Three years of genocide, three years of global silence
Mitchell Plitnick writes in Mondoweiss on 9 October 2026 :
“They have nowhere to return to. Look at how it looks. And by the way, the world isn’t stopping us.” Those were the words of Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich at a small gathering at his home recently. Smotrich was speaking about Israel’s occupation of Southern Lebanon at that time, but he could just as easily have said the same thing about Gaza, the West Bank, or Syria.
It hardly comes as news to Palestinians to hear Smotrich talk like this. Israeli impunity has been a permanent fixture of the dynamic that has perpetuated Palestinian dispossession since long before the Nakba even happened. But never has that impunity been so absolute as it is now, even while Israel’s image in the world, and the global public’s opinion of it, craters.
As we mark three years since the bloody October 7 attack called Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and Israel’s genocidal actions in its wake, it is important for all of us to take stock of what Palestinians, both in Palestine and in the diaspora, have been saying: that the world isn’t stopping Israel.
The three-year, ongoing genocide has answered the question many of us have asked at times: “What would I have done during the Holocaust?”
Many have answered that they would wallow in a denial, which is, in fact, a racist cover for the fact that they support the genocide. But for a far greater number, the answer has been either indifference or a casual, “what can I do about it” shrug. The indifference, the denial, and the support for the genocide are all rooted in the same phenomenon: the utter devaluation of Palestinian lives.