The first editorial of every volume is among the hardest to write. Inevitably, it demands one set the tone for the year to come, establish the subject on which Arthur will write and the tone with which it will write about them.

It is in this sense not unlike a television pilot—attempting to convey all the breadth of probable brilliance while still being all too cobbled together in conceit and execution. Where the two differ is chiefly in the budget afforded to it, and the amount of time allotted to actually putting it together.

I wrote my part of the last editorial in just over two hypercaffeinated hours. You definitely couldn’t make the first episode of House M.D. in that period of time. You couldn’t even make 1/7th of The Evil Dead.

My original intentions with this editorial, slapdash as it was to be, were to pursue a typically Evan-esque line of inquiry, fellating my recent purchase of a $500 record player into some sort of treatise on entropy which would ultimately elicit a cheap pun for the title of a listicle about things that I wanted to do over the rest of this print year.

This editorial is not that, for two reasons.

One: in the midst of mine writing this Liam Payne, former member of the boy band One Direction, died via gravity-inflicted injuries after plummeting from a hotel balcony in Argentina.

Two: because of this, everyone seemingly lost their minds.

People about whose names I have not thought since high school emerged from the proverbial woodwork to eulogize this man on their Instagram stories. Even many of those less sincere in their intentions elected to do so by means of sarcasm-laden posts to music of Payne’s with themes of falling, or else just threw in the towel and overlaid him with that one picture of XXXTentacion.

I’ve written about celebrity death before, in a different time and a different context, though I stand by just about everything I observed then about the zealoutry of celebrity death worship.

It just so happens that—by virtue of his once-stratospheric levels of fame amidst persons of my generation, mostly female and mostly residing on Twitter or Tumblr dot com at a certain point when cable television was still and active cultural force and iTunes sales still mattered—Liam Payne has become perhaps the most significant death of 2024.

I see this to some degree in the reactions of people to the news of Payne’s death. Many people have stressed Payne’s youth, extrapolating along the lines that he “died before his time.”

Payne’s having died at 31 is no doubt a rude wake-up call for many to whom One Direction were a formative cultural touchstone. His sudden absence from the world may well shake the foundations of their once-stable worldview.

Certainly it is a bit weird for me that Payne was only a year older than one of my closest friends, but equally I was a Nirvana fan at age fourteen, so I’m probably at least somewhat braced to expect anyone in star business to flame out.

If anything, what I wasn’t prepared for was the extent to which the sudden and seemingly unanimous singing of Payne’s praises would worm its way under my skin.

As someone who went to high school in an upper-middle class, predominantly white neighborhood, believe me when I say that posts about Payne were inescapable on my Instagram feed for a good fourty-eight hours.

Something about it rubbed me the wrong way, something only exacerbated by the fact that my girlfriend informed me that Payne allegedly pressured his then-girlfriend into an abortion, and was embroiled in a legal battle with her at the time of his death as he refused to heed her requests for him to leave her alone.

Is this the worst thing a male celebrity has ever done to his partner? Probably not, though neither that nor death exonerate Payne of those facts.

And yet, all this week I’ve seen Tweets, posts, and Instagram stories lamenting the loss of this man—this artist—and along with him the end to all the sensitive, vulnerable, commercially-palatable pop-poetry he brought into this world.

Some of these tributes are so heartfelt, so effusive, that you’d be forgiven for thinking the persons posting them actually knew Payne.

Upon reflection I realized what had got me so worked up over a handful of people posting admittedly inane threnodies to a man who I’m fully willing to accept was absolutely figurative in their childhood: in no way was his death exceptional.

Celebrities die every day, and as much as Payne’s death may well have represented the loss of an artefact of childhood innocence to many, in the scope of all of the deaths to which 2024 has borne witness, I can’t help but feel that his must be among the most trivial.

Mere weeks before Payne took a tumble off an Argentine balcony, the world marked the grim anniversary of a year of Israel’s siege of Gaza. Since then, the Palestinian Health Authority reports that the State of Israel has killed 43,257 Palestinians in airstrikes and military operations in the Gaza Strip.

43,257 people. 

Not celebrities. Not widely-beloved buccal-fatless British ex-boy band members. Just people—ordinary, unremarkable, people.

Perhaps this most abrupt of left tonal turns is in excessively poor taste, but then “good taste” seems rather incompatible with the state of things at the moment.

“The proper words” is something that we, as writers, so often seek, yet so often in situations such as these find ourselves coming up short.

For the past year we’ve been so bombarded by images of violence and death wrought by an expressly Genocidal ethnonationalist regime that it has become, if not normal, then at least banal in the way that evil so often and typically is.

The Israeli occupation of the Gaza strip—and the frequent airstrikes which the Israeli military use to maintain it—is not a new phenomenon. I’m not even the first Arthur editor to write an editorial on the matter. 

Having scoured the archive time and again throughout my tenure here, I know firsthand that many before me have expressed similar sentiments; lamented the systemic displacement, incarceration, and execution of Palestinians, the investment of institutions and governments into funding the Israeli government which oppresses them, and the Zionist project which conspires on both the local and cultural scales to legitimate and normalize the continued administration of such atrocities.

I come at this through Liam Payne for two reasons.

Many of those eulogizing the singer are not among those you’d have expected to see lending their voices to the Palestinian cause over the last year; decrying the present Genocide which the State of Israel is orchestrating.

Granted, I’m not a mind reader, and I admit that not posting about the present humanitarian crisis in Gaza or attending vigils and demonstrations in support of an immediate ceasefire do not belie one’s sincere belief in either of those things.

