-Leaders-Summ.jpeg?width=1200&auto=webp&trim=342,2149,1090,0#)
Why the World is Silent on Gaza Genocide, and Sometimes Worse When It Speaks
By Benay Blend
While Israel continues to perform one atrocity after the next, each more horrific than the last, there seems to be very little action to stop it.
In his first Sunday address on May 11, Pope Leo XIV called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and expressed concern over escalating global warfare. Because he reiterated his predecessor’s support for Gaza, the Pope committed no acts of commission (active wrongdoing) nor did he perpetrate the more common acts of omission (failure to act when one is morally responsible to do so).
The same cannot be said for much of the world’s population. There, the sentiment runs from “individuals cannot change the world so why bother?” to “Israel has a right to defend itself against another terrorist attack.”
As for the former, individuals such as journalists, writers, and public commentators can certainly make a difference, while the rest could join an organization that works collectively to bring about global peace with justice.
Regarding the latter, which is possibly more pernicious, Israel, because it is the colonizer, does not have the legal right to commit genocide against the colonized. Because this misinformation is so rampant, it has led to the entity’s ability to commit mass murder with impunity.
While Israel continues to perform one atrocity after the next, each more horrific than the last, there seems to be very little action to stop it.
As Ramzy Baroud observes, these acts of omission are performed with “varying degrees of anger, helplessness, or total disregard.”
Even when some activists are not silent, either individually or as group policy, there is often much that is purposely omitted from their statements. As Amanda Gelender notes, it is “deeply disappoint(ing) and frankly unconscionable” that many of her fellow anti-Zionist Jews “still refuse to openly and unapologetically support the Palestinian armed resistance.”
“It is not your right as Jewish ‘anti-Zionists’ to sanitize and defang the struggle,” she continues. “by throwing the resistance under the bus to assuage the liberal sensibilities of your members, donors, families, and followers in a way that suits your philosophical debates, fragile egos, guilt, and comfort as well as the empty darkness of your own conceits.”
Her statement goes for all public officials, commentators and individuals, anti-Zionist or not, who claim to be opposed to Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing, but fall short of calling it a genocide that harks back to the original Nakba.
For example, Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont) is known as a progressive politician due to his support for national health care, raising the minimum wage, along with other social policies.
Despite being hailed for criticizing the entity’s “destruction of the Palestinian people,” his remarks are often drawn from the liberal Zionist playbook.
On May 8, 2025, Sanders delivered a speech chastising Congress for its silence on the “manmade nightmare” going on in Gaza.
After listing all of Gaza’s troubles, even calling out the Netanyahu cabinet for its war crimes, Sanders shifts to saying that Israel had a right to defend itself after “Hamas, a terrorist organization, began this terrible war with its barbaric October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages.”
These remarks undo all of Sanders’ good intentions because most of this statement was used first by Israel to justify the genocide now on its 591st day, plus his words are a twisting of the facts.
While international law gives the occupied the right to resist its occupation, it does not give the occupier the same accord. Moreover, much of the killing took place by Israel itself, as its soldiers were shooting wildly in the confusion of the moment.
‘There was crazy hysteria, and decisions started being made without verified information,” Yaniv Kubovich writes. Moreover, documents and testimonies garnered by Haaretz show that Israeli soldiers employed the Hannibal operational order, which allows the military to use force to prevent soldiers from being taken into captivity by the enemy.
Finally, Sanders takes October 7 out of context, as so many people do. Specifically, he fails to mention the Nakba (catastrophe), which took place in 1948 but has been ongoing ever since.
“One of the tactics used by the West and Israel has been to almost succeed in decontextualizing October 7 so that it appears to have come out of the blue,” explains legal expert Richard Falk in an interview with Palestine Chronicle.
In these ways, Sanders demonizes the resistance, which he labels a terrorist organization responsible for this “terrible war,” thus not only taking October 7th out of context, but also removing it from the history of anti-colonial struggle that continues to this day.
“Progressive” politicians such as Sanders seem more comfortable sharing pictures of starving children than they are allowing Palestinians their full humanity, which would require seeing their struggle as a legitimate response to decades of occupation. Instead, they see the occupied as merely victims, which of course they are, but they are also courageous freedom fighters who resist as the only moral option.
“Decolonization is currently playing out by the resistance on the battlefield,” writes Gelender, “not at the US ballot box.”
“What’s at stake is the sovereignty of narrative itself,” writes Mohamed L. Mokhtar, “who defines justice, who controls meaning, who decides what is visible and what remains hidden.”
In a review of Peter Beinart’s book on “Genocide, Trauma, and Jewish Identity,” as the article is titled, Paul Von Blum agrees with Beinart’s call for a new Jewish narrative, “one that is based on equality rather than supremacy.”
Nevertheless, Von Blum, and by default Peter Beinart, are unclear how to go from committing genocide to living in a state of co-existence.
From here, Beinart and his reviewer revert to the standard trope of conflating resistance with terrorist acts, “both-sidesing” that erases the call for a new narrative that includes what came before.
“Beinart understands perfectly the trauma that Hamas’s October 7 attack wrought for Jews in Israel and elsewhere, Von Blum writes, thus providing cover for Israel’s disproportionate response.
To his credit, Beinart points out the historical oppression of Palestinians, Von Blum notes, but the reviewer goes on to write that this “in no way absolves Hamas for its carnage.”
In this way, both writers provide an ahistorical account of Palestinian resistance. As did Sanders, they fail to note that October 7th is yet another chapter in the long history of freedom struggles—Nat Turner’s revolt, Wounded Knee, Vietnam, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and Land Back, to name a few.
Indeed, when a group of people is kept in bondage over a significant amount of time, their victimizers live with the fear that there might be at any moment an uprising by the victimized themselves. This was certainly true on slave plantations in the American South, where the owners of enslaved people knew that their “property” wanted to be freed.
As a Jewish person, I don’t feel this kind of fear, at least not from Palestinians. What does concern me are Zionist groups that are increasingly vocal in their efforts to, at the very least, intimidate anti-Zionist organizations, especially their fellow Jews.
Rather than focusing on Jewish trauma, as Beinart seems to do, it might be better to discuss efforts like Project Esther that are aimed at branding pro-Palestinian groups as terrorist organizations so that members can be more easily “deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered ‘open society.’”
Having been the target of these policies myself, it feels, at times, surreal that Jewish people, who experienced their own Holocaust, sometimes only second or third generation removed, are now being threatened for protesting another genocide. This time it is not Jewish blood, but rather Palestinian, that is being bled.
“Amidst the relentless depravity of this holocaust,” concludes Gelender, “resistance is the only antidote to despair. Never capitulating, never kneeling, fighting against all odds, until victory.”
– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
The post Why the World is Silent on Gaza Genocide, and Sometimes Worse When It Speaks appeared first on Palestine Chronicle.
