Nice and White During a Genocide
Do you say you want peace? Do you say “it’s awful”? Do you tell your friends that maybe you need to take a break from social media? See also: are you nice and white during a genocide?
You scroll through pictures of charred dead babies trapped under rubble. Videos of mothers sprinting through blasted hospital corridors, their blood-curdling screams of grief piercing through the hum of hovering drones.
In the dust of an Israeli airstrike, another family who moments before was eating dinner together, is now gasping for breath under the weight of the home they saved for years to afford. A child digs desperately for his baby brother, finding only one cold, severed foot.
She was my newlywed, he was studying to be a doctor. We dreamed of traveling together, they painted the most exquisite art. Entire generations of Palestinians evaporated in the gasp of an American bomb: She is the soul of my soul. She is my mother, I know her from her hair.
You aren’t sure if it’s appropriate yet to post a picture of your meal. You are nice and white during a genocide.
You want peace. “It’s awful.” You liked it better before, when Israel murdered Palestinians with less fanfare, and you weren’t expected to have an opinion about it. You preferred when U.S.-made bullets assassinated Palestinians silently, bleeding out in the street with less of a fuss. You think you need to take a break from social media: You want the next news cycle more than you want justice. You are nice and white during a genocide.
You have clients and friends and family who support Israel and you don’t want to isolate anyone. Thousands of kids’ bodies pile up dead and decomposing, but let’s not bring it up and make anyone uncomfortable. You want Palestinians to accept their annihilation quietly. Let the stray cats eat the corpses; you are nice and white during a genocide.
Your empty platitudes of peace scatter like limbs along a trail of tears. You want to wait until western institutions decree that it was in fact a genocide before you say anything. Before you risk anything. Your political morality moves at the glacial pace of your own comfort, incentivized to slow the tide of liberation because the current system suits you just fine. Your baby didn’t decompose in a hospital incubator. Palestinians should be patient for peace. “It’s complicated.” You are nice and white during a genocide.
You want award-winning white scholarly books, papers, and documentaries to affirm it was genocide before you speak – when it’s too late to intervene – instead of trusting Palestinians who still have breath in their lungs. You laude liberatory resistance like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Nat Turner Rebellion when they are etched into history books – defanged, decontextualized, and archival enough to be unthreatening to you personally – but you can't muster the courage to support Palestinian decolonial liberation when it counts. You heard they are the “children of darkness,” and you are nice and white during a genocide.
You do not know life under military occupation. You do not know life under siege. What it’s like to be shaken awake in the dead of night by armed occupiers who tie up and torment your family just to remind you you’re never safe or free from their fascist reach. What it’s like to clutch the key to your family home that settlers blissfully squat in just miles away. Armed resistance? That’s a bit much. But of course your heart breaks for those poor starving children. You are much more comfortable viewing Palestinians as objects of pity in need of aid than respecting them as agents of liberation teaching the entire world how to get free. You are nice and white during a genocide.
You know clean running water, a stocked fridge, a warm bed. You haven’t lived a life rendered so strangled by occupation that there’s nothing left to lose. Look Palestine in the eye and tell her you want her to die silently so you don’t have to see any more of her flesh and blood splattered across your newsfeed. Tell her you’re paying for the bombs. That you don’t care for her children like you care for your own white kin. Tell her yourself.
But if it was your home stolen and your neighborhood burned to the ground? If you watched your partner shot dead in their bedroom? If your babies were kidnapped and tortured—perhaps you too would yearn and burn for a thousand lifetimes to seek freedom by any means necessary. But you are nice and white during a genocide.
Your life hasn’t changed that much, really. Still shopping online, seeing friends, seeking healing and “self-improvement.” But you’re missing it. Palestinians enduring generational genocide have emerged like poppies bursting through cracked concrete —upending entrenched systems of oppression and insisting on life against all odds. Palestinians are setting you free, too. This is a new dawn, a prison break of justice, and you don’t even know it yet. You cling to the corpse of a dying world order that has already perished under the weight of a hellfire missile. The phoenix of Palestine rises despite your silence.
If you cannot speak up unwaveringly for Palestinian liberation now, keep your hollow, feeble, words to yourself for the rest of time. Your unprincipled, untrustworthy analysis is not needed again. May the career you clung to out of fear turn to dust in your hands. May your cowardice be legendary.
Palestinians teach us life. You are the “human animal.” You are the silent killer. You are the sniper. You dropped the bomb. You starved the child. You let her die of thirst. You raped the captive. You burned the trees. You waited and wished for it to pass and did nothing, risked nothing, when it mattered. May no one ever treat you with such mercilessness if the tables were turned. Your spinelessness makes a mockery of your professed ethics, burying the remains of your morality in a mass grave along with your complicit peers. Your silence shatters humanity’s ear drums. You are nice and white during a genocide.
“If you cannot speak up unwaveringly for Palestinian liberation now, keep your hollow, feeble, words to yourself for the rest of time. Your unprincipled, untrustworthy analysis is not needed again. May the career you clung to out of fear turn to dust in your hands. May your cowardice be legendary.” Another powerful piece from Amanda! ❤️🙏🏽🇵🇸
“You want to wait until western institutions decree that it was in fact a genocide before you say anything. Before you risk anything. Your political morality moves at the glacial pace of your own comfort, incentivized to slow the tide of liberation because the current system suits you just fine. Your baby didn’t decompose in a hospital incubator. Palestinians should be patient for peace. “It’s complicated.” You are nice and white during a genocide. You want award-winning white scholarly books, papers, and documentaries to affirm it was genocide before you speak – when it’s too late to intervene – instead of trusting Palestinians who still have breath in their lungs.” So powerful 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 thank you Amanda for putting so many of my feelings about silence in this moment into words.