking alongside, powerless to protect them. The donkey limping on, trying to do what it was never asked to do.
And yet, the cart still carries a strange cosiness. The children huddle together, as if pretending this were just a journey to a picnic, not exile.
The donkey walks, tired but unyielding, as if it, too, is hoping for a warm stable to welcome him on the other side of misery.
In this cold, calculated, and unfeeling world, it is the cart in Gaza that underscores what dignity looks like in ruins, in movement, in endurance.
In an age obsessed with speed, where gleaming machines like Maseratis, Porsches, Ferraris and drones are celebrated as emblems of success and desire, the donkey cart appears almost incongruous.
Though a relic in a world that worships acceleration, the cart resists the tyranny of haste, moving not with urgency, but symbolically suggesting the “politics of slowness”.
I see a quiet, almost unbearable dignity in the image of the donkey. In a time when human conscience lies buried beneath propaganda and spectacle, it is this humble companion that bears the weight of their survival and the cold, calculated silence of a world that refuses to care.
The writer is former Professor of Cultural and Literary Theory and UGC Professor Emeritus at Panjab University, Chandigarh
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