Israel is still killing Gaza.
Why does nobody seems to notice anymore?
For the last two months, Israel has maintained a complete blockade preventing food, medicine, and other humanitarian assistance from reaching the remnants of Gaza. Food and supplies stockpiled during the brief ceasefire have mostly run out, warns the World Food Programme, and little produce can be grown in a landscape utterly destroyed by a virtually unprecedented level of bombing and dislocation. Every humanitarian organization, from the United Nations to the major relief NGOS, is once again sounding the alarm of incipient famine and warning that conditions are the worst they have ever been. Israeli leaders are quite clear, as they have been from the start, that this is the intended outcome of the blockade, even as the International Court of Justice takes up the question of starvation as a war crime. And even as Gaza starves, Israel has resumed its brutal war on Gaza's population, adding some 2000 dead in the last two months to the 52,000 confirmed Gazans killed in the war (the real toll is almost certainly much higher).
And yet few seem to care this time. It's not because we don't know. Reporters still report, human rights organizations record the atrocities, the International Court of Justice holds hearings, the UN issues increasingly frantic warnings. Doctors Without Borders has released a remarkable page featuring highly detailed, day by day documentation of the devastation of Gaza (with a special focus on attacks on hospitals and health care workers) throughout the long war. NPR recently released a powerful multimedia account of the death of 132 members of one family in a single Israeli strike. Al-Jazeera released a vast archive of social media posting from Gaza's "livestreamed genocide."
But they don't get the traction they once did. The US and the world seem to have moved on even as Gazans continue to die and Israel's Defense Minister explains that the blockade will not be lifted. Why has Israel's renewed onslaught over the last two months received so much less attention this time around? Here are three factors:
First, at least in the United States, Donald Trump's systematic destruction of the American economy, state, universities and democracy takes up almost all the oxygen in the public sphere. Right now, it's just difficult for any issue that isn't Trump to get any traction. Tellingly, as this Google Trends search shows, the only time Gaza news has spiked in the last year was when Trump unveiled his demented plan to expel all 2 million Palestinians from Gaza and build beach resorts in their place. I'm guilty of this too, as the urgency of defending higher education from the administration's brazen assaults takes up so much time and energy that previously would have gone to regional crises like Gaza.
Second, the repression of campus protestors which began under Biden and has accelerated under Trump to an unprecedented pitch has clearly taken its toll. As predicted, the Trump administration used "antisemitism" as a wedge to unleash an unprecedented assault on higher education. Its use of federal grants to blackmail colleges and universities to crack down on student protestors and interfere with Middle East teaching and research was only the beginning: the same tools used to pressure higher education over Palestine seamlessly transfer to equally unacceptable demands on transgender athletes, DEI, climate change, and any other right wing bugbear. Arrests, deportations, and canceling of student visas which first targeted international students who participated in Gaza protests – or who just published an oped calling for peace – quickly expanded to include almost any international student.
The organizations and individuals who led the charge in protesting Israel's war are on the defensive. Some of them (like MESA and AAUP) have played excellent defense, challenging the administration in court and exposing the cynical insincerity of the 'antisemitism' allegations. But they are still playing defense against a powerful onslaught far worse than that of the McCarthy era. Many students have already paid a terrible price for political activism which on any other issue would have been clearly seen as constitutionally protected speech, only to be abandoned by craven university leaderships. Harvard's task force reports on antisemitism and Islamophobia released recently reported "92 percent of Muslim survey respondents saying they believed they would face an academic or professional penalty for expressing their political opinions"; those findings will not be the subject of Congressional hearings or DOJ investigations.
To be clear: the ferocity of the repression suggests weakness, not strength; opinion polls and elite discourse suggest that the crudity and brutality of the attacks on student protestors (like the rendering of immigrants to El Salvador and the many other instances of Trump overreach) are triggering a backlash. But that doesn't make the current climate any less frightening or the suffering inflicted any less painful.
Third, the war has gone on for so long that its horrors have become normalized, and attempting to stop or even alleviate them comes to seem pointless. "Never again" has become "every day." That's the price of Israeli impunity for its war crimes. The most intense campus protests in a generation, urgent efforts by every major humanitarian and human rights organization, even unprecedented rulings by the International Court of Justice and prosecutions by the International Criminal Court – none of it managed to break through the protective wall of Israeli impunity established and defended by the United States.
Protection from international legal institutions by US support and supplied by insane levels of essentially unconditional US arms even as Netanyahu repeatedly defied US pressure and undermined its ceasefire efforts allowed Israel's most extreme right wing politicians to defy both international pressure and domestic dissent to continue killing Gaza. Former Biden officials desperately want to blame everything on Trump, but nobody should ever forget who oversaw, armed, and facilitated Israel's destruction of Gaza.
As scholars and analysts, we need to do what we can to keep public attention on Gaza, overcoming exhaustion, political repression, pressures to self-censor, and the distractions of the daily Trump show to keep trying to alleviate the suffering and push for some kind of justice – and to make sure that none of this is forgotten.
Abu Aardvark's MENA Academy features book review essays and podcasts, roundups of new academic publications, and my commentary and analysis of Middle East politics and the academy.
