Gaza is a ‘killing field’ where people are being starved. How long will the world tolerate this by Arwa Mahdawi

I have written a lot of op-eds where I’m essentially just begging people – including some of my colleagues in the western media – to give a damn about Palestinian suffering. To remember that Palestinians are humans too. To remember that starving civilians is a war crime, one which should not be sanitized with the passive voice and obfuscating language. To understand that this isn’t some distant foreign policy issue: this genocide is US-taxpayer funded. Meanwhile, unprecedented attempts to suppress free speech in the US on Palestine have turned this into a domestic issue.

I’m done begging people to care about Palestinians now. I’m writing this not because I hope to change any minds, but because the only power I have – the only power that many of us have – is to continually raise our voices and say that we do not consent to this.

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this,” the journalist Omar El Akkad wrote. When that day comes, nobody can pretend they didn’t know.