Genocide and the right to exist: Colonialism, Palestine and the myth of neutrality

There is a photograph that haunts me.

A girl in Gaza, perhaps seven years old, stands beside what was once her home. The devastation speaks volumes — she cannot. Her family lies trapped beneath concrete and collapsed dreams; her neighbourhood levelled in the time it takes to brew a cup of morning tea. 

Her eyes carry something no child's eyes ever should: the burden of knowing the world sees her dying — and makes it harder. She is, in a way, fortunate. She survived.

The figures are staggering, nearly unfathomable. According to Israeli media outlet Haaretz, nearly 100,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza over the past two years amid the ongoing genocide. Most of them are children and women. But statistics reduce truth to numbers. 

They cannot capture the mother hunched over her lifeless baby, the father clawing at rubble with bare hands, or the grandmother withholding her final loaf of bread for a grandchild who will never return.

This is not war. This is not a conflict. This is the mechanical precision of erasure — settler colonialism disguised as self-defence, genocide cloaked in diplomatic language.

And still, the world debates Israel's "right to exist".

The architecture of elimination

Picture this: You wake up to the sound of bulldozers. Not the kind that builds — but the kind that erases. Ahead of you are your olive trees, planted by your great-grandfather, their roots deep enough to remember a time of peace, then your home.

"It's not personal," they'll say. "Just policy."

This is the Palestinian daily experience. The "right to exist" of a colonial state translates, for the colonised, into a right to keep dying in silence.

Patrick Wolfe offered us the lens to understand this, "Settler colonialism is a structure, not an event." It does not arrive once and then recede; it breathes, morphs and persists. It turns homes into rubble, children into targets and life into resistance.

From the 1948 Nakba — when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced — to the present-day demolitions in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, we see the same logic at work: land confiscation justified, ethnic cleansing disguised as security, genocide normalised as policy.

Mere statistics cannot capture the mother hunched over her lifeless baby, the father clawing at rubble with bare hands, or the grandmother withholding her final loaf of bread for a grandchild who will never return.

The global pattern: A world on fire

Palestine is not a solitary tragedy. It is the latest page in the world's oldest book: the strong devouring the weak while others look away.

It is ethnic cleansing in the modern era, mirrored by a cold case in Sudan. Villages in Darfur are being systematically wiped out. Mass graves keep secrets the living dare not speak of.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, over six million have been murdered in a genocide fuelled by our appetite for minerals — those powering our phones, our cars, and our indifference.

Across Turtle Island in North America, First Nation children lie in unmarked graves, buried in residential schools meant to "kill the Indian in the child". Their spirits haunt the present, asking us to remember what we tried so hard to forget.

In Australia, Aboriginal children were stolen at gunpoint — the "Stolen Generations" — a campaign now acknowledged by the UN as cultural genocide.

These are not aberrations. They are structures. Genocide is not the collapse of civilisation — it is often one of its functions.

The weaponised myth of "rights"

Here is what they want you to believe: that some people's right to be supersedes others' right to exist.

No other modern nation demands recognition of its identity while denying that same recognition to another people. Israel's insistence on being acknowledged as a "Jewish state" inherently denies Palestinians equal rights, equal land and the right of return.

This is not a legal argument — it is rhetorical warfare. Accept it, and you accept apartheid. Refuse, and you are labelled antisemitic, a terrorist sympathiser and anti-peace.

We have seen this before. Apartheid South Africa asserted its "right to exist" while enacting brutal repression of Black South Africans. But the world finally said no. No political system has the right to exist if it is built on the oppression of another.

The killing field in real-time

We are watching genocide in high definition. Imagine your child starving while lorries filled with aid are blocked just miles away. Imagine seeking humanitarian relief only to be fired upon by those claiming to "protect civilians".

Reports recently confirmed at least 19 incidents in a single month where Israeli soldiers opened fire at aid delivery points. Colonial troops shooting into crowds of starving civilians queuing for food. It has been described as a "killing field" in military reports published in The Times of Israel and Haaretz.

And this is the regime Palestinians are expected to legitimise.

Here's the final insult: recent polls show 82% of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of Palestinians, not just from Gaza, but from within Israel's borders. A significant minority supports the mass killing of civilians. These are not fringe extremists — this is mainstream democratic consensus in a nation that has normalised genocide as state policy.

