Never To Forget
In the Shadow of the West’s Complicity in Gaza, It’s Our Duty to Remember
Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid, no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be undone or prevented. Every event had the finality of a last judgement, a judgement that was passed neither by God nor by the devil but looked rather like the expression of some un-redeemably stupid fatality. —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Against stupidity we are defenceless. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (1951)
For the last few months, I’ve been struggling to find the words.
I know truth—and with it, language—is often the first casualty of war, but truthful clichés aside, I’ve not been in a war myself. I’ve merely watched one from afar, televised, as a news story. Even that word, “war,” is wholly inappropriate to describe what’s been happening, despite the fourth estate clinging to this term like some kind of desperate cover for its complicity.1
I’ve wanted to talk about this—to shout, to scream—but that’s exactly where the words have failed. And I’ve wanted to talk about what it’s been like to sit here, mute, amid the toxic swirl of gaslighting and evasion by the press, politicians, and powerbrokers. But again, the words have only tasted like vomit in my mouth.2
And then, lost in this unholy darkness, I remembered some words—three of them—that my father had tattooed on his forearm. Suddenly I realised I had something to say after all. Those three words were Never To Forget—inscribed on his body 50 years ago as a gift to me; put there to reinforce a promise he’d made to himself to bring me up as best he could, with love, dignity, and respect, and by extension, to protect me from the violence and moral idiocy that marks our benighted age.
I’ve been lucky enough to avoid the former; but the latter, well, that proves almost impossible to elude. That’s why I must talk about it. Because such moral idiocy in large part rests upon forgetting. And such forgetting serves to catalyse and make space for the violence currently taking place in Gaza.
This is especially galling in the West, which has long claimed a kind of moral supremacy over the rest of the world, a right to determine reality, to say what goes. The West forgets at its convenience, rewrites at its leisure. Forgetting and revisionism are coded into its algorithm, underwritten in many instances by the twisted logic of Orientalism.3 The result is that history itself must bend to the West’s will. Indigenous populations wiped away, villages cleared, cultures destroyed, history rewritten, barely a trace left behind.
Sure, this has gone on forever, part of some dark, reptilian impulse buried deep within the human brain, but the difference is that today you can look at your phone and watch a genocide happen in real time, while our leaders backstop the massacre and the media run cover for its perpetrators. Every day for the last 19 months, seemingly intelligent people freely chewing up facts, defending the indefensible, eviscerating truth and condemning those who try in vain to cling to it.
Some rationalise their behaviour as “impartiality,”4 others construct an architecture of asymmetry, obfuscation, and erasure. The real reason is located somewhere at the confluence of fear, cowardice, ignorance, and self-interest. All of it symptomatic of a kind of ethical degeneracy which has long haunted the house of Western liberalism.5
This mode of active, contemporaneous forgetting functions like a kind of dark magic. It is in part the product of both an overexposure to horror, and a desperate need to look away, to pretend that what is happening cannot really be happening. But when you bury your head in the sand these days, you’re likely to find the bodies of murdered aid workers and the twisted metal of their ambulances scattered alongside them.
This dark magic is widespread. It has written itself into the internal neural pathways that process reality and into the external information flows we’ve built to describe and disseminate that reality. It pulls at the seams of sense. It rots the human heart. Such corruption of the spirit is not unlike that which attended the fall of Rome. How quickly the Colosseum inures its audience to the bloody spectacle of violence. How happy we are to tear down the walls of the institutions built to protect us. The hypocrisy is bold and blatant. The West, self-proclaimed champion of human rights, deontological imperatives, and the rule of law, dare not apply those same standards to itself. Not when it occupies the dock; not when it knows what the verdict would be.
“Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations,” writes Dostoevsky in The House of the Dead. “Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate... the return of human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible.”
Today, the tilt toward tyranny is clear.6 Unimaginable for those of us born into the post-war West, where the warm waters of “liberal democracy” have long nurtured our sense of stability and comfort (much of it built on debt, financial engineering and asset price inflation). But then the liberal classes have been a busted flush for a long time now, hierodules to corporatism, duped by the illiberal economics of the free-market fraudsters and spineless technocrats whose job it is to oversee the continuance of colonial exploitation and oppression, just without all the quinine and flag-planting.
You see, little has changed on that front. As the world’s economic systems have been rewired in favour of US corporate hegemony,7 and trillions of dollars of wealth spirited into opaque offshore tax havens,8 the grim wheel of death and destruction has kept on turning. The modus operandi of Western imperialism remains the same as it ever was—just more brown bodies being ground into dust. Meanwhile, our collective morality atrophies in the face of the atrocity exhibition that is currently taking place in Gaza.
Ask yourself, “when was it that things went too far”? Was it when they bombed the first hospital, the first school? Was it when they killed the first journalist, or perhaps the hundredth? Was it when five-year old Hind Rajab and members of her family were gunned down? Was it when seven World Central Kitchen workers were killed in their clearly marked vehicles? Was it when a young man, seemingly still attached to an IV drip, was captured on film, flailing in his hospital bed, burning alive? Was it when the paramedics were executed and buried in shallow graves to hide the evidence? Was it when an on-duty doctor learned that nine of her children had been blown up? Was it when a blockade was placed on any food, medicine or aid entering the territory for more than two months?
