Who we root for

“TO us, it’s just a toy. To him, it’s the mother he lost.” I read that comment under a viral video and stopped scrolling. Someone had written about Punch, a baby macaque at a zoo in Japan, abandoned by his mother and given a stuffed orangutan by zoo staff to sleep with, to carry, to hold in moments of fear. I am not someone who is easily undone by animal videos. But I have not had my mother for 30 years now, and something about that sentence — the particular grammar of loss it described — caught me somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

I watched the video. Then I watched it again. Then I went looking for updates.

Footage of Punch clutching that toy — his surrogate mother, his safety blanket, his entire world — has been viewed some 15 million times. He received around 2m likes on a single video. He has a handler the internet has named ‘Punch Daddy’. He has adoptive mothers among the other monkeys in his enclosure. He has, in the words of one commenter, “got the whole world hooked on him”.

It is a genuinely moving story. I do not begrudge Punch his viral moment or the humans who find comfort in it. He is a small, frightened creature holding onto the nearest thing that feels like love. The instinct is universal.

But I could not stop thinking about another child holding onto the nearest thing that feels like love. Except that child is not in a zoo in Japan with a devoted handler and adoptive mothers and millions of strangers rooting for him. That child is in Gaza.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, almost 40,000 children in Gaza have lost one or both parents. Approximately 17,000 of them have lost both reports Al Jazeera. Not a stuffed toy. Both parents. The bureau has called it “the largest orphan crisis in modern history”. These children are not integrating into warm enclosures. They are living in torn tents and destroyed homes, in what the bureau describes as a near-total absence of social care and psychological support.

Ten-year-old Arat Awqal promised her father she would be a doctor before he died. Now she spends her days caring for her younger sister. “Whenever we heard the sound of missiles,” she told CBS News last October, “my father would hold us, but now he’s gone, and we are always scared.”

Nobody has named her handler. Nobody is tracking her integration. There is no viral update about whether she is making friends.

I have been trying to understand what the Punch phenomenon tells us about ourselves and I find the answer deeply uncomfortable. We are not, as we like to believe, indifferent to suffering. We are extraordinarily capable of empathy. We will mobilise it, at scale, instantly, for a baby macaque in Japan. The feeling is real. The tears are real. The 2m likes are real.

What we apparently cannot do is sustain that empathy when the suffering belongs to a people we have been, for decades, conditioned to see as a geopolitical problem rather than as human beings. Edward Said wrote about how the Palestinian is never rendered as an individual with a face and a history and a particular grief, but always as a mass, a cause, a complication. A baby monkey gets a name; there’s a nickname for his carer, and daily updates on his emotional progress. A Gaza orphan gets a statistic.

Fourteen-year-old Deena Al-Za’arab lost both her parents. “I wish the war were just a dream I’d wake up from and see my parents next to me,” she told CBS News. “I have to keep it together for the sake of my siblings. Now I must raise them.” She is 14. She is now a ‘parent’. The world did not get 15m views of her story.

I am not making an argument against caring about Punch. I am making an argument about the architecture of our attention — who built it, who benefits from it, and what it costs the people left outside it. The same media ecosystem that gave Punch his global moment has spent years, as I have written before, carefully managing how Palestinians are seen and described and counted. The result is a world in which a monkey’s reunion with a stuffed toy breaks the internet, and the largest orphan crisis in modern history does not.

The whole world is rooting for Punch. He has his plushie, his Punch Daddy, his new friends, his zoo full of visitors, and his future.

What does it say about us that we have seen their faces, learned their names, watched them on our screens holding siblings instead of toys — and still scrolled on? Punch’s story has a happy update. Gaza’s orphans are still waiting for theirs.

The writer is a former journalism instructor.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, March 15th, 2026

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