Palestinian death is not for your entertainment

The disillusionment of the west to Palestinian suffering & how Israel strategically plans their invasions around western consumption

When I was only 13 years old, I saw my people in Gaza slaughtered by 150 occupation shells on evening news, as if our death was casual, replaced a few days later by false ideas of “peace talks.” I sobbed as mangled body parts were gathered and buried. As lies were told to excuse those who only referred to my people as “terrorists” deserving of slaughter.

Now, for the past seven months, the trauma is born again: after 212 days over 30,000 Palestinians, 14,000 children, have been slaughtered, with world governments, especially my own, not only excusing this onslaught but actively enabling Palestinian death.

However, if you were to turn on the news, or read the paper, you would perhaps, be bombarded with coverage of the Met Gala. The media, and western world at large, fawning over the costumes draped over an evening of celebrity gossip, with no mention of the two-hundred Palestinians murdered every day.

As many have drawn the metaphor, it seems that the war on Gaza, the war on Palestinian existence, bears a striking resemblance to The Hunger Games: fashion used as a socio-political weapon by the upper class to distract the masses of their oppression, heavily surveilled with the use of AI weapons, capital violence against protestors of the regime, and children as spectacles of war. The irony is uncanny, but somehow lost on the very audience the film captured.

Through social media, the catastrophe on Gaza has become all too clear, we see live the footage of children trapped under rubble, fathers carrying the remains of their family members in bags, or the hundreds of other documented and systematic war crimes, as UN rights experts say, committed against the Palestinian people. These images and sounds interlaced on our feeds with whatever random content is put out by our peers who could not be bothered to the suffering of our people. Why  must I see pictures from your birthday party after witnessing a Palestinian child take their last breath? What you wore to prom over Palestinians  using animal feed as food as they slowly starve? I have seen more posts and “hot takes” on the feud between Drake and Kendrick Lamar than the several mass graves found at Al-Shifa hospital. Why is it that the algorithm recognizes your inability to process Palestinian death as deserving of your attention? Is it cognitive dissonance? Is Palestinian life worth so little that you simply do not care, is the death of our people inconvenient to your normalcy? Here in the States, the media and administrations have spent decades telling us that war is endemic to the Middle East and that the Palestinians have brought this destruction upon themselves. But this does not drown out the screams of Palestinian children that haunt my dreams. 

But the disillusionment to Palestinian suffering goes far beyond the MET Gala, it is ingrained into media coverage, or lack thereof, that has led to western disregard for the lives of my people. Each day for the last seven months, myself, and those in my personal life, have felt an indescribable grief – not a breath goes by where the constant thought of my family back home or destruction of Palestine does not weigh heavy on my lungs. However, as I made my way through my first year of law school, the very people meant to uphold future generations of justice, it as though the genocide of my people is not taking place. Never once did someone say how preposterous it is that a foreign lobby is bankrolling politicians sending U.S. weapons to rain down bombs upon children, not once did I hear anger that the U.S. senators are rejecting the International Criminal Court investigation into genocide, and I have yet to hear grief that our own university is invested in weapons of mass destruction. They, like most of the west, see the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as a far-removed problem. Their privilege a result of the media that continues to perpetrate stereotypes of the savagery of Arabs in the Middle East. More than that, they continue to live their lives unburdened by the fact that they contribute to the colonial chokehold on Palestine through their silence, many are afraid they may lose job opportunities or risk their reputations. To them, I ask, why is your morality up for sale?

In truth, I cannot place on the blame on them. For it is not their fault that our suffering if often overshadowed, purposefully, by the never-ending cavalcade of Western entertainment. Airstrikes and war crimes in Gaza make brief appearances in the news cycles before being shunted aside by the ongoing Trump Trial or Joe Biden eating his ice-cream. For many in the West, Palestinian lives seem to hold little value beyond vaguely shocking imagery before the public’s inevitably short attention span shifts. There is a willing ignorance that prevents empathizing and sustaining interest in Palestinian death. It would mean confronting those hard questions about our lives and our government. It would also mean recognizing how the Israeli military strategically schedules their major bombardments during times when they know the western public is pre-occupied and conditioned for distraction. They understand the reality that Palestinian life will not interfere with American comfortability.

Historically, operations like 2008’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza commenced shortly after Christmas, when Western attention was still fixated on the holidays. The 2014 bombardment that created a generation of Gazan orphans took place during the World Cup. Israel’s 2018 massacre of Palestinian protestors in Gaza began on the eve of the Met Gala that year.

 This pattern repeated numerous times over the last few months. Christmas of 2023 had been one of the deadliest nights to that point, with refugees in the Maghazi camp being massacred Christmas night. While holiday dinners were hosted in the west, the world forgot that people in the Holy Land bled as their savior did – the third oldest church in the world destroyed due to indiscriminate bombardment.  During the Super Bowl this year, Netanyahu ordered the military to submit their military plan to invade Rafah, where over 1 million Palestinians were pushed as a “safe zone”, which we now know was invaded during the Met Gala this year.

These are not coincidences, but rather intentional efforts to minimize eyes upon their brazen disregard for human life. Yet, for all their marketing prowess, Israel cannot ultimately control the horrific images of grieving families wailing over the mutilated bodies of loved ones. The West cannot simply look away and retreat their privilege. It should not be easier to disengage than confront the complexities of brutal occupation and cycles of violence.

This disillusionment is inescapable to us Palestinians. There is no red carpet, no star-studded gala to blissfully distract us, and those in Gaza, from the rubble, the screams, and looming threat of the next bombardment.

Though an ocean away, each of those silent is complicit when they allow their gaze to avert from injustice. Consumed by frivolous entertainment, you become an accomplice in the most sinister crime – the normalization of this atrocity. As Dr. Jill Stein says, never again means never again for anyone. Each failure to acknowledge Palestinian humanity, each decision to buffer yourself from the violence, it as if you drop the bombs yourself.

History has shown time and time again that the will for freedom outlives the will of the occupiers. Palestinians have taught us what it means to see your homeland stolen from you, yet still believe in your right to return. They have taught us what it means to live under occupation, yet still believe in peace. And they have taught us what it means to live through generations of ethnic cleansing, yet never lose pride in your being. We owe it to the Palestinians suffering under the bombs our tax dollars fund to not make their death a backdrop to be scrolled past.

I originally published an edited version in The Guardian May 17th