A Message For Those Who Watched

We will not forget, we will not forgive. Silence was more than betrayal.

Part of me envies some of you who have given zero brain space for the ongoing genocide. What a gift not to internalize the photos we all see online, what a gift to turn a blind eye. The other part of me is ashamed to have known you at all. The other part of me is disgusted that you have remained whole while so many parts of me have broken as I watched my people die.

It has been 22 months.

Twenty-two months since the killing began in plain sight, again. Since the siege tightened into total annihilation. Since a people who had already lost everything were hunted with bombs, burned alive in tents, starved in silence. And still, you said nothing.

You stood in the corner and adjusted your language. You chose your careers, your reputations, your comfort. You calculated your conscience. You convinced yourselves that neutrality was nuance, that silence was sophistication, that distance was wisdom.

You fed this genocide with your press releases, your editorials, your headlines that erased the dead and repeated the lies of their killers. You staged debates while mass graves filled with children. You asked if it was really genocide as mothers scraped pieces of their babies from piles of ash. You ran “both sides” coverage while one side was eating leaves and drinking sewage and the other side had the full backing of the world’s arsenals.

You softened every cruelty. You filtered every scream. You humanized the murderers and pixelated the murdered.

Now, when it is too grotesque to ignore, when the bodies have been starved to bone and the hunger in their eyes stares directly through your screen, now you pretend to care. Now, suddenly, there is room in your timeline for the horror. But only the horror. Never the cause. Never the criminal. You speak of suffering but not siege, of loss but not logistics, of death but not who dropped the bombs. Even now you cannot say Palestine. You cannot say Israel.

Let me tell you something no one ever had to tell us: if it takes the slow starvation of an entire population for you to whisper concern, you were never neutral. You were never decent. You were part of it.

To every newsroom executive, every polished anchor, every culture critic who found ways to make Gaza disappear from your content calendar: you are not just complicit. You are instruments of this genocide. Your euphemisms made the bullets easier to fire. Your editorial guidelines stripped the blood from every massacre. You made slaughter palatable for donors and advertisers and liberal sensibilities.

You chose to be cowards. You chose to serve power. You chose to dehumanize us with headlines and silence and sanitized grief.

And to those of you in our lives who ghosted us, who said nothing, who went to brunch while Rafah was burning, who could not stomach our anger but were unbothered by our people’s agony: I hope the quiet eats at you. I hope you live with the knowledge that your silence was a luxury paid for by someone else’s life.

This is not a movement that forgets.

You don’t get to return now with broken hearts and poetry when you couldn’t muster a single word when it mattered most. You don’t get to say “this is heartbreaking” when you said nothing while the heart was being ripped from the chest. We will not hold space for your delayed outrage. We will not make room for your guilt.

I do not know many who have died, yet part of me has died with them. I am buried with the death of a soul humanity never had.