Genocide and the Deafening Silence

A few thoughts for the silent majority.

There are only 193 countries in the world, and I like to have some idea of what's going on in all of them.  It inevitably surprises the cab drivers that I know the name of the capital city of the country they're from.  I memorized them all when I was 12.  It doesn't take much to impress most any African, Arab, or eastern European cab driver.

There are terrible things going on in many different parts of the world, and I try to keep tabs on a whole lot of it.  There has been a huge upswing in wars, civil wars, and famines in lots of different countries, most of which are related to some combination of climate change, the sanctions on Russia that have quintupled so many commodity prices globally, and huge structural problems like so many governments that are basically collapsing under the weight of their national debt.

There's only one country, which isn't officially a country, part of which consists of a walled ghetto which is being systematically starved and bombed for the past 19 months, and which was being regularly bombed and deprived of necessities for decades before 2023 -- only one.  That country, or that occupied place, is called Palestine.

I have woken up every morning for the past 19 months wondering how many children were bombed or starved to death since I went to sleep.  Al-Jazeera provides this information for me, as best as they can.  They only know for sure who died whose bodies were found, rather than all the unknown possibly hundreds of thousands who are buried beneath rubble that no human can possibly move without the right equipment, none of which is available.

When the US invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001, I bought five different t-shirts that had a huge, sinister-looking image of GW Bush with bold yellow words that said INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST.  It seemed like the only reasonable thing to do, when your country's military was regularly bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan, torturing prisoners, and committing massacres of civilians in Iraq.

I kept very busy back then singing at antiwar protests and other events.  Mostly small ones, occasionally big.  It was easy to be ensconced in that community most anywhere I went, which was mostly in North America and Europe.  But it was also too easy to get an idea of how the general public felt about these wars, and this president, and the guy wearing that t-shirt, or some combination thereof, anyway.  Overwhelmingly, it was silence.  People look away and pretend not to notice, or they notice and they maintain a stern expression of some kind.  Maybe 1 in 100 passersby would smile or say something indicating their opposition to the so-called "War on Terror."  Less often, people would be hostile.

I've been writing about the Palestinian struggle now for 25 years, but my level of engagement increased a lot since October, 2023.  Sometime around then I acquired a number of Palestine flag t-shirts, and I've been wearing one most days since then.

People involved with protesting or otherwise organizing to try to stop the war machine have of course wanted to show how many people in the US and other countries are opposed to Israel's war on Gaza, and depending on which poll you look at, there seem to be a lot of them. 

But going to the protests in the US and other countries, while they are sometimes big, they're almost never nearly as big as the numbers being put out by organizers, which are often the same ones used by the media these days, bizarrely.  (The media didn't used to do that.)

And walking down the street in Portland, or in a random airport, or in London, it is overwhelmingly stony silence that greets me everywhere I go.  Now and then a woman in a hijab or an Arab family at an airport will smile at me.  Embarrassingly, they often thank me.  But otherwise it's as it was with the Bush t-shirt I used to wear -- no reaction.

I feel like I'm living in a different dimension from the vast majority of my fellow humans, at least in the countries I frequent.  There's a walled ghetto being bombed and starved every day for the past 19 months, with hundreds of thousands actually killed, many more hundreds of thousands wounded, and two million people now on the brink of starvation.  And it's all being livestreamed, minute by minute, on Al-Jazeera and any number of other places online, by Palestinians who are taking great risks just to get to a wifi hotspot where they can send out the photos and videos and other reports documenting their own annihilation.

Random people, like the checkout person at Trader Joe's, ask how I'm doing, ask what I'm up to this weekend, reflect on some recent local event, and they never say anything about my t-shirt.  There's a genocide happening, have you heard the news?  I want to ask, but I don't.

I write songs about the ongoing Palestinian apocalypse, and a hardcore group of fans tell me how good the latest song is with great enthusiasm, and they thank me for doing this work.  It's usually the same people, I recognize most of the handles on YouTube and Substack and wherever else.  

But in terms of the broader public, once again, it's silence.  By the time one song I put out last week got a thousand views on X, it had been reposted 15 times.  That's 1.5% of people who watched the video felt moved to share it.

At the same time, it's clear there is concern and interest -- for example, with the onset of the genocide, my audience on Spotify increased by 50%.  People who are looking for artists who have written a lot about the Palestinian struggle found me.  But that doesn't mean hardly any of them are bold enough to repost a song on X or Facebook.

Are they concerned their boss will see the post, and they'll get fired?  Or that they'll alienate some of their friends or relatives by taking a public position on this ongoing genocide?  Or if they are artists, that they'll never play at another folk festival in the US again?  Or they'll lose their record contract?

