When the Holocaust ravaged Europe in the mid-20th century, most of the world did not and could not know the full extent of the genocide committed by Nazi Germany. Workers waited for newspaper articles and court trials to determine if the alleged genocide was truly as murderous and sinister as it turned out to be.
The phrase “never again” is often used to speak out against the atrocities of the Holocaust. Two simple words designed to remind the world of the suffering, and to prevent the dangers of an ethno-nationalist project.
Around 80 years since the end of the Holocaust, genocide has happened again — only this time, the world can see. The world has seen, and the world is complicit in it. Palestine and its indigenous population have been under official occupation by Israel since the 1948 Nakba and have had to defend themselves against Israel’s genocidal campaign since the settler-state’s creation.
Of course, Palestine has been under occupation by multiple sovereign states, including Great Britain, Egypt and Jordan. However, it is only Israel in modern history that has ramped up the attacks on Palestinian natives to the degree seen today.
It is only now that Palestine and its children are “tipping into a point of no return,” as stated by Kate Phillips-Barrasso, vice president of global policy and advocacy at Mercy Corps, that multi-national news media organizations have been honest in their coverage of the genocide.
This begs the question: What took so long? Gaza has been starving for over a year and has watched its civilian population fall by approximately six percent since October 7, 2023. Israel has been clear in its intent since the same day. Yet, American and other Western news media have spent the same time disingenuously calling the genocide a “conflict,” or “war.”
In the same way, many liberal and centrist Americans are just now taking a public stance against the genocide, reposting the same news sources reporting the famine on social media. It took nearly two years for these individuals to stand on the right side of history.
These Americans and news media organizations should feel nothing but shame for their apathy and inaction.
As we approach the two-year mark of a full-blown ethnic cleansing campaign by Israel in Palestine, the public consensus continues to shift towards what anti-Zionist organizers have been saying for decades. Israel has strategically been starving Palestinians, intentionally killing civilians and deploying an apartheid regime against natives in an effort to seize all of Palestine, and remove its indigenous population.
Unfortunately, this has been clear since the weeks and months after October 7, 2023 — the date Hamas, a Palestinian anti-colonial militant group that governs the Gaza Strip — launched an attack on Southern Israel. This attack occurred during the deadliest year for Palestinian children in the West Bank at that point in history. The attack gave Israel the perfect opportunity to retort with an elevated ethnic cleansing crusade, accompanied by an increasingly supported movement by Israeli settlers to take the Gaza Strip for themselves.
The outcome of the last two years is evident on social media, where images of headless babies, malnourished children and families literally torn to pieces have been widely available for all of the world to see. Journalists on the ground, both professional and amateur, have been showing the full effects of the siege in both print and with photography.
There is not much left to cover about the genocide that hasn’t been covered by those journalists on the ground. Israel will continue its siege on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank until the United States and other Western nations put their foot down on sanctioning the nation.
In the days following the October 7 attack, as Israel ramped up its attacks on Gazan civilians, anti-Zionist American labor organizer Trey Cook posted on X, “Years from now, our children will ask us what we were doing during the Palestinian Genocide. What will you tell them? Will you be proud?”
And as Egyptian-Canadian writer Omar El Akkad titled his recent novel on the Palestinian Genocide and western complacency in both material and media support, “One day, everybody will have always been against this.”
Jacob Ramos is a Sports Staff Writer. He can be reached at jacobtr@uci.edu.