It is a peculiarity of our age that such monumental suffering as that endured by the people of Gaza has come to feel, for much of the world, like background noise—static behind the headlines, present but ultimately ignorable. In the global psyche, there is a disquieting resignation, as if Palestinians are fated to die, as if their lives carry less moral urgency, and their agony is somehow part of the natural order of things. It’s an indictment not only of politics,but of collective conscience, an indictment in which every bystander has a share.
The normalisation of Palestinian suffering did not happen overnight. It is the product of decades of dispossession, war, and occupation, met largely with diplomatic handwringing and vague calls for restraint. Each wave of violence has followed a familiar script: horrifying images fill our screens, leaders issue statements expressing“deep concern,” and then the world moves on—except for Gaza, which is left to bury the dead, mourn the missing, and somehow rebuild yet again. The slow erosion of horror in the face of repetitive tragedy is not just an emotional numbness but a cultivated indifference, carefully tended by a global narrative that quietly suggests: this is just the way things are.
But this normalisation is not accidental. It is imposed by structures of power, geopolitics, and media framing that position Palestinian deaths as regrettable but ultimately“complicated”—a euphemism that signals the world’s unwillingness to really care. To protest, to rage, to demand change, one must first be convinced that injustice is intolerable. But the persistent messaging is that this injustice—this uniquely terminal kind of injustice—is condonable, endurable,explainable away. The world fabricates endless rationalisations: that Israel has security needs, that “both sides” are responsible, that Hamas hides among civilians, and so the calculus blurs civilians and combatants until the distinction collapses. When confronted with the scale of suffering—hospitals bombed, children starved, entire families crushed in their homes—the default is to invoke complexity, as if empathy itself requires a permit.
This routinisation of Palestinian death produces a kind of moral fatigue. The images of starving children, weeping parents, destroyed neighbourhoods,provoke a momentary ache, but all too soon, they are replaced by other crises.There is always a global attention deficit, a fresh emergency, a newer horror to displace the old one. Gaza’s agony is rendered both perpetual and disposable, too terrible for prolonged focus, too persistent to inspire real outrage. The world has learned to flinch, look away, and return to its routines.
In Western capitals, where policy decisions could alter the course of this tragedy, the reluctance to act is shrouded in the language of diplomacy—calls for “restraint,” “balanced approaches,” and endless negotiations that serve only to dignify paralysis. There are moments, of course, when the world’s conscience is briefly, spectacularly pricked: a mass killing, a particularly heartbreaking story, a new round of images too graphic to ignore. But the spikes in attention fade, and the status quo reasserts itself. There is, at bottom, an unstated belief in the expendability of Palestinian life—a sense that these deaths, while regrettable, are the price of maintaining an uneasy stability, or preserving alliances, or simply avoiding discomfort.
For Palestinians, the knowledge that much of the world has grown used to their suffering is itself a species of torment. To grieve your dead, knowing that your pain is met with indifference or rationalisation, is to feel not just abandoned, but erased. The endless repetition of slogans—“Israel has a right to defend itself,” “violence on both sides”—becomes an incantation against moral responsibility, a shield against the imperative to act. And in this climate of cultivated helplessness, even small gestures of solidarity can feel subversive.
It would be naïve to pretend that apathy is the only response; around the world, millions march, mourn, and rage in solidarity with Palestinians. Activists risk careers, activists and journalists face repression, ordinary people raise their voices and demand accountability. Yet the ferocity of collective protest is rarely matched by the will of those in power. Instead, time and again, governments that pride themselves on human rights send weapons and aid to Israel, while failing to ensure a ceasefire or intervene to prevent starvation and mass death. The contradiction is glaring: the world proclaims universal values, but draws the line at the border of Gaza.
Why is Palestinian life so easily sacrificed? In the corridors of power, there is an unspoken calculus: the status quo serves entrenched interests, and challenging it would mean confronting powerful lobbies, risking alliances, or disturbing a carefully maintained equilibrium. In the media, framing devices turn the victims into abstractions—statistics, or worse, collateral damage in a narrative that privileges Israeli security above all. On social media, outrage is diffuse, fleeting, easily engulfed by the next trending hashtag. There is a kind of learned impotence, a conviction that nothing—no petition, no protest,no heartbreaking image—will make a dent.
Yet the cost of this indifference is unbearable. For those who allow themselves to feel, a terrible cognitive dissonance takes hold: how can we enjoy our meals,our families, our comforts, while an entire society is being starved, bombed,and suffocated? The juxtaposition is so obscene that it can feel like complicity, or at the very least, moral surrender. To carry on as usual is to acquiesce to the logic that Palestinian suffering is, if not justified, then at least not actionable—a tragedy to lament, briefly, before it resumes its place among the world’s unsolvable problems.
The sense that Palestinians should die—should, in the sense of a resigned inevitability—is not always stated outright. But it is encoded in every act of inaction, every equivocation, every statement that treats genocide as a matter of perspective rather than a crime. To resist this logic is to remain human, to insist that some things are not acceptable, no matter how distant or complicated or politically sensitive. To remain silent, or to normalise this horror, is to cede our own humanity.
Palestinian suffering is the product of choices—political, military, economic—and the result of a global consensus that has, for too long, thought of Palestinians less as people than as problems.
The world may behave as if Palestinian lives are beneath its moral concern, but that is a fiction—one that must be exposed, rejected, and replaced with a solidarity that is stubborn, unsentimental, and relentless in its insistence on equality. Anything less is an abdication of conscience; anything less is a betrayal not only of Palestinians, but of the very idea that suffering anywhere ought to move us all.
Why is Palestinian life so easily sacrificed? (Photo by Adobe).