SOCIAL media has broken the monopoly of traditional media over information flows, but it has also exposed how the oppressed remain unheard, as the unconditional support of powerful Western governments to the Gaza genocide has demonstrated.

The live coverage on social media from Gaza, where Israel has enforced a foreign journalists’ entry ban, may have shaken millions of people around the world but has still failed to stir the conscience of the self-proclaimed champions of democracy and human rights.

Their own perceived strategic, ideological interests remain their solitary consideration. While some powers may have said they weren’t aware of the Holocaust being carried out by the Nazis in the heart of Europe in the 1930s/40s, today ignorance can’t be an excuse for inaction.

One can get a sense of the scale of the destruction and indiscriminate mass killing of Palestinians, including infants and children, in the name of retribution for the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct 7, 2023 from social media alone.

While some powers may have said they weren’t aware of the Nazi Holocaust, today ignorance can’t be an excuse for inaction.

However, the fact that Israel has not trusted even Western media outlets largely sympathetic to its point of view and barred them from reporting from the ground points to the impunity with which the occupation forces choose to operate.

The gulf on the issue between the governments and the people in many countries may be wide but also underlines how elections and elected representatives in Western democracies remain subservient to special interests and forces more than their own electorate.

What to talk of the US, UK and Germany to name just three Western governments or despotic OIC states, even elected OIC members who have allowed mass street demonstrations in support of the Palestinians have practically done nothing to support them. So much so that they have happily served as conduits for uninterrupted energy supplies and other significant imports of Israel.

Little wonder Gazans often ask on social media if anyone cares for them or how they are being exterminated through a brutal military campaign waged by occupation forces funded and armed by their Western foes and facilitated by their brothers in the region.

Notwithstanding their stoicism, one can’t imagine how a people living under a canopy of round-the-clock armed drones and rain of bombs/missiles with their hearth and home taken from them, feel or even survive for over a year. Neither can one imagine how much despair must fill their hearts that they are largely friendless.

Yes, friendless, because well-wishers like you and I don’t count for much if we are powerless to stop the fire and death raining on them every day. This feeling of being powerless is not restricted to Gaza or Palestine if you ask me.

Just last week, I was listening to a discussion on Twitter or X Spaces where a number of articulate speakers were describing the situation in Parachinar in Kurram district. Some journalists were also tuned in.

When they noticed I was a ‘listener’, they asked me to join in as a ‘speaker’, in the mistaken belief that as a journalist with 40 years in the field I would have answers on how they should communicate the plight of their besieged and battered community effectively to the outside world and shake it. This ‘outside world’ was no more or further than the decision-makers in Peshawar and Rawalpindi-Islamabad.

This discussion was taking place after a blockade of upper Kurram had been in place for over 80 days by a ‘rival’ sect. After a courageous aid mission, using a small plane, Edhi Trust’s Faisal Edhi had referred to the death of some 50 infants/children in one hospital alone because of shortage of medical supplies.

Just to boost their morale, I told some of the Parachinar participants, including journalists, what I thought could work in terms of a communications strategy but deep down I was embarrassed, as I am during exchanges with Palestinians I have befriended on social media, because I feel utterly, desolately hopeless.

Hopeless because how can I tell people who are existing in a living hell that they are on their own; that they may have a lot of people with empathy rooting for them but have nothing more than their impotent empathy, humanity to offer; that when murder, mutilation and multiple amputations of infants and children or images of third-degree burns on their tender bodies does not move those with the power to stop it, they are doomed.

You can tell, like so many around the world, my outrage too is being replaced by a deep depression borne out of despair. Injustice, whether in Palestine or Kurram or Kashmir, is no different than injustice in Balochistan. Whether it is the state itself which is the perpetrator that kills or whether it is the state indifference that allows the killing is immaterial to those at the receiving end.

I know some of my correspondents from India who regularly email me with feedback on the column are not representative of the average Indian. I say this because some of them are so upset that I write about the Gaza genocide that they don’t even hold back invective.

Perhaps hardliners are frustrated they can’t replicate what is happening in Gaza in Kashmir or elsewhere to put down dissent. I apologise if other readers see this as offensive. I am specifically referring to those who write in with their comments, accusing me of being a lot of things I am not including an extremist!

While the Gazans are forced to live in hell under an unaccountable occupation force that calls itself the most moral in the world but whose morality, humanity and genocidal actions have been questioned by some in the Israeli media itself like the daily Haaretz, the eternal optimist in me also knows that the human spirit is capable of rising phoenix-like from the ashes. And it will.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 5th, 2025