The Children We Choose Not to See

From Gaza to the DRC, the world’s silence reveals a hierarchy of suffering—where race, politics, and alliances decide who deserves empathy.

Not to be shocked by the hypocrisy of the United States and the Trump administration to claim there is genocide in South Africa, yet underplay the degree of human suffering that is taking place around the world. Gaza sits on the verge of famine without aid as a function of the Netanyahu administration. The DRC continues to go without adequate aid and resources after the shutting down of U.S. A.I.D. The refugees granted priority are Afrikaaners in South Africa.

This is not only a failure of our humanity but a failure of all the history that brought us to a place where we were meant to care about human rights, peace, and democracy. Institutions such as the UN continue to be disproportionately dominated by Western and Eastern entities which hold a stronghold in the Security Council. Vetoes make it impossible to mobilize generalized care and prevent accountability across the world.

The people who suffer the most are not the countries with leaders who do not care for anything outside their borders. The ones who suffer are the people on the ground—civilians who had no hand to play in many of these conflicts. Not every Palestinian is a Hamas soldier, nor a supporter. They remain as people—kids with dreams unactualized. Worst of all, no one cares to take them as they endure human suffering on a daily basis.

The Guardian wrote about baby Siwar Ashour, a six-month-old baby who is literally being starved due to complications that require formula, which is in extreme scarcity. A child not even having seen their first birthday, who has known nothing but war, is a sign of the global collective failure to call for accountability.

It must not be forgotten that the world turned away from Nazi Germany until they felt that the issue was at their doorstep or related to their country. The world continued to watch until invasion took place across the globe. Jewish people were persecuted locally before it became an expansionary mission. Even then, it took a great deal of convincing to get the Americans on board. In that time of silence, then fighting, fifteen million soldiers died and a disheartening number of people died in the Holocaust.

What is currently taking place in Gaza is genocide and extreme retaliation for an attack that should have never taken place. Now occupation is a question for the Israeli government—showing that it was never about self-defense but a strategic execution of Palestinian people.

Notice how this is no different from the invasion of Iraq that was justified by the search for weapons of mass destruction. This assumed threat that needed to be shut down led to major suffering in the region. It was the start of an eight-year conflict that resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 U.S. servicemembers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

When you draw comparisons to Israel, they make claims to want to eliminate Hamas—a terrorist group—which is no different from the terrorists they claimed to be taking care of in Iraq. They seem to have gone well beyond their right of self-defense and are now seen as the aggressor. However, maybe society has forgotten the failure which was the war on terror, and many people forget the suffering and instability brought by the United States. History is repeating itself.

Now more than ever, the blinders to the atrocities taking place around the world continue to be highlighted by the Trump administration providing refuge to Afrikaaners—who definitely face threats of farm killings but do not experience the constant bombardment, famine, and suffering that is taking place around the world.

The real truth lies in the fact that the Trump administration is able to recognize danger when it is not perpetuated by an ally. They are able to see persecution even when it is happening at an insignificant level in comparison to the rest of the global chaos and wars. It should not be that hard for them to point out genocide in Gaza, not be hard to point out abuse of power in Russia, and to declare a solution and peace for the DRC. But because they have Black and brown skin, they are not considered deserving. They remain insignificant—because white populations are under attack.

This is not different from the wealth of history that speaks to the exclusion of Black and brown people across the world. Many argued they ought to bear arms to garner change in this world and to defend themselves against oppressive systems. Many of those leaders—Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Gaddafi, who called for a unified Africa—remain as mirages in history because integration was the better cause.

Once again, as it was at the end of colonialism, the end of slavery, the end of Jim Crow, and the end of Apartheid, integration is not influenced by the victims of these systems but by the ones who created them—who continue to allow false victories to assume that we are all one and equal. Oppression by no means is the same as it was then, but it has definitely changed masