What are you doing to stop the imminent ethnic cleansing of Gaza? This is a serious question. If ever there was a time to stand up for the rights of an oppressed people, this is it. And yet, in many places in the western world, you can’t. It’s literally been outlawed. How is this even possible?
As I’m writing this, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied territories, is pleading with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to demand Israel stop its killing. “The delay in calling on Israel to cease taking revenge on millions of Palestinian civilians,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “is intensifying the descent into [the] abyss.”
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced by the Israeli military after the entire population of northern Gaza, some 1.1 million people, has been ordered to leave everything behind and move south. (Gaza’s population is mostly refugees from 1948, and some have refused to flee, having once lost their original homes 75 years ago.) Israeli bombs have killed more than 2,670 people, at least 724 of whom were children. And every single member of 47 different Palestinian families – some 500 people, including dozens of children and babies – has been killed by Israeli airstrikes.
The term genocide, like fascism, is often flung around carelessly these days, but it’s worth recalling that there is an official definition. The crime of genocide is “to destroy, in whole, or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. No minimum number of victims is necessary to establish genocide, but the loss must be severe enough that it “will impact the group as a whole”. Since close to 50 families have already and horrifically been exterminated, and we’re only just past the first week of this carnage, what other word should we choose?
The urgency to demonstrate against such horrors could not be more necessary. Yet our contemporary ambassadors of the enlightenment have other ideas. Across the western world, our political leadership has decided that freedom of opinion must be curtailed, that expressions of support for Palestinians reflexively equate to support for Hamas and terrorism, and that Palestinian narratives simply must be suppressed. These notions aren’t just hollow. They’re dangerous.
The French minister of the interior, Gérald Darmanin, sent a message to French police banning pro-Palestinians protests. He wrote that “pro-Palestinian demonstrations must be prohibited because they are likely to generate disturbances to the public order”. Adopting this logic, I suppose we should amend the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man to the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man Unless Such Rights are Likely to Generate Disturbances to the Public Order. Needless to say, government prohibitions on freedom of speech amount to censorship.
Berlin also banned pro-Palestinian protests. Vienna banned pro-Palestinians protests. Several cities in Australia banned pro-Palestinian protests. In the UK, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, told senior police officers that waving a Palestinian flag or chanting specific phrases for Palestine may be a criminal offense.
It’s one thing when those in power attempt to suppress your story by privileging another. It’s quite another when they criminalize your story by false attribution and making everyone afraid of you.
That tens of thousands did march for Gaza in London, and protesters gathered across the United Kingdom, the United States and other parts of the western world, sometimes risking arrest, merely to express support for the Palestinians illustrates precisely the kind of courage that is needed right now. At Brooklyn College, where I teach, the college president forced students protesting for Palestinian rights off campus, where they were met with a phalanx of police officers and a pro-Israel city councilwoman who came brandishing her own weapon.
In such an environment, supporting Palestinians in Gaza today – as they face depopulation, deportation and death – means literally putting your own life on the line. In fact, just being Palestinian can mean risking your life. We already have a fatality in the United States. In Plainfield, Illinois, six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume was stabbed 26 times to death and his mother was also grievously harmed in a hate crime allegedly motivated because mother and child were Muslim at a time when the official discourse is telling the population that Muslims and Palestinians are to be hated.
How can we stop such horror? There is pain everywhere right now. I too feel it. In the last few days, a celebrated Gazan poet I know has lost 30 members of his family to Israeli bombs. A gifted Palestinian American doctor, poet and translator I know has spoken powerfully about his grief after Israeli airstrikes killed 17 members of his family in Gaza. A highly respected colleague of mine in California has told us that his niece and her husband, residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, have been abducted by Hamas, also clearly a war crime and an atrocity. Each one of these experiences matter. Our suffering is human, and grief has no nationality.
But what about justice? How many times have we been lectured about so-called western values? I am a person born and raised in the west. I am a westerner, and yet those so-called values are sounding very much like Gazans, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims are utterly disposable. We hear Israel present the situation as if it has no choice but genocide, and we are expected to go along with this? Never. One can be opposed to Hamas, as I am, and to genocide, as I am. That’s not hard to comprehend. The fact that this has been made difficult or in some cases criminal to say, reveals just how superficial those so-called western values actually have been, and how standing up for Palestine today is also to save the west from the very worst of itself.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is a professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian US
