In recent months, the assault on Gaza has intensified. Mass graves have been uncovered, aid convoys blocked, the population systematically starved, and Rafah — one of the last shelters for the displaced — has come under bombardment. Israeli leaders now speak openly of “voluntary migration” and “finishing the job,” revealing that what was once denied is now admitted: the aim is not security, but total control, even at the cost of erasure.

WH Auden wrote these famous lines on 1 September 1939.

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

When he laid bare this psychological perversion of human nature on the eve of a global catastrophe, he could not have known how deeply they would reverberate across time, or how precisely they would echo the moral disfigurement we are witnessing today. In Gaza, under siege, starved, bombed, displaced, the Palestinian people are enduring a genocide in real time. A people made stateless are now being made invisible.

There is no longer room for ambiguity. What was once whispered has now been shouted from official podiums: threats of mass deportation, calls for total erasure, the repugnant language of “cleansing” a euphemism unworthy of the suffering it seeks to obscure. The mask has slipped. What was framed as defence reveals itself, increasingly, as destruction.

We are taught to believe history progresses, that its moral arc bends toward justice. But what we are witnessing in Gaza is the collapse of that illusion. No number of rationalisations can obscure the fact: a nation armed with F-16s and nuclear weapons is systematically bombing refugee camps, hospitals, and mosques, starving, displacing, and erasing a people under the world’s watchful eyes.

Despite claims of “disengagement” in 2005, Israel’s current campaign lays bare a deeper truth: the intention was never to relinquish Gaza, but to manage it as a walled-in ghetto: controlling its airspace, borders, water, and movement, while evading responsibility for its people.

I do not write as a politician, but as a poet of Palestinian descent and a Muslim voice for peace. I write in sorrow, not hatred. And I write because silence, in moments like these, becomes a form of betrayal.

The moral collapse is staggering. A state armed with one of the world’s most powerful militaries has unleashed its arsenal on a captive population with nowhere to flee. Hospitals are leveled. Journalists are killed. Aid is blocked. Whole families are erased in a single strike. And much of the world watches in paralysis, or worse, in complicity.

There is no symmetry here. One side controls the air, the land, the sea and the narrative. The other is struggling simply to survive. To speak of this as a “conflict” is to participate in a dangerous fiction. This is occupation. This is apartheid. This is colonial violence laid bare.

I understand the weight of history. I understand Jewish trauma, and the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. But suffering does not confer moral immunity. Trauma, when unexamined, can calcify into ideology. And when the lessons of that trauma are applied only inward, they become a license for further harm.

This is the tragedy at the heart of what we are witnessing: a people who know what it means to be dehumanised, now dehumanising others. The grief is doubled for the victims and for the soul of the perpetrators.

I have written elsewhere about the roots of Zionism and the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Others have examined it more thoroughly, and I would point readers to those discussions. But here, I am less concerned with theory than with testimony.

As a Muslim, I am taught that to oppress another is to dishonour the divine. That justice is a sacred trust. And that peace without dignity is a false peace. The Israeli state, in its present course, is violating every moral standard it claims to uphold. And those of us who still believe in a shared humanity must say so.

To name this genocide is not to be antisemitic. It is to be honest. To call for Palestinian liberation is not to call for Jewish suffering. It is to insist that no people should live behind walls, under drones, or under occupation.

I stand with those Jewish voices, brave, compassionate, principled, who reject what is being done in their name. Who know that real safety cannot come through domination. That security built on someone else’s dispossession is fragile, poisoned from the start.

The world must stop using the Holocaust as a shield against legitimate criticism. To do so desecrates the memory of the six million Jews who perished. Never again must not mean never again for some. It must mean never again for anyone.

This essay, like my poetry collection Palestine Wail, is not a cry for vengeance. It is a cry of witness. It is my way of refusing to look away. Of holding a mirror up to a world that has grown numb to Palestinian suffering, and to a global order that too often confuses power with virtue.

We do not need more euphemisms. We need moral clarity. We must recognise that what is happening is not an unfortunate byproduct of war, but the intended result of a long-standing ideology of supremacy. An ideology that has no place in a just future.

I believe poetry can still do something. It can name what is being erased. It can mourn what is being lost. It can imagine what might yet be possible.

What we need now is not more weapons or false neutrality. We need a reckoning. And we need imagination: a vision of coexistence built on equality, not exclusion. The idea that one people must disappear for another to thrive is a lie that has cost too many lives already.

I want my people to live, not behind checkpoints and rubble, but in freedom. I want my Jewish brothers and sisters to live not as occupiers or besieged, but as neighbours.

Until that future arrives, I will keep naming the wound. I will keep mourning the dead. I will keep praying, through poetry and prose, for the day when justice no longer needs a voice because it has become the ground we all stand on.