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Israel’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.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
