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How Can You Look Away?
Picture this: You are holding your newborn baby, the one you waited months to meet, feeling their warmth in your arms. Now imagine that baby is ripped from you, buried under rubble, their tiny body lifeless before they ever said their first words. Imagine your one-year-old, just beginning to walk, gunned down or crushed beneath the weight of a war machine funded by your own tax dollars. Imagine your five-year-old, who should be learning to read and write, whose biggest concern should be which toy to play with next—lying cold, gone forever.
This is not a nightmare. This is the reality in Gaza, Palestine.
At least 825 babies never made it to their first birthday.
895 one-year-olds died before taking their first steps.
3,266 toddlers never got to run, play, or discover the world around them.
4,032 six- to ten-year-olds will never sit in their classrooms again.
3,646 middle schoolers survived three wars, only to die in a fourth.
2,949 teenagers who grew up under siege, preparing for their futures, were killed before they could even begin to live.
8,899 were sons, 6,714 were daughters. All of them had names. All of them had families. All of them had dreams.
And yet, American leaders, NATO, and even Arab and Muslim governments look away. They issue hollow statements, wring their hands in pretend concern, all while signing deals, sending weapons, and shaking hands with the architects of this genocide. They are not just complicit. They are enablers of the ethnic cleansing.
And what about the American public? Where are you? Where is your outrage? Where is your humanity? How can you remain silent while your government funds the annihilation of an entire people? How do you go to work, worry about your 401(k), your promotions, your dinner plans—while thousands of children are being slaughtered in your name? What if God forbid it were your child? What if God forbid it were your home turned to dust? What if God forbid it were your family fleeing in the dead of night, knowing nowhere was safe?
The American public, too many of them, remain unmoved, lost in their consumerism, in their petty worries, unwilling to reckon with the reality that their tax dollars are funding the murder of children. And those who claim to be progressive, who claim to fight for justice, have proven that their advocacy has limits, that their morals crumble when the victims are Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, brown.
Gaza is not just being bombed. It is being erased. The occupation did not start last month. It did not start last year. It started in 1948, with a plan of expulsion and replacement, with the ongoing theft of land in the West Bank, and the strangulation of over 2 million people in an open-air prison. Now, that plan has reached its final, brutal stage: total extermination. And still, the world refuses to act.
To every politician who remains silent, to every journalist who refuses to call this genocide by its name, to every citizen who thinks this is too far removed to matter—you are complicit. Silence is complicity. Indifference is complicity. And history will not forget.
What does it say about a society when it values stock markets over human lives, when it funds bombs instead of food, when it looks away as genocide unfolds in real-time? What does it say about people who profess their love for democracy but turn a blind eye when their own governments fund and enable apartheid, occupation, and mass murder?
The Balfour Declaration laid the groundwork, 1948 set it in motion, and today, with full Western support, Israel is executing the final phase of its colonial project—total erasure. The forced displacement of millions, the daily slaughter, the destruction of homes, hospitals, and places of worship—all of it is deliberate, calculated, and genocidal. And yet, even as the blood of Palestinian children stains the conscience of the world, the so-called leaders of Arab and Muslim nations stand by, complicit in their silence and their deals, unwilling to defy the empire that pulls their strings.
But words do have power. Resistance has power. The human spirit has power. History does not absolve the oppressors, and neither will the people. To be silent in the face of genocide is to be complicit. To look away is to betray our own humanity. And to those who remain indifferent, who choose comfort over conscience—know this: history will remember where you stood, and it will not be kind.
Signed,
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