Or was it when the International Court of Justice issued provisional orders to the State of Israel to prevent genocide? Or when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu? Or when more than 800 lawyers, legal academics and former judges wrote an open letter to the British Prime Minister warning him that “genocide is being perpetrated in Gaza or, at a minimum, there is a serious risk of genocide occurring.” Or when Human Rights Watch cautioned those states party to the 1948 Genocide Convention, including the US and the UK, that they may risk legal liability for failing to act to prevent genocide in Gaza? Or when Amnesty International published their report concluding that Israel is committing genocide? Or when former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stated that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza.
Perfectly intelligent individuals in positions of power are parroting a lie about Israel’s genocide of Palestinians as if their lives depended on it. Politicians, news anchors, commentators, pundits, propagandists for power… all just doing their jobs. Agents of some un-redeemably stupid fatality. Confusio linguarum. A world turned on its head, in which those who provide cover for violence are valorised, while those who protest it are condemned. No wonder words seem ineffective. No wonder so many people resort to a strategy of silence. This desire to withdraw is almost understandable—the need to forget, right here, right now.
But we must resist this impulse for it drives the moral stupidity which stains this moment in our collective history. Forgetting serves power, and power—both wielding it and bending to it—blinds the eyes of moral insight and blunts the will of moral purpose. If you want clarity on an issue, look to where power truly resides in relation to it, then gauge your response from there. Here’s another clue: fair-minded governments don't tend to seize people off the street for expressing dissent in a university newspaper.
Such overreach reveals a weakness within the power structure. Opposition must be silenced, which at least infers its effective potential. That’s why we must be alive to such abuses, for they represent a corruption of the principles for which we supposedly stand. Hobbes himself noted that power depends not just on fear, but also on passivity.9 That desire to forget in real-time is what ultimately sustains the political, moral, and intellectual corruption that fuels the horror we are witnessing in Gaza.
“In matters of foreign and military policy,” writes the political theorist Sheldon Wolin, “the demos is said to lack the knowledge, experience, and analytic ability to make rational judgements, yet when they have their attention directed upon national and international problems or crises, they are encouraged to respond viscerally to appeals to patriotism, nationalism, and political evangelism. These forms of collective self-righteousness serve as blinders to the consequences, some horrendous and grossly immoral, of its support. The demos becomes at once complicit and irrational.”10
As I write this, the narrative tide is turning (albeit slowly),11 and now is the time for the demos to shed any trace of irrationality or moral shortsightedness. Too many of our political and media classes, who should’ve been calling this out far earlier, have revealed themselves for the moral simpletons they are, ignorant of history, devoid of courage, and let off the hook for way too long by the tractable masses.
It’s now our duty to speak out, resist this moral degradation, and hold those in power to account. To remember what was said, when, where, and by whom.12 To remember and never to forget the excuses they made, the cover they gave, the omissions and obfuscations they oversaw. To remember and never to forget what was done, and that it was done with Western support, Western money, Western bombs.13 That is our task: to remember and never to forget any of it.
It almost goes without saying that the majority of mainstream coverage can be understood as existing within the conceptual framework of “manufactured consent” as laid out by Chomsky more than three decades ago, but for a deeper understanding of how this plays out in relation to Gaza specifically, see the work of Assal Rad, Peter Oborne, Ezgi Başaran, among others, who detail many of the mechanics involved, from delegitimising dissent to frame-building, absence of attribution, and intentional echolalia.
This feeling of hopelessness was summed up in a recent opinion piece by Arwa Mahdawi. She writes: “Where do I even start? In recent weeks I’ve sat down to try and write about Gaza and, every time I steel myself to write about one atrocity, another atrocity is committed… Normally, when I write an opinion piece, it feels like I’m having a little tete-a-tete with the reader. But I don’t really know who I’m writing this piece for. If you’ve read up to here then there’s a good chance you already agree with me, that you’re already appalled by what’s happening and that you’re using your own voice as best you can. And if you are not devastated at this point, then there is simply no convincing you to care.”
For a cogent exploration of this view of European exceptionalism in relation to Israel-Palestine specifically, see Edward W. Said’s The Question of Palestine (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024), specifically Chapter II. Said writes: “This doctrine was reinforced in other ways, some of which had a direct bearing, I think, on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. Among the supposed juridical distinctions between civilised and non-civilised peoples was an attitude toward land, almost a doxology about land, which a non-civilised people supposedly lacked. A civilised man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he bred useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For an uncivilised people, land was either farmed badly (i.e., inefficiently by Western standards) or it was left to rot. From this string of ideas, by which whole native societies who lived on American, African, and Asian territories for centuries were suddenly denied their right to live on that land, came the great dispossessing movement of modern European colonialism, and with them all the schemes for redeeming the land, resettling the natives, civilising them, taming their savage customs, turning them into useful beings under European rule.”