These are all typical consequences to speaking up about Palestine in a serious way, so that other people actually notice.  Quite likely to happen, from my experience, and by my observation of what happens to other people, too.

We hear about and perhaps celebrate the ones who speak out regardless, and suffer serious consequences for it.  We hear much less about the many more who stay quiet, keep their  heads down, don't get involved with saying what they think of controversial, divisive issues.

An artist might deign to make a "ceasefire now" statement, and their career survives, more or less intact.  Dare to denounce Israel's genocide against the Palestinians and you've crossed a line that will likely have consequences, and so most artists never do it.  An artist might write a generic peace song, but not a song criticizing the genocidal intentions or deeds of the self-proclaimed Jewish State.  And they won't share any of the songs I've written about this subject either.

Those few people with large followings who do ever share my songs on this subject are people who are already defined by the issue -- journalists like Sam Husseini or Sarah Wilkinson.  People who have been brutalized by police, and otherwise already faced serious consequences for daring to speak out.  The other people with big accounts I've shared songs with who haven't shared them with you are too numerous to name.

If this were a predominantly Muslim nation bombing and starving millions of people living in a walled-off ghetto who were Jewish, you can be sure there would have been all sorts of international intervention by now.  But not if the situation is the reverse.

Just in the past couple of weeks, coverage on BBC has changed.  It's become just a little more like Al-Jazeera.  They're now telling us each day how many hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by the Jewish army of Israel, though of course they don't call it that, and they always make sure to uncritically mouth the nonsense being put out by Israel's slick PR machine claiming that every one of those bombings were targeting Hamas, despite the high death toll of children in all of them, despite the obvious fact that they're targeting hospital staff and patients half the time.

I guess BBC management doesn't want to go down in history as doing what most of the American media is still doing, even now, and mostly ignoring the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, or the daily, violent pogroms in the Occupied West Bank, or the frequent Israeli bombings of targets in Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen.  Let's just talk about tariffs, that plane in Qatar, and the new Pope.

Over these 19 months in my travels I have so often been in social situations where I see old friends and comrades who are as obsessively attentive to every development in Gaza as I am.  This is never surprising.

What is always surprising is the number of people I see who seem to be living on a different planet from me.  So many people horrified by all the things Trump is doing, who seem to have forgotten that this genocide is still ongoing, and that it's a bipartisan one -- and has been for the past 80 years or so.

I go to England and I hear about the rise of Reform UK, and how pathetic the Labor Party continues to be when it comes to running the government in such a way that things like the health service functions like it used to do, or in such a way that housing is affordable.  For so many, as long as the lesser evil party is managing to hold onto power, the genocide they are sponsoring along with the Tories seems to be somewhere far back in the order of their priorities.

I go to Scandinavia and find a greater degree of involvement with the issue overall, but still plenty of people who are clearly much more concerned about the rise of antisemitism in Europe, or the growth of a local rightwing party, than about the genocide of the Palestinians which all of their mainstream political parties actively support by trading with and helping to arm the fascist state of Israel.

As I've said a lot, along with lots of other people, at some point in the future, perhaps not even the distant future, countries will be building museums to remember the genocided Palestinians.  People, pundits, national leaders will broadly proclaim how they failed to stop this genocide, how they didn't realize it was really happening or whatever other utter nonsense they might come up with.  They'll say they just couldn't imagine a Jewish State could possibly do such a thing, despite it being livestreamed on the internet hour by fatal hour.

It's just as ridiculous as realizing after the fact that maybe killing millions of civilians in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia over years of constant bombing was a bad idea.

Back then, there was a much bigger and more sustained resistance movement in the US, which faced all the same obstacles as people have faced during this one.  But it still was never a movement that became the kind of mass movement that history has seen before, leading to things like general strikes.  There were no general strikes against these wars, except for student strikes.  Almost every day, the ports stayed open and the weapons kept being shipped, then as now.

I have watched this genocidal war being conducted on the people of Gaza for the past 19 months, and now, along with so many others who are living in the same reality as me, I wait with absolute, abject horror for the far greater numbers of death through starvation to begin in earnest, as so many people in the Gaza Strip have barely eaten in months.

While I appreciate the efforts of the activist few -- mostly Jews and Muslims who feel too  personally tied up with the situation to ignore it -- the silence of most people throughout the western world, at least among the countries that I frequent, particularly across the US, is deafening.

I will never be the same.  And in the future if I ever hear anyone talking about "never again" in relation to the Nazi holocaust who is not in the same breath talking about the genocide of the Palestinians by an army of Jews, I don't know what I'll do.