Why Is the World Silent When the Gaza Genocide Is Not Over?
Diana Buttu on how Israel continues to kill, starve, and imprison Palestinians as the world remains distracted by the words ‘peace’ and ‘process’ and ‘boards’ and ‘plans.’
As I was scrolling through social media the other day, I came across a Facebook post showing a picture of an Israeli car with a yellow sticker reading, “Bring Them Home Now” in English. The author of the post asked a question: “Advice as to how to remove? Soapy water?” For the author, just like that – poof – their life had returned to normal: no more caring about Gaza. The person was now preoccupied with ways to remove a bright yellow sticker – crowdsourcing advice in a Facebook group.
This single post shows the vast disparity between Israeli and Palestinian life – not just since October 2023, but since Israel was created, on the ruins of our country and by devastating our nation and people. While the post’s author was concerned with sticker residue, we are forced to contend with trying to survive (a still ongoing) genocide. Every day, we see Israel killing Palestinians – an additional 586 added to the 72,000 death toll since the unveiling of the Trump Plan – with little attention paid to any of these killings. Israeli soldiers continue to gleefully blow up and raze Palestinian schools, buildings, and homes, while slowly squeezing Palestinians into even smaller spaces to shrink the area inside the “yellow line” beyond which Palestinians live in a death trap. Palestinians are contending with little humanitarian aid entering Gaza due to Israel’s continued blockade. Palestinians continue to languish in tents, with absolutely no clear prospects that Gaza will ever be rebuilt after Israel bombed more than 81% of all buildings in Gaza. We are still digging through the rubble to find our dead.
For Israelis, of course, they can breathe a sigh of relief: the last of the dead Israelis was returned, so they can go back to ignoring Gaza. They paid no price for committing genocide; no price for ethnic cleansing; no price for eviscerating Gaza. Accountability looks like a joke. It didn’t matter to them that they killed four Palestinians and bulldozed a mass grave in order to get the last Israeli dead body back. Who cares about dead Palestinian bodies strewn all over the streets of Gaza? And who cares about how dead Palestinian bodies are returned to Gaza? Certainly not Israelis. This is why when the Israelis returned the bodies of 54 Palestinians and skull samples, they were returned mutilated and unidentifiable, and not a word from the Israeli media or the Israeli public.
But it isn’t just Israeli media that has been silent.
So too have much of the mainstream media and the so-called international community fallen silent. Can it be that Palestinian lives are just not worth as much as Israeli ones? What else can explain the silence surrounding Israel’s continued imprisonment, torture, and starvation of more than 9,300 Palestinians from the West Bank, including 350 children and 3,300 who are imprisoned without any charges whatsoever (i.e., hostages)? What else can explain the silence surrounding the continued imprisonment of more than 1,000 Palestinian hostages from Gaza (the true number is unknown as Israel has refused to provide this information), including 80 medical professionals, such as Dr. Husam Abu Safiya, who are being held in horrific conditions, some held underground and without access to lawyers. Video-recorded abuse sessions (shown to the Israeli public on TV) show these gaunt Palestinians subjected to regular beatings, assaults by dogs with muzzles, and being stepped on by prison guards. What else can explain the silence as Israel continues to hold 776 Palestinian dead bodies, including the bodies of Palestinian citizens of Israel? (Incidentally, Israel is the only country in the world that uses dead bodies of its own citizens as bargaining chips.) Why aren’t we hearing politicians endlessly demand that Israel release Palestinian hostages?
And, as Israel breathes a sigh of relief, we now see that Israel is backing away from its endless hasbara because it doesn’t need it any longer – it can do as it pleases. For two years, Palestinians were gaslit and told that the 72,000 Palestinians that Israel killed were somehow a figment of our imagination. Imagine how dehumanizing it has been for Palestinians to have to prove that their loved ones are dead. We have had to come up with list upon list, with names and ID numbers, of the dead; we have had to explain our decades of experience in counting the dead; we have had to point to US reports attesting to our expertise in counting the dead. Recently, Israel accepted the 72,000 figure – which means that it is now kosher for the rest of the world to follow suit. Undoubtedly, the figure is much higher than that, particularly given that Palestinians have been reporting for some time that Israel has been using weaponry that has effectively incinerated Palestinian bodies, leaving no trace behind. But of course, it will only be when Israel admits to it that this will be accepted as true.
So why is this happening? Because everyone wants to forget. Palestinians have seen this game before: everyone wants to turn away from the horrors that Israel creates, and so, it only takes the words “peace” and “process” and “boards” and “plans” for the world to become distracted. It becomes easy to pretend that life has improved for Palestinians. This is why people lazily use words and phrases like “progress” when a couple of cans of food make it into Gaza or “risks fragile ceasefire” when Israel kills 31 people after bombing residential buildings. Trump knows this, and Israel knows this, too.
And so, as Jared Kushner unveils a seemingly ChatGPT-created reconstruction plan for Gaza with the Arabic written backwards and disjointed, not only is it obvious that he did not have a Palestinian read the plan, it is obvious that he does not care. His talk about stadiums and high-rise towers is really just about paving over the dead Palestinian bodies trapped beneath the rubble that he claims to want to clear. The focus is on forgetting – pretending that genocide did not happen.
So while Israelis are too busy thinking about how to remove sticker residue and thinking about whether they will win a medal at the Olympics that they should have been barred from participating in, we are focused on putting our lives back together and on how we will survive as a nation with a country full of genocidaires who believe that what they did was right and who have yet to pay a price for all of the evil that they have committed. And while Israel and world powers may have forgotten, Palestinians have not forgotten and will never forget. No Trump Tower, no “Board” of Colonization, no plan will make us forget. And so to the Israeli who asked, yes, soap may remove the sticker residue, but nothing will ever remove the residue of committing genocide.
Diana Buttu is a Haifa-based lawyer and analyst who was a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team in the early 2000s and is a frequent commentator and writer on Palestinian and Israeli issues. She is also a practitioner in residence at Georgetown University in Qatar. She writes Zeteo’s ‘A Diary from a Palestinian in Israel.’
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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Simple: because the illusion of a "ceasefire" gives them the moral cover they're so desperate for. They can turn a blind eye to Palestinians continuing to be slaughtered because the hostages were returned and because "officially" we're in peace time and rebuilding Gaza. It's all a lie but that's irrelevant to them. So long as they can keep saying there's a ceasefire, they'll deny a genocide is ongoing.
Thank you Diana, thank you. I admire your steadfastness in this sea of genocidal gaslighting.