Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: If Gaza's corpses can vanish from our conscience, what else are we becoming blind to?

Indian Express

24-07-2025

The silence and denial around the moral catastrophe unfolding in Gaza only seems to grow in proportion to the scale of atrocity being inflicted on the Palestinian people. It is as if humanity is in moral regress. The fragile gains of international law — those slivers of humanitarian sensibility that once insisted atrocity on this scale must be unacceptable — are being steadily eroded.
There are signs of progress. The facts of what is happening in Gaza are more widely acknowledged, and the debate over how to legally and morally name the horror has intensified. Yet, paradoxically, the atrocity is also being made more invisible. Any ceasefire now will already be too late. The world will assuage its conscience only after mass death and destruction, and call the wreckage 'peace'.
But the silence around Gaza demands deeper analysis. Perhaps it was always naïve to believe that humanity was capable of sustained moral progress. As Bruce Robbins argues in Atrocity: A Literary History, moral indignation in the face of atrocity is historically rare. For much of human history, violence was treated like the weather — brutal, routine and morally unremarkable. Killing civilians was normal, and even the victims did not always think of themselves as morally wronged — only defeated. Often, mass violence was invested with redemptive meaning.
Even rulers with moral qualms about violence applied those doubts selectively. As a character in one of the few novels to confront moral culpability during wartime — Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five — says, 'So it goes.'
Robbins's powerful meditation exposes the many ways humanity evades confronting atrocity. Moral demands rarely override the narcissism of group identities. Even when atrocities are condemned, the critique is hemmed in: It must not destabilise existing hierarchies. Conservatives often fear mass violence not because of its human toll, but because it might disrupt order. Societies struggle to indict themselves; self-accusation is psychologically intolerable. Literature is saturated with violence, but most writers ultimately find it difficult to indict their own societies in the face of atrocity.
We are increasingly in a world in which moral concern is no longer trusted. It is pathologised. Those who speak of atrocity are seen not as conscientious objectors but as the sort of people who feel superior in feeling bad about these things. They use it to make others feel bad. The function of atrocity talk is performing superiority, virtue-signalling, making others uncomfortable. Humanity's moral conscience, in the face of tribal loyalty, is shrinking terrain.
Yet there is still something alarmingly distinctive about Gaza. Is there any precedent for this — where state after state not only denies the horror, but also actively expects silence? The US is effectively policing speech on Gaza, not just within its borders but globally. UN officials are being sanctioned with barely a murmur of protest from the international community. In India, criticism of Israel is now tantamount to being seen with the 'wrong side'. The states of West Asia now extensively regulate criticism of Israel. Australia is considering adopting a definition of anti-Semitism that, as Richard Flanagan noted in The Age, would render some of the most morally courageous Jewish voices — Joseph Roth, Tony Judt, Omer Bartov — effectively anti-Semitic. Much of Europe has already made Israel its 'reason of state'. While some states are complicit, through sins of omission or commission, in failing to push back against the atrocities in Gaza, it seems that much of the world is becoming complicit in drawing a veil of silence over them.
One of the most important moral lessons of the Holocaust is being forgotten: That 'never again' must be a universal ideal. To defend that principle is not to deny the Holocaust's specificity, but to protect its moral legacy. To reduce it to a licence for state violence is a betrayal of its memory. Anti-Semitism is a real and urgent problem. But its political weaponisation now threatens to empty the term of moral content. The most reactionary forces invoke it not to combat hate, but to silence criticism, stifle reflection, and protect impunity.
Most Western democracies are now sacrificing their democracy and civic freedoms — not for the Jewish people, but for the policies of the state of Israel. In West Asia, too, the discussion of Palestine is hemmed in by state repression. Fear of retaliation, of being seen on the 'wrong side', chills public discourse. Even social movements seem unable to articulate a language of universal principle: That no one should be targeted for who they are; that the mass killing of non-combatants is never justifiable. We are trapped in a nihilistic moment, where only one question matters: Which side are you on? Not: What are the limits of power, the principles that must bind all states and actors?
This tribalism is not new; nor is hypocrisy. But rarely in recent memory has there been such a drastic foreclosure of moral reflection. It is as if we now believe that vindication will not come from being humane, but from letting power operate unrestrained, whatever form that power takes.
The horror in Gaza is so palpable that explanation or contextualisation often feels obscene. These are now tools of evasion, not illumination. The evasions and silences are linked to the broader civic failures of democracy. In a powerful essay in Harper's Magazine, 'Speaking Reassurance to Power', Pankaj Mishra connects the silence over Gaza to the collapse of civic courage in democracies. He writes that 'for all its claims to superior virtue, the American intelligentsia manifests very little of the courage and dignity it has expected from artists and thinkers in less fortunate societies'.
Mishra sees this failure as rooted in complicity: The American intelligentsia, too close to the machinery of imperial power and too dependent on the largesse it doled out, was often disabled from speaking truth. It was meant to offer reassurance. Or rather the criticism that it permitted was costless. But the disquieting thought he offers is whether the willed silence over Gaza, and the relative lack of resistance to authoritarianism, are linked. They both speak of an easy adjustment to the realities of power. But this is not only America's problem. Across democracies, we are witnessing the ease with which civic discourse renders mass death invisible.
If Gaza's corpses can vanish from our conscience, how much easier it will be to ignore the quiet, shadowy encroachments of our own states, which are increasingly going after whoever they choose. What the silence and inaction over Gaza is saying is: Only brute power rules. As Vonnegut said, 'So it goes.'
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express