World’s silence echoes louder than screams of wounded Palestinians
For Palestinians, grief is generational. It is a wound that has never been allowed to heal but rather only deepened by occupation, displacement, and the relentless weight of near statelessness
There is a particular kind of grief that comes with losing a home – one that never stops gnawing at the heart.
It is not just about walls, floors, or the soil beneath one's feet.
It is about identity, memory, and the right to exist.
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For Palestinians, this grief is generational. It is a wound that has never been allowed to heal but rather only deepened by occupation, displacement, and the relentless weight of near statelessness.
This is the grief that is unfolding right now, in real-time, as Israeli forces launch a large-scale attack across the Gaza Strip, in the first major strikes on the territory since Israel's cease-fire with Hamas began roughly two months ago, leaving 400 people dead within a few hours.
And yet, beyond the death toll and casualties, we witness something more horrendous: the story of people who are constantly being told that their existence is negotiable.
The suffering of the Palestinian people is not new, nor is it accidental. It is the story of occupation, of erasure, of a people forced into exile, their land carved away, their history rewritten.
The world sees, the world knows, and yet the world turns away
The numbers are merely a footnote in history's margins.
The world watches in real-time, yet silence echoes louder than the screams of the wounded.
Palestinians are refugees even in their own land, their homes bulldozed, their olive trees uprooted, their existence questioned.
The occupation of Palestine is not just about land — it is about dignity.
It is about the right to exist without fear, without checkpoints, without the ever-looming threat of being erased.
Palestinians exist in a purgatory of global indifference.
Their displacement is not a relic of 1948—it is ongoing, relentless, without pause. Their suffering is repackaged as "conflict," their resistance as "terrorism," and their deaths as "collateral damage."
To be Palestinian is to live in exile, even at home.
As the bombs fall again on Gaza, the question remains: How many more generations will be born into exile, only to die unheard?
History will judge those who remained silent. But for Palestinians, history is not an archive—it is the rubble beneath their feet, the blood on their streets, the graveyards filling too soon. And the world is still watching, still forgetting.
Enabler of the occupation
There is a patron in this silence – America, the ever-watchful guardian of Israel, pouring billions in military aid, shielding war crimes behind vetoes, and ensuring that the occupation remains indomitable.
Every missile that reduces a Palestinian home to dust, every bullet that pierces a child's body, carries the imprint of American complicity.
The bombs that fall on Gaza bear the weight of American tax dollars, yet the outrage is muffled beneath political alliances and strategic interests.
America's hands are not just stained with complicity; they are actively shaping the siege. The deadlock in ceasefire negotiations is not just a diplomatic failure; it is a political choice.
From Biden to Trump administrations – and like those before it – are issued carefully worded statements, urging "both sides" to exercise restraint, as if the slaughter of civilians and the destruction of entire neighborhoods is a conflict between equals.
But there are no two sides when one is the occupier and the other the occupied.
It is as Palestinian author so aptly described in regards to any peace treaty: "That is [a] kind of a conversation between the sword and the neck."
And while politicians talk about Israel's "right to defend itself," they erase the question of who defends the defenseless.
The voices of resistance
And yet, despite it all, Palestinians persist.
They resist through art, through storytelling, through the simple act of existing. Filmmakers, comedians, and artists force the world to look at what it would rather ignore.
They humanise the struggle that is often reduced to statistics. Writers, poets, journalists - they all fight against the silence, against the forgetting.
For decades, Palestine has been synonymous with suffering, and yet, beyond the headlines, beyond the numbers, there are people who wake up every day and refuse to be erased.
They resist not with weapons, but with the audacity to live, to remember, to dream of a future where their children do not inherit exile and occupation.
It was this quiet resistance that filmmaker and activist Basel Adra, 28, sought to document.
Growing up in Masafer Yatta, a small region in the southern occupied West Bank, Basel has seen his home repeatedly targeted by Israeli forces. He has watched houses reduced to rubble, entire families forced to flee, and their lives dismantled piece by piece.
