https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/19/imagine-silent-terrible-evil-committed-gaza-inaction-censorshipImagine if all those who are silent about the terrible evil being committed in Gaza spoke up | Owen JonesIsrael’s genocide was
only on pause: for Palestinians woken on Monday night by a vicious wave
of airstrikes, the resumption was no less shocking. More than 400
people – many of them children – were slaughtered in a matter of hours,
in an assault that reportedly received the “green light” from Donald
Trump. This mayhem was swiftly followed by evacuation orders – that is,
forced displacement – raising the possibility of renewed ground
operations. Israel’s excuse? A confected claim that Hamas hasn’t
observed the terms of January’s so-called ceasefire agreement – the
terms of which Israel itself has broken over and over again.
In
the wake of the attacks, CNN reported that Israel’s onslaught threw
“doubt on the fragile ceasefire”. Orwellian doesn’t even begin to
describe such framing. As it is, there was no “ceasefire”: not if your
definition is firing ceasing. A single Israeli has been reported to have
died in Gaza during the “ceasefire”: a contractor killed by the Israeli
army, who mistook him for a Palestinian. A reported 150
Palestinians have been killed in Gaza during this “ceasefire”, and
dozens others butchered in the West Bank.
Here is an example of
how Israeli violence is endlessly indulged and Palestinian life is
stripped of any meaning. If just one Israeli soldier had been killed by a
Hamas militant, I predict many politicians and media outlets would have
immediately pronounced the ceasefire over. This same narrative is why
we are led to believe that peace prevailed before 7 October, even when
238 Palestinians – 44 of them children – had been killed in the previous
nine months.
Future generations may well ask: “How was a crime
that obscene facilitated for so long?” After all, thanks to mobile
phones and the internet, no crime in history has been so well documented
by its victims as it happened. As they have done for 529 days, Gaza’s
survivors post the evidence of their own extermination on social media,
hoping – in vain – that enough consciences will be pricked to end the
genocidal mayhem. A dead baby in a rainbow jumpsuit; a grieving father
playing with the pigtail of his daughter for the last time; entire
families covered in shrouds, their bloodlines wiped from the civil
registry.
No crime has been so evidenced by experts as it
happened. Last week, a new UN report detailed Israel’s sexual and
reproductive violence: like the killing of pregnant women, the rape of
male detainees with objects ranging from vegetables to broomsticks,
the destruction of an IVF clinic with its 4,000 embryos. Waging war on
Palestinians’ ability to reproduce were termed “genocidal acts”.
There
are limitless examples of other such acts. Report after report has
detailed Israel’s destruction of civilian infrastructure – homes,
hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches; its obliteration of
83% of all plant life, more than 80% of agricultural land, 95% of
cattle; and its ruin of more than 80% of water and sanitation
infrastructure. Israel has deliberately and systematically rendered Gaza
uninhabitable. This is why – from Amnesty International to scholars
such as Omer Bartov, the world-renowned Israeli-American professor of
Holocaust and genocide studies – there is a consensus among the relevant
specialists that Israel is committing genocide.
And no crime has
been so confessed to by its perpetrators as it happened. Israel
announced a total blockade on all humanitarian aid entering Gaza 17 days
ago, an incontrovertible violation of international law. Last week,
Israel’s environment minister declared the “only solution for the Gaza
Strip is to empty it of Gazans”, one of countless statements of criminal
and genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders and officials in the past
17 months. Israel has made no attempt to disguise its belief that the
civilian population has collective guilt – “human beasts” who deserve
only “damage” and “hell”, as one Israeli general said at the start – or
its intent to raze Gaza to the ground. Israeli soldiers have joyously
posted their crimes online, whooping, cheering, singing as they
detonated civilians’ homes and abused detainees.
How can an
obscenity so documented, evidenced and confessed to – an obscenity
facilitated by western weapons and diplomatic support – persist for so
long? No one in western politics or media circles can plausibly say, “I
did not know what was really happening.”
In a rational world,
cheerleaders of this abomination would be regarded as monsters with no
place in public life. You cannot, after all, justify the Rwandan
genocide and expect anything other than to become a pariah. But it is
those who opposed Israel’s depravity who have been deplatformed, shut
down, censored, sacked, arrested and – in the case of the Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil – detained and potentially deported.
By
turning the world on its head, the most brazen and systematic attack on
free speech in the west since McCarthyism has achieved its primary
goal: widespread silence over a crime of historic proportions among
those with power and influence. There are politicians who have
unequivocally called this crime what it is, but they are
marginalised and disciplined. There are mainstream journalists who speak
the truth, but they are few. There are celebrities who use their
platform to tell the truth – such as Gary Lineker, Paloma Faith, Khalid
Abdala and Juliet Stevenson – but they are isolated.
The silent
are scared about their careers and incomes, and not irrationally so. But
Gaza’s survivors are scared about starvation, disease, being burned
alive and suffocated under rubble. Silence in the face of injustice is
always a sin; when your government is facilitating genocide, it is a
moral crime. In every atrocity in history, the silent are always
principal players.
If all those who know a terrible evil is being
committed spoke out, what would now happen? Ministers would resign from
governments. Newspapers and news bulletins would not only lead with
Israel’s atrocities, they would correctly frame them as heinous crimes,
underpinned with a drumbeat – that something drastic must be done to
stop them. Demands for an arms embargo and sanctions on Israel would
become impossible to ignore. Rather than those who opposed genocide
being hounded and vilified, it would be those complicit in genocide who
would be emptied from public life.
Many of the silent undoubtedly
feel guilt, and they should. Through their cowardice, they have played a
pivotal role in normalising some of the worst barbarism of the 21st
century. Ending silence doesn’t involve handwringing and platitudes
about how sad you are about civilians dying: it means calling a crime
for what it is, and demanding accountability for those who facilitated
it. Time is running out for the traumatised, maimed, starving people of
Gaza. So is time for those who want to salvage their conscience.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist