After decades of oppression and 21 months of sustained bombings, mass shootings, and forced starvation, the people of Gaza are on their last leg. Reports of the famine there are as horrific as anything in modern history. Images of children and babies emaciated to the bone pour out of the region every day, and the situation is only getting worse.

All of this is intentional, imposed on Gaza by the state of Israel and supported throughout the US government. Israel has completely obliterated the region’s infrastructure and land and is now deliberately preventing aid from getting in. Even more despicably, when aid does manage to enter the strip, Israeli soldiers slaughter the hungry people trying to reach it. This kind of massacre, one of the most depraved things anyone can imagine, is now routine.

Only now are some Western leaders and talking heads coming around. Among others, The New York Times, a longstanding and defiant supporter of Israel even through the worst atrocities, is gradually growing more critical. But plenty of observers have known for a long time that this latest flare-up between Israel and Palestine was different from previous skirmishes. This time, from the beginning, the intent and the actions have been purely genocidal.

If you’re just waking up to the horror now, then welcome aboard. It’s time to speak up. And if you haven’t woken up yet, you have precious little time left to do so. Gaza may not last much longer. And when the people there are all gone, when we’re realizing the extent of the horror we have perpetrated, you won’t be able to say you weren’t told. This is a US atrocity as much as it is an Israeli one, and every American who looked the other way shares in the responsibility. 

Our shared responsibility in the crime of the century

Without US blessing, Israel couldn’t get away with what it’s doing in Gaza. US funding essentially helped build the modern state of Israel, especially its military. Even today, as our screens are filled with images of parents gathering the pieces of their bombed babies and decimation as far as the eye can see, we have continued to send more aid and weaponry, totaling nearly $18 billion since October 7, 2023.

In other words, we are responsible. All of us. Both the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration. Members of both parties. Propagandists, diplomats, cabinet officials, congresspeople, military brass, defense contractors, and, to a certain extent, the American people.

Start from the top. When the fighting began in October 2023, the Biden Administration pledged its uncritical support for Israel’s campaign, sent them billions of dollars, and ran diplomatic cover even as international outcry increased, culminating with the International Criminal Court calling for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, under the Trump Administration, Israel has stepped up the carnage. And President Trump has openly expressed his desire to ethnically cleanse Gaza and build luxury hotels atop their mass graves. Trump has even taken to using the term “Palestinian” as a slur.

At a lower level, Biden Administration spokesman Matthew Miller, who now admits Israel committed war crimes, lied daily to the American people and, when pressed, used the same excuse as Nazi war criminals: he was just doing his job. Continued funding for Israel’s genocide receives near-unanimous, bipartisan support. Even a politician as supposedly left-wing as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez deserves culpability for her insistent lies that Vice President Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.” 

Then there is the cadre of pundits who downplayed or ignored every Israeli atrocity and sensationalized every attack by Hamas, perpetuating false stories about mass rape and baby beheadings. Add to them the university administrators, police officers, and ICE agents who violently assaulted peaceful protesters on college campuses who were demanding an end to the carnage, going so far as to attempt to deport some of them. 

Imagine how far gone a society must be to get to the point where protesting a genocide is a greater crime than perpetrating one.

The academic and activist Eman Abdelhadi said it best: “Every editor who cancelled a story about Palestine brought us here. Every boss who censored an employee. Everyone who said ‘not this way’ to protesters. Every university admin calling the cops. Bloody. All your hands are bloody, and we will never forget.”

I would add to this guilty roster the American people – you and I included. Our tax dollars funded this atrocity. And our consent, whether explicit or implicit, has allowed it to go on. 

Some of these people – especially the further up you go – are sick, malevolent monsters who are relishing in this genocide. Plenty of others may not be. But just as people enable these atrocities, people can stop them, too. Politicians can stop signing checks for the bombs. Police and military can lay down their arms and join the protesters. And ordinary people have more power than they think, and can force change through civil disruptions, boycotts, mass strikes, and other collective actions.

A sliver of hope to redeem ourselves

The only way to salvage the piece of our souls we’re surrendering for this historic atrocity is to immediately reverse course and start helping the people of Gaza, then prosecute those responsible, including and especially within our own government. If it takes every single one of them down and they all need to be replaced, so much the better. We should also support the ICC’s attempts to bring Netanyahu and his coconspirators in the Likud Party to justice.

But that likely won’t happen, and even expressing the wish feels fanciful. Somehow, we’re so twisted that for far too many of us, justice sounds more radical than genocide.

Still, there’s no need for the American people to go to hell alongside our leaders. We do not have to stand by while our money is used to perpetrate atrocities like this. If you have always told yourself you’d have opposed slavery or the holocaust had you been alive, now’s your chance to be that hero.

And none of this is about a “holier than thou” attitude. The American people have our own problems and burdens. I have not done enough, either. But this is a basic moral test. We’re not just witnessing, but perpetuating, a genocide, and it isn’t asking much to oppose it. Post about it on social media, sign petitions, write to media outlets, protest, join aid flotillas. There is no sacrifice too great in the face of this greatest of all evils. Maybe the only one truly absolved of complicity in this horror is Aaron Bushnell, the Air Force serviceman who burned himself alive in protest. 

Long before October 7, international observers were calling Gaza the world’s largest “open-air prison.” It has essentially been a concentration camp for generations. The people there have lived their whole lives under brutal oppression, and now they are living through their own holocaust, funded by US taxpayers. You may not like the way some of them chose to fight on October 7, but whatever your feelings about it, that attack has long since been paid back hundredfold in death and misery.

The US has done a lot of terrible things in its long history. But rarely in modern times have we been faced with something so monstrous, perpetrated in broad daylight and livestreamed on every platform, where we are so unequivocally in the wrong. If we can’t get this one right, then we are truly lost. Even if there is some miraculous turnaround and what’s left of Gaza is saved, the world will never forgive the perpetrators. You owe it to yourself not to be on the side of history’s next great evil.