It has been more than a month since a former president of the United States, Donald Trump, used my identity as an insult in a televised debate. He called his opponent, current US President Joe Biden, a “very bad Palestinian” for his alleged failure to help Israel “finish the job” of killing everyone in Gaza and stealing the land. He received zero pushback. Biden, the person who is directly funding and supplying the weapons for the ongoing genocide of my people, clearly had no issue with our identity being turned into a slur. But the nation’s liberal commentariat, always ready to call out Trump’s racism, did not really care either. There were a few articles on how Trump’s “racist insult” has upset human rights advocates, but in a matter of days if not hours, the incident was completely forgotten.
This came after months of Palestinians in Gaza being indiscriminately bombed, shot at, imprisoned and starved. After the complete decimation of the strip’s hospitals and universities. After the despicable murder of six-year-old Hind Rajab with 355 bullets shot directly at the car she was in.
And since Trump used my identity as a slur on national TV, the killing, maiming and repeated displacement of Palestinians continued, not only in Gaza but all across Palestine. Various investigations concluded that Palestinians being held without charge or legal representation in Israeli prisons and detention camps, like the notorious Sde Teiman in the Negev desert, are being tortured, starved, raped and left to die. The official death toll of this latest round of Israeli slaughter in Gaza has surpassed 40,000 with many more thousands still buried under the rubble. And after all this, the US government approved weapons sales to the genocidal state of Israel totalling $20bn.
A brutal, systematic war is being waged on my people, in open view of the world, to deprive us of our land and our basic right to dignity. And yet, it seems, the global community has became numb to our suffering, our pain and the injustice we have been subjected to for many decades. Especially those in the West appear indifferent to what Israel, with the help of their governments, is doing to us. This is why Israel has been able to continue this genocide with impunity for 10 long months, and this is why no one even flinched when two of the most powerful men in the world casually used “Palestinian” as a slur on national television.
How did this happen? How did we get here? Since October 7, anyone who has access to social media has undoubtedly seen the mangled corpses of Palestinian children killed by Israeli bombs and bullets. They have seen the starvation, the desperation and the endless destruction. So how can they still turn a blind eye to this carnage? How can they still support politicians who are funding and facilitating a blatant attempt to exterminate an entire people?
The answer, of course, is dehumanisation. Many in the West, especially many in positions of power, do not believe Palestinian life has value – they do not see us as human beings. If Palestinians are somehow proved to be inherently violent beasts in a man-made cage, then our slaughter can be justified.
This dehumanisation obviously did not begin on October 7 but went into overdrive in the past 10 months. Palestinian voices were erased almost completely from political and media spheres. Us Palestinians were not only banned from speaking for ourselves in the public sphere but were yet again branded violent terrorists, beasts and savages for merely resisting our slaughter.
In this context, the relentless stream of images of death and suffering emerging from Gaza numbed outside observers to Palestinian suffering even further. Seeing these images, some doubled down on their belief that Palestinian suffering does not matter because we are all “violent” “terrorists” who cannot be controlled or reasoned with anyway. Others became desensitised to our suffering as an emotional defence mechanism. With a genocide being livestreamed on our phones, each life extinguished has become just another tally mark, another statistic in a war that seems without end.
This atrocity fatigue, which has affected everyone, including those who truly care about Palestinians, also has had a heartbreaking impact on people who are currently in Gaza facing this genocide.
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