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.