A Wall of Silence

Since the Hamas attack on October 7, Israel has been escalating its military siege of Gaza. The list of crimes against humanity continues to grow: the killing of journalists and UN aid workers, the bombing of hospitals, the luring of refugees to specific sites only to bomb them, too. All of these combined equate to what scholars of genocide are calling exactly that. New images of profound suffering and mourning appear daily. The brutal reality of this war is inescapable. It cannot be hidden behind the engines of manufactured consent that set public discourse during the Iraq War. We can all see online the images of women searching for their children within seas of body bags, of babies being taken off incubation because of lack of electricity as doctors scramble to keep them alive while under constant bombardment. We can also see viral TikToks, like the one of the Israeli settler praying for a time when Gaza is replaced with Disney World and Starbucks. In a New Yorker interview with Isaac Chotiner, Daniella Weiss, a leader of Israel’s settlement movement, made explicit…