He has filmed as Israeli settlers encroached upon Palestinian land with the quiet assurance that no one would stop them.
The world, as it so often does, looked away.
But Basel did not.
For four years, from 2019 to 2023, in his camcorder, he captured the relentless reality of life under occupation – bulldozers tearing through homes, families forced to live in a cave, the ever-present threat of displacement, and the suffocating weight of a life lived under military rule.
This footage became "No Other Land," a documentary that tells the story of people whose very existence is resistance.
The film does not sensationalise the pain; it simply reveals it. The agony unfolds in raw, undiluted truth, showing how this erasure is not just physical – it is cultural, emotional, existential.
Israel's policies of forced displacement, demolition of Palestinian homes, and restriction of movement serve one purpose: to make life unbearable so that Palestinians will leave.
But they do not leave.
They resist, not with weapons, but with their very existence, with their determination to survive in a world that has abandoned them.
As I was watching the documentary, I felt the weight of an entire population's grief pressing down on me. I couldn't stop myself from wondering – how does one carry on when the world insists you don't exist?
No Other Land won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature just two weeks ago.
Winning an Oscar should have been a gateway to wider recognition, a chance for No Other Land to reach the screens it deserves. Instead, it has become a battle in itself — a testament to how Palestinian stories, no matter how urgent, are met with resistance at every turn.
The Israeli minister of culture Miki Zohar referred to the Oscar win as "a sad moment for the world of cinema," – a statement that reflects not just state disapproval, but an entrenched fear of narratives that challenge Israel's carefully curated image on the world stage.
The day after the Oscars, he sent a letter to state-funded cultural institutions and cinemas, urging them not to screen No Other Land claiming the film was "proof that public funds should not support content that 'serves the enemies of the state."
Zohar cited it as justification for the regulations he has been pushing, which would restrict public funding for film and television to projects that are not "perceived as anti-Israel."
The irony, of course, is that the film was made without a single shekel of Israeli government funding. Its very existence, let alone its triumph at the Academy Awards, is an act of defiance against an increasingly authoritarian cultural landscape — one that seeks to silence, rather than engage with, uncomfortable truths.
But the silencing isn't limited to Israel. In the United States — the supposed land of "free speech" — No Other Land remains without a streaming deal or theatrical release, trapped in the limbo of inconvenient truths.
Hollywood, which has long positioned itself as a voice for the oppressed, has yet to embrace the film. And so, an Oscar-winning documentary — one of the most critically lauded of the year — struggles for the space it has already earned.
Its very existence defies the forces that seek to erase it. Funded independently, made in the face of occupation, celebrated on cinema's biggest stage — it is, in itself, a form of resistance. But applause means little if it is followed by silence. And silence is what No Other Land continues to fight against.
Basel co-directed the film with Hamdan Ballal and accepted the award alongside their Israeli co-directors, journalist Yuval Abraham and filmmaker Rachel Szor.
On stage, Yuval's words cut through the ceremony's usual pleasantries.
"We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together our voices are stronger. We see each other. The atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end."
"When I look at Basel, I see my brother. But we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws that destroy lives that he cannot control. There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people," he added.
Basel echoed the same sentiment, "About two months ago, I became a father, and my hope to my daughter is that she will not have to live the same life I am living now, always fearing violence, home demolitions, forced displacement that my community, Masafer Yatta, is facing every day. No Other Land reflects the harsh reality we have been enduring for decades and still resist as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people."
The film marks the first-ever Academy Award for a Palestinian filmmaker but the applause is fleeting as the death count rises.
Applause does not stop airstrikes, does not rebuild homes, and does not bring back the dead.
The film is not just about Masafer Yatta – it is about a world that has allowed apartheid to continue under the guise of diplomacy, about people who have fought for decades just to be seen as human.
The world will forget, just as it always does. And still, they endure.
Because endurance, in itself, is an act of resistance. Because to be Palestinian is to be persistent in the face of erasure. Because, despite everything, no other land will ever be home.
Zarin Tasnim is an Online journalist at The Business Standard
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