“Impartiality” has long functioned as a rationale for the BBC in particular, which has this nebulous word placed at the heart of its editorial guidelines. But being “impartial” must never be an excuse for failing to communicate the facts of a situation. For a long time, BBC News would trot out climate deniers for fear that it wasn’t being impartial. Today, we’re witness to on-air presenters aggressively interjecting Israeli government talking points into interviews with doctors on the ground in Gaza detailing the carnage and bloodshed they’re witnessing every day. In a recent article in the Independent, former BBC journalist, Karishma Patel, who quit over the Corporation’s position on Gaza, writes: “Impartiality has failed if its key method is to constantly balance “both sides” of a story as equally true. A news outlet that refuses to come to conclusions becomes a vehicle in informational warfare, where bad faith actors flood social media with unfounded claims, creating a post-truth “fog.” Only robust evidence-based conclusions can cut through this.” For an in-depth insight into the internal conflict going on inside BBC News over the issue, see Owen Jones’s extended piece for Drop Site News, The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza. See also, the work of British academics Greg Philo and Mike Berry: Media research shows BBC is very far from “biased against Israel.”
See Chris Hedges’ The Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation Books, 2011), which offers a compelling argument concerning the critical failure of liberal institutions, specifically the press, universities, and the Democratic party itself, which has left America open to the influence of corporatists, plutocrats, and political ideologues.
Clearly, old-school authoritarianism is on the rise, but perhaps more worrying is what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor term “end times fascism.” They write: “Alive to our era of genuine existential danger—from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI—but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of de-humanised others.”
For a deeper dive into the transmogrification of Western economic imperialism and the machinations of US corporate control, see the work of former Financial Times journalist, Matt Kennard, specifically The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire (London: Bloomsbury, 2023) and (with Claire Provost) Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy (London: Bloomsbury, 2023).
Both the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers revealed the scale of this financial malfeasance. Estimates vary, but a 2010 report by the UK’s Tax Justice Network reckoned there to be between at least $21-$32 trillion of financial wealth stored offshore. For a deep dive into this topic, see Nicholas Shaxson’s eye-opening Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens (London: Macmillan, 2012), which reveal’s the extent of the UK’s role in this system, effectively a continuance of Empire by other means.
Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (London: Penguin Classics, 2017). Hobbes’ famous description of a life ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ describes the situation of so many people in Gaza. Political and social contracts aside, our moral contract with them is broken, and has been for a very long time.
Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Spectre of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future political orientation of America and the West more broadly. His vision of despotism is built on the increased prevalence of corporate power and the passivity of the populace, providing a useful framework with which to consider the modes and methods that have defined state control in the neoliberal era and how these might evolve in the future.
The political tide is turning too (albeit even more slowly). See the recent Joint statement from the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Canada on the situation in Gaza and the West Bank. And while such moves are welcome (and essential for bringing this horror to an end), here in the UK at least, it feels like politicians are doing a lot of talking and not much walking. In fact, it’s far worse than that: the Labour government is still supplying arms to Israel, more in the final three months of 2024 than the Tories did for all of 2020-2023, according to a report by CAAT. A second report, using Israeli tax data, gives even more detail about the type of arms supplied from October 2023 to March 2025. Plus, the Royal Airforce has conducted over 500 surveillance flights over or near Gaza’s airspace in the last 15 months, according to an investigation by Declassified UK, raising further questions about the UK’s possible complicity in breaching international law.
Or what wasn’t said. Condemnation for the horrific attacks on October 7 was rightly forthcoming and vociferous. But how long, and how much evidence, was required before our political and media classes began speaking out about the obliteration of Gaza? They have been fudging this issue for well over a year and a half. As they now rush to condemn the most recent blockade as “monstrous,” we should never forget, for example, Kier Starmer’s early defence of Israeli siege tactics during an interview on LBC, all in the name of “Israel’s right to defend herself.” Notice there’s never, never any mention of the Palestinians’ right to defend themselves from illegal occupation.
See the Quincy Institute’s recent report ‘Under Primacy, Weapons Sales Will Always Supersede Human Rights’, which highlights successive US administrations’ hypocrisy over arms sales as balanced against their supposed declarations in support of human rights legislation. According to the report: “The history of America’s unwillingness to sacrifice the profits of the U.S. defense industry to the rule of law, combined with the unique privilege enjoyed by the state of Israel, should have meant that U.S. support for Israel in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, was not surprising. Yet even the Israeli military expected the United States to allow them to carry out the indiscriminate bombing campaign only for a matter of weeks before reining in the scale of destruction, as the U.S. had repeatedly done in the past. Instead, the Biden administration violated American laws and bypassed Congress to rush an unprecedented $17.9 billion in weapons and security assistance to Israel, all while lying to the American public about working tirelessly toward a ceasefire.”
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