The plan is already underway. Israel's Defence Minister announces it coolly: concentrate Gaza's population in a "humanitarian zone" built atop Rafah's ruins. That phrase — "humanitarian zone" — follows a long colonial tradition of dressing horror in soft language. Reservations. Homelands. Bantustans. Now: humanitarian zones.

Call it what it is — a concentration camp with a humanitarian façade. A "final solution" framed as aid. The architects of apartheid South Africa would recognise this design: first you dehumanise, then you concentrate, then you eliminate. The only differences now are modern efficiency and global complicity.

Schools are now morgues. Hospitals, rubble. UN shelters, mass graves.

And yet the Western world tells us it's "complicated", that there are "two sides", that we must remain "balanced".

If you're reading this, you are implicated. You live in a world that enables such atrocities. You benefit from the systems that allow them. You face the same question every human being faces in the face of evil: Will you side with the oppressor or the oppressed? Will you choose comfort or conscience? Will you risk something for someone else's freedom?

The myth of neutrality

When a politician calls for "restraint on both sides" while one side is being butchered — they have taken a side.

When a journalist debates whether to call mass killings "genocide" while children burn in hospital beds, they have taken a side. When the UN edits a statement for "context" while entire families are eradicated, they have taken a side. Neutrality in the face of genocide is not moral; it is complicit.

The world broadcasts bombings, beheadings, refugee camps turned into killing fields — and then demands "nuance." But genocide has no nuance. There is only justice — or the betrayal of it.

Last week, I was talking to a friend about the New York mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani. He shared with me an incident, and later he sent me a link to a viral clip of that incident. That clip of a New York mayoral candidate, Mamdani, being confronted by a Palestinian — whose family has constantly been under attack — rekindled a fierce grassroots debate: Can a state born in colonial settlement and preserved through constant dispossession ever be legitimized in the name of "existence"? He added very boldly that, "...it's not your land to say it (Israel) has the right to exist."

The responses to that clip say it all. Most are unwilling to accept that "balance" or "diplomacy" can coexist with justice. Calls for "equal rights" within an apartheid regime ring hollow. As one commenter put it succinctly: "No one was pro-South Africa — they were anti-apartheid."

To expect Palestinians to accept their dispossession as legitimate is to demand their silence.

Proposals for "two states" or "equal rights" ignore the root: land theft and Indigenous erasure. Justice cannot be built on stolen land. Decolonisation is not a slogan — it is a necessity: return the land, restore the rights, end the occupation.

Decolonisation: The only way forward

Recognition, ceasefires, peace talks — these have only reinforced injustice. The problem is violent settler colonialism itself — a system that cannot be reformed, only dismantled. Real justice means returning the land. Respecting the right of return. Tearing down apartheid walls. Choosing life over death, freedom over oppression, truth over comforting lies.

Decolonisation is not a metaphor. It is bulldozers replaced by gardens, it is children learning to read before they learn to run from bombs. It is the revolutionary idea that all people deserve dignity on their ancestors' land.

The last question: It's not just Palestine

This is about the kind of world we will choose to share.

A world where some children matter less?

A world where some genocides are too "complex" to stop?

A world where some lives are too sacred to lose and others too disposable to save?

If you are reading this, you are implicated. You live in a world that enables such atrocities. You benefit from the systems that allow them.

You face the same question every human being faces in the face of evil: Will you side with the oppressor or the oppressed? Will you choose comfort or conscience? Will you risk something for someone else's freedom?

History won't care about your good heart. It will not remember your "nuance" or "balanced analysis." It will remember what you did when you had the chance.

The girl in the photograph waits. So do countless others. They wait for a world that values their lives over geopolitics.

The question is not whether you can stop genocide alone.

The only question is: Will you do everything you can with the power you hold — your voice, your vote, your wallet, your discomfort — to be on the right side of history? There is no middle ground during genocide. Only choices. Only sides.

Remember: We are nearly two years into an ongoing genocide in Palestine. Israeli soldiers have smuggled oxycodone into Gaza in flour sacks meant for aid. One Israeli soldier was quoted saying, "No one cares about Gaza anymore. Killing people there doesn't even count as an 'incident' anymore. It's nothing."

And across Congo and Sudan, genocides continue while the world remains silent.

The last question history ever asks is always the same: Where were you when the world burned?

Make a choice — before the dead render you speechless.

Let no one say again, "We didn't know." You know now.

Saad Shahriar is an anti-racist activist, filmmaker, and writer. He is currently pursuing further studies in Visual Anthropology at the University of Münster, Germany.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.