by Christopher Horner
Appearances can change. This can be because the thing you are viewing has changed, or because you have moved, so what was there anyway now looks different. In a ‘parallax shift’ an object’s position appears to change when viewed from a new vantage point. This latter is what is happening in the way ‘The West’, now looks to its own citizens. The cause is the continued refusal by political leaders to do anything to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
For Western political and media elites, events in Gaza are somehow complex, and legally ambiguous, obscured by a diplomatic word-fog. Meanwhile the rest of us have clear real-time images on our screens of what is happening there: mass murder. You can’t miss it, unless you are choosing to look away. So, look. Then turn back to the USA, UK, Germany et al. They seem complicit – because they are, and have been for a long time
The recent, very late acknowledgement by the media and political classes that something terrible is happening and that somehow Israel has some responsibility, is motivated by a desire to avoid looking responsible for what is now unfolding. Their chatter about this is the grotesque soundtrack to what is beamed live into our mobile phones and homes: genocide, now in the form of planned starvation of a civilian population. It can’t be just shrugged off as the news cycle moves on.
A striking thing about the ongoing atrocities occurring in Gaza, the West Bank and nearby has been the strange inability of many people to talk or think intelligently about it, let alone to be ethically engaged with it. Individuals who were full of anger at the invasion of Ukraine, or Trump’s ICE deportations, display a moral blankness when it comes to the destruction of children in Gaza. And let’s recall that the perpetrators of this crime have been clearly and repeatedly telling the world that this was their intention all along: the killing or displacement the Palestinian population. It hasn’t been hidden from sight. The difference is that it is getting hard to keep the disavowal going.
This is not new. The gap between the rhetoric of human rights and freedom and the reality of western backed murder and oppression in various parts of the world goes back a long way. Plenty in the global south have been on the sharp end of it, and don’t need a change of perspective to know what is happening. The Palestinians exposed to expulsion, occupation and now genocide don’t need to be told the news. But we do, it seems. The world sees those that announced an ‘international rules-based order’ supply the weaponry and diplomatic cover for a state to breach it in the most egregious way possible. It is the most recent variation on an old dance. What may be new is how it is displayed in all its nakedness to populations in the West, through a thousand social media platforms and conduits.
Silence or equivocation regarding Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza, equates to complicity in those crimes. This silence has been striking, especially given Western proclamations of Human Rights. The genuine demand for justice is grounded in something authentically universal; the counterfeit version often promoted by the West has been quite different: particular interests, masked by the rhetoric of universality. When Palestinians are excluded from this ‘universal’, it is exposed as partial and fraudulent. Again, compare the official moral outrage over Ukraine to the equivocation and denial regarding genocide in Gaza. For genocideis occurring there, as a brief look at the UN convention will tell you. [1]
This is more than policy; it is a politics of erasure—not simply avoiding action, but working actively (through language, media, legal instruments) to suppress recognition of Palestinian suffering, while supplying weapons to their tormentors. Some lives matter, while others are made invisible – or they would be if the means could be found to shut down the livestreaming of mass murder.
Gaza represents for the West a traumatic “Real”—a kernel of truth that, if acknowledged, shatters the fantasy of Western innocence and humanitarian self-image. Culpable silence is not just political expediency; it is a psychic defence mechanism that maintains liberal fantasy at the cost of Palestinian life
Applying the notion of parallax shift does not merely expose difference in narrative; it forces a reckoning with the constructed nature of Western innocence. To see the West’s own role alters what is understood about the situation in Gaza, which in turn changes the way the West is seen. To really see and hear Gaza is to risk the collapse of cherished Western fantasies—but this is the only ethical course. The question is whether it is one that will be taken. We must do all we can to make it happen.
Free Palestine.