Still, those choosing to eulogize Payne’s death perhaps implicitly speak to their priorities. What makes him more deserving of being remembered? What makes him, specifically, too young to have died?

Certainly these are all things that could have been said of any number of people in Palestine. Many thousands of young, innocent people, with otherwise rich lives ahead of them have been killed in air strikes on schools and hospitals.

If they had made pop music, then would they deserve our sympathy? That question in itself feels so perverse it makes my skin crawl.

To some extent it feels a question of scale. Celebrities dying gives us something to latch onto—a proverbial rock upon which to anchor our worldview.

Payne is someone people know. Not personally, of course, but to them it may well feel like they do. They know his name, his face, the impression he has made on their lives.

More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the year-long military siege, but how many of us know their names?

One can repeat the numbers of the dead, but even those don’t provide any assurance of the scope of the atrocity sinking in. If anything, the numbers feel increasingly hollow as Israel continues to dump munitions into cities in Gaza while the numbers hover around that same mark month after month. The longer the crisis drags, the harder it becomes to establish accurate body counts.

Morbidly, the more explosives and firebombs Israel drops on Gaza, the fewer actual bodies there are for anyone to count.

So many Palestinian children have been killed by the State of Israel that I cannot properly eulogize them, as to simply print their names in full would more than exhaust the pages of this issue of Arthur.

It is impossible, fundamentally, to conceptualize what 15,000 dead children look like. 

Scientists have concluded that the human brain is able to recognize up to 5,000 individual faces; 10,000 in extreme cases. What that means is that even a person with a near-eidetic memory is unable to grasp, on a person-to-person scale, the true extent of the horror being visited upon the people of Gaza.

It is mathematically impossible for us to understand Palestinian casualties as people.

Perhaps that’s what our governments are counting on. As the war drags ever on, and the imagery coming out of it becomes ever more atrocious, I’m hard pressed to deny it’s become easier to look away. 

Even the ways in which we continue to grapple with the conflict feel mired in the modern illness of parasocial celebrity. Despite their actively documenting the genocide of their fellow Palestinians, journalists like Bisan Owda and Motaz Aizaza have been held to ludicrous standards of purity by internet users who have turned them into social media influencers (how I loathe the word) overnight. 

All the while, Americans such as ex-serviceman Aaron Bushnell are lauded for engaging in “extreme acts of protest,” such as self-immolation, and celebrities are made in the West off the back of their support for the Palestinian cause. 

There’s a degree of futility I feel watching all of this unfold. Yes, we are watching the extermination of an entire ethnic group from the screens of our cell phones, but more to the point it feels as though we are only able to engage with an active genocide in the language of the internet; Owda is “problematic,” Aizaza is “a coward,” for leaving the Gaza strip.

We in the West latch on figures like Owda and Aizaza in the terms we can understand: fame and celebrity gossip. We martyr those like Aaron Bushnell without asking whether their efforts would have been better spent elsewhere.

It speaks to a profound narcissism of the capital-”W” Western mindset that we in the American imperial core refuse to understand this humanitarian catastrophe in any way but our own while nonetheless believing that we do so in an exceptionally unique or meaningful way.

There is a part of me deeply and sincerely terrified that now, a year into this genocide, it amounts to most people little more than background noise, or—worse—some sort of perverse entertainment.

This brings me, I think, to my second reason.

Because while Israel continues to hold itself as though it were above international law, and the United States, Canada, the U.K. and countries around the world continue to enable it through either weapons exports or the manufacture of consent, it does not mean there is nothing to be done.

Labour movements have been among the most successful efforts in making material in-roads to the pro-Palestinian cause. Unions have blockaded shipments of arms, shut down ports, and pressured corporations and governments alike to divest hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli banks and companies.

The Israeli genocide of Palestinians is—on the level of policy—massively unpopular, and only more so the longer it continues. Those who continue to zealously push military action and parrot apologia for tens of thousands of people killed are a petty elite, a vocal and powerful minority.

For the past year I’ve been turning over one phrase in my head: “One day, everyone will have been against this.”

I don’t doubt the truth of it, but there’s another, less palatable truth it implies. One day, one way or another, this genocide will be over.

On that day, we will all have to find a way to live with ourselves.

Because the truth is that none of this started on October 7th. None of this started in May of 2021, or July of 2014, June of 2006, or any of the countless times before that. For as long as Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories they have beaten, imprisoned, and killed Palestinians for the crime of living there. The only thing that has changed is that in the interim people began to pay attention.

We, as journalists, bear some degree of responsibility for shaping how people think about and discuss this. Certainly many outlets have chosen the routes of silence, false equivalencies, and towing party lines as their particular approach, but as someone who styles themselves as a principled radical I doubt I could live with myself if I followed in those steps.

Journalism can confer meaning, importance, and legitimacy. It is our onus, if we are to ever call ourselves good people, to use that power wisely.

I’d rather speak to something meaningful than another dead white guy.

While no amount of guilt or self-flagellation will exonerate us in the West now, the least we can do is turn that despair into something productive. There are ways to effect change for those with the will and the wherewithal to do so.

Until such times as the Gaza strip is not being used as a firing range, and the West Bank is not an open-air prison, I believe it my duty to remind you of such.

I know these words will fall short, though I hope that in spite of that my intent will stand in for something.

We are none of us free until we are all of us free.

Solidarity forever; free Palestine.