Silencing statistics, silencing genocide, betraying Palestinian lives and memory

On Thursday last week, the US House of Representatives passed an amendment to prevent the US State Department from using Gaza’s Health Ministry statistics to cite the casualty figures for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Israel regularly states that it has no information on the Palestinian civilians killed and wounded by its bombs, preferring to focus the narrative on purportedly eradicating Hamas. The latest pro-Israel gesture by Congress, therefore, means that the State Department is now completely complicit in trying to erase the fact of genocide from global memory. For Palestinians, the legislation signifies another step in their annihilation and obliteration from both memory and statistics.

If the bill passes the Senate, the State Department’s silence is guaranteed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really couldn’t ask for more. In November last year, at the beginning of the genocide, the assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs admitted that the killing toll could be even higher than that reported by Gaza’s health ministry. “We’ll know after the guns fall silent,” she added. So far, the genocide is still raging and evidence of families completely wiped out by Israel keeps emerging. The House of Representatives solution is to enforce such oblivion.

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While Israel kills, the US silences dissent by stifling the information at source. At a time when social media disseminates news at such a fast pace, the only discrepancy lies in the fact that governments have the authority to manipulate politics in the name of democracy. Such amendments will not silence the truth from emerging, but they will increase the likelihood of an ongoing genocide which Israel can pursue at its leisure. Indeed, the longer it takes, the more the international community will likely speak of human rights violations rather than genocide. Take the shock element away by prolonging the violence, and the UN follows suit by mellowing its language even further. We then have “genocide denial,” as US Congress Representative Rashida Tlaib put it so succinctly. And in a world that is ready to protect Israel no matter what it does, genocide denial triumphs over international law.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres stated that “no place is safe in Gaza” following recurring evacuation orders in which Palestinians are ordered to safety, only to be blown to shreds by Israeli bombs. Palestinians have been crying that the entire Gaza Strip is unsafe, but the UN has done nothing to provide even a semblance of safety. However, for diplomatic purposes, Guterres does not mind appropriating the Palestinian narrative which he has ignored since taking office, as did other UN diplomats before him and during his tenure. Silencing Palestinians is not a new tactic, but combining it with the silencing of the voices iterating the facts of Israel’s genocide adds to the lethality.

As Israel’s genocide unfolds with impunity, Palestinians are killed daily and Israeli ministers dream of recolonising Gaza and spreading their genocidal actions across the whole of occupied Palestine, rendering Palestinians invisible.

Such invisibility, though, is also an illusion.

To commit a genocide, the population targeted for extermination must exist; you cannot pretend that, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people,” as one far-right Israeli minister claimed last year. As in the 1948 Nakba, there was never a barren land devoid of people; Palestine was a land with indigenous Palestinian people whom the UN trampled upon to help create the genocidal colonial power that established itself on stolen land. This genocide is a direct reflection of the oblivion enforced by the UN, and the US has learnt to parrot the parts of the narrative that suit Israel’s purpose well.

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