Ali Imran & Greta Schreiber, Specials to The Denisonian—
Over the past month, we have witnessed Western media outlets and government officials parrot the Israeli government and frame Palestinians as a people unworthy of life and rights. On the surface, these narratives are impassioned commitments to the dignity of all life, but these condemnations of crimes against humanity end at Hamas and give the Israeli state apparatus the green light to commit massacres, depopulate Gaza, and sanction a textbook case of genocide. While Palestinians, scholars, and major human rights organizations are sounding the alarm about Israel committing genocide in Gaza, Western media outlets have platformed dehumanizing genocidal rhetoric by Israeli and Western politicians. Instead of covering Israeli crimes in Gaza and the suppression of speech and violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, narratives in the U.S. and Europe have continued to censor Palestinians and police their speech. This hegemonic narrative in the West has manufactured consent for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Islamophobia and racism are constitutive and salient elements of U.S. public discourse. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, disinformation and obfuscating rhetoric were used to generate bipartisan anti-Muslim and anti-Iraq hysteria, resulting in the death of over a million Iraqis. Similarly, Israel, with U.S. backing, regularly employs these deeply held Western conceptions of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians as savages, backward, and inherently violent to justify its apartheid regime. We have witnessed the consequences of this over the last month: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza with the full endorsement and support of Western nations particularly the United States. In Chicago, a 71-year-old man killed a 6-year old Palestinian-American boy, Wadea Al-Fayoume, by stabbing him 26 times and shouting “You Muslims must die!” Students and activists, especially in Germany, the U.S., and U.K, are being harassed, assaulted, silenced, and demonized for involvement with advocacy for Palestine.
Israel’s relentless and indiscriminate carpet bombing of Gaza has killed around 8,000 Palestinians and more than 1.4 million people in Gaza have fled their homes (as of October 29) – this number is bound to increase. Despite multiple pleadings and warnings from the UN, WHO, MSF, and all major humanitarian groups, Israel has continued to cut off food, water, fuel, electricity, internet, and aid from Gaza. This is a continuation of Israel’s decades-long targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure, including bombing residential buildings, hospitals, and UN schools and the flattening of entire neighborhoods in the last two and a half weeks. As Israel prepares for a land invasion, they have ordered the evacuation of 1.1 million Palestinians from northern Gaza, while simultaneously killing the evacuees as they attempt to escape along routes Israel itself declared safe. The UN has deemed this evacuation as impossible and in breach of international law. Palestinian civil society and rights groups have called for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the occupation, and accountability for Israeli crimes.
What should discerning moral agents and active citizens do during these times? According to some at Denison, the answer is to remain silent or put out hollow, milquetoast statements that placate an apathetic student body and create the illusion of a progressive and engaged campus. The small group of students trying to generate dialogue, awareness, and action through their campus activities have been harassed, surveilled, and maligned as biased, disruptive, and threatening to this campus’ illusion of peace and inclusion. By silencing or willfully ignoring Palestinians and their allies, we will become yet another institution that, at best, looked the other way, and, at worst, condoned genocide. When the fog of war has settled and you are able to see the catastrophe–the Nakba– that Palestinians in Gaza are living through right now, history will remember us as a campus of silent spectators who paid for and consented to the carnage.