Rabia YavuzOn June 9, Israeli forces intercepted Madleen, a Gaza-bound civilian ship in international waters. Part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, it carried medical aid and peaceful activists protesting Israel’s siege of Gaza. Among them was Greta Thunberg, who live-streamed the event, describing it as a “kidnapping.” The ship’s seizure was not just a violation of maritime norms; it was a message.
Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), attacking a civilian ship in international waters is tantamount to piracy. Yet there was no diplomatic outcry, no international response.
Such description of the incident, though, echoed far beyond the vessel. Increasingly, expressions of solidarity with Palestinians, however nonviolent, are treated not merely as controversial but criminal. Peaceful protest, humanitarian aid, and even public empathy for Palestinians are now met with disciplinary force. The suppression of protest reflects a broader erosion of international norms.
Therefore, this wasn’t just an attack on a ship. It was an assault on the voice of conscience. In a world where a peaceful humanitarian mission is met with military force, where resistance to genocide is punished, none of us are safe. And none of us can stay sane in the face of such normalised horror.
Gaza: a mirror, not a mirage
Since October 7, 2023, Gaza has become the epicentre of one of the most brutal and widely documented atrocities in modern history. Israeli bombardments have killed over 60,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children. Civilian infrastructure, from hospitals to schools, has been turned into rubble.
But this is not just about Gaza. It is about how the world responds or fails to respond to suffering. It reflects how selective morality and political convenience override the principles of justice. The blockade, the bombardments, and now the silencing of those who try to help, demonstrate a larger global disorder.
Gaza is not an exception. It is a mirror held up to the international community’s hypocrisy.
Western governments that rally quickly for Ukraine appear muted when Palestinian lives are involved. This double standard fractures the global moral order, creating hierarchies of whose suffering matters.
The global discourse on Palestinian suffering is uniquely constrained. Public outcry for Palestinians is often cast as suspicious, or even subversive. The cases are now too familiar: a student voices anguish over the bombing of Gaza; her visa is revoked. When journalists, academics, or activists attempt to speak out, they face social ostracism or legal reprisal.
From those aboard the Madleen to Turkish academic Rumeysa Ozturk, who was “kidnapped” in the street by state officials recently after criticising the US complicity in Israeli crimes, governments are increasingly treating moral clarity as a political danger. None of these individuals was accused of violence, nor even of incitement. Their error lay in expressing the wrong kind of solidarity.
This is not just a legal failure. It’s a psychological wound on our collective conscience. When truth becomes dangerous and silence becomes the safest option, justice is no longer a pillar of global order. It's a performance, reserved for the few deemed worthy.
And what that mirror reveals is terrifying for all of us.
The psychological toll of watching these events unfold is profound. To witness mass suffering while being told to remain silent creates a dangerous dissonance. In such a climate, moral clarity is not welcomed, it is punished. Visa cancellations, job suspensions, public censure: these are becoming common responses to dissent.
We are not merely witnessing war crimes; we are enduring a breakdown in the very concepts that hold us together as human beings. The ongoing genocide in Gaza doesn’t just kill bodies; it wounds our collective mind. It destabilises our belief in truth, justice, and empathy. And in a world where injustice is met with silence or suppression, even sanity itself is at risk.
The global conscience has created a dangerous hierarchy of whose lives matter, whose suffering is “grievable,” and whose voices deserve to be heard.
This is not just about the limits of free speech. It’s about who gets to grieve, who gets to belong, and who must constantly prove their right to be heard. Judith Butler once asked: Whose lives are grievable?
Gaza forces us to ask: Whose grief is allowed to be public?
Emotional paralysis in the age of horror
We often think of violence as physicals such as bombs, bullets, borders. But there is another form of violence at play: psychological violence. The violence of silence, and watching unspeakable horror and being told it's “complicated.” The violence of speaking up and being shamed, isolated, or punished for doing so.
Living in a time when truth itself is politicised, many of us experience cognitive dissonance, helplessness, and even emotional paralysis.
What does it do to the human psyche to see babies pulled from rubble, hospitals turned to ash, journalists killed one by one and still hear world leaders speak of “Israel’s right to defend itself” while denying Palestinians the right to exist?
The psychological impact of witnessing genocide in real-time while being powerless to stop it is a form of global trauma. It fractures not just communities but individuals. Many concerned global citizens suffer feeling helpless, hopeless, even emotionally numb. This numbness is not a lack of empathy which is the result of prolonged exposure to unprocessed grief and moral disorientation.
Such horrors create a moral disconnect that is unsustainable. If we allow this detachment to solidify, we risk losing not only our sense of justice but our very humanity.
How can the same liberal democracies that champion human rights allow such blatant erasure of international law and moral principle? The answer is chillingly simple: geopolitical interest has trumped human dignity.
The consequence is a world in which empathy is weaponised, and truth is filtered through the lens of power. It drives us to the edge of emotional collapse.
And yet, looking away is not an option. Because the moment we stop seeing, stop naming, stop witnessing that is the moment humanity begins to die.
Moral capture: Price of silence
There is, historically speaking, nothing especially novel about the absence of empathy in wartime. What is perhaps more telling in the present moment is the rapidity with which even the semblance of empathic expression is policed, disciplined, or excised entirely.
Some say, “I can’t look because it’s too much.” But looking away is a luxury the people of Gaza cannot afford. They live what we fear to watch.
Besides, bearing witness is not being removed or passive. A world that refuses to hold perpetrators in Gaza accountable, it normalises the very injustices it claims to oppose elsewhere – putting everyone at risk. The threat may not be physical. But the erosion of international laws directly and adversely affects the dignity of people far beyond the conflict zones.
When moral expression is criminalised, then justice becomes the privilege of the powerful. When solidarity is punished, then truth becomes dangerous.
If we let Palestine be the graveyard of accountability, we are digging our own graves too. The price of ignoring a genocide is not only the death of others. It is the decay of the world we all live in. And in such a world, no one is truly safe.
We are told to be calm, to be reasonable, to wait. But what is the cost of emotional restraint in the face of mass murder?
To feel deeply, to cry, to rage. These are not weaknesses. They are signs that we are still human. Our sanity lies in our refusal to accept the unacceptable.
Expressions of grief, political critique, or historical awareness are collapsed into presumed malice. One is not allowed to feel certain things, or at least not publicly. Yet to speak of empathy in these terms is already to risk sounding sentimental.
Empathy, when taken seriously, is a method, a way of apprehending the conflict that refuses to reduce it to abstraction. What it demands is something more difficult: the rehumanisation of those made illegible by the dominant narrative.
“We’ve been kidnapped,” said Thunberg, not only in reference to the vessel, but to a larger moral capture. It was a warning. In a world that punishes the voice of conscience, we are all being taken hostage by indifference, fear, and selective morality.
Until Palestinians are oppressed, none of us are free, said Nelson Mandela famously. Until Gaza is safe, none of us is safe. And until we speak, shout, and act against this brutal silence, none of us will remain sane.
