Are Palestinians Invisible? The British establishment sure acts like it.

On Channel 4 last night, Emily Thornberry was asked: "Do you think there should be any red lines for Britain's political support of Israel?". In response, the MP for Islington South and Finsbury repeated a tired Labour line, that Israel has the right to defend itself. She also said: "There are war crimes on all sides during this conflict. There are war crimes being committed by Hamas, by Iran… on all sides". Somehow, she did not name Israel once.

The same day the world woke up to Palestinians engulfed in flames, David Lammy announced sanctions on Iran for the attack on 1 October against an Israeli military base. An attack that Iran said was “legal and rational”, having struck a military base with no fatalities. At a time when we expect to see arrest warrants for the main perpetrators of the Gaza genocide – Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant – this attack could be seen as the country fulfulling its positive obligation under the Genocide Convention, which requires all states to act to stop a genocide taking place. Instead, the Labour government played its part in manufacturing consent for Israel to continue its onslaught, placing all responsibility for escalation squarely with Iran. Again, Lammy was unable to, or perhaps unwilling to name Israel’s recent acts of terror against Palestinian civilians, despite the fact that recent days had seen countless massacres in Jabalia and across north Gaza.

On Sunday, Hezbollah launched strikes against an Israeli military base, killing four Israeli soldiers. Sky News went to great lengths to humanise them; their full names, ages, and photos were displayed while presenter Kay Burley somberly repeated that they were just 19 years old. In fact, the majority of traditional media outlets chose to focus on Hezbollah’s attack that day and the following morning.  Irrelevant then, that all four were soldiers fighting as part of Israel’s genocidal regime. Irrelevant also that another 19-year-old was killed that day; Palestinian student Sha’ban Al-Dalou, burned alive in his bed after the Israeli airstrike outside Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. His mother and two others were also burned alive, but their names were not mourned by establishment media.   

Scanning senior Labour figures’ social media accounts looking for condemnation of these attacks, for acknowledgement that they might carry a shred of humanity, seems only to confirm one thing: Palestinians have become invisible. Israel’s genocidal onslaught has become so normalised for them that this horrific incident did not even generate a single response

As many racialised communities know, you are visible when your existence is seen as equal to others – specifically white people in the west, the “familiar Self,” according to Edward Said. But decades of dehumanising brown and Black people abroad in the name of legitimate war tactics or collateral damage, coupled with the ever-pervasive racism in our institutions means our realities are not the same. Still, recent displays of double standards in media reporting and the inability to condemn the most depraved acts of Israeli terror have been particularly difficult to swallow: that Palestinians who have been displaced multiple times and survived more than a year of genocide only to be burned alive, that this did not cause any outrage or heartache in the hearts and minds of the establishment in the UK. And why should it, if Palestinians are not even seen, let alone seen as humans?

When David Lammy spoke recently at the UN, he launched into a sharp critique of Russia, explaining how he, as a Black man, knows imperialism when he sees it, invoking his ancestry and the horrors of slavery to dress down Putin specifically. But what good is a Black man in a position of responsibility and power when he betrays the most racialised and oppressed? How can we be more than a year into what the ICJ has all but declared a genocide, with British politicians consistently failing to acknowledge the elephant in the room? The answer is simple: Palestinians largely exist to the establishment not as real human beings, but through the ‘complex’ history narrated by liberals content with the status quo of occupation and apartheid; through the passive and blameless ‘humanitarian crisis’ that many Black and brown nations are relegated to once imperialist objectives are met. Palestinians are not here being killed, ethnically cleansed and starved, trying to live, just like everyone else. They don’t actually exist in the eyes of the racist establishment, because if they did, we would not have seen more than a day of bloodshed in the name of ‘self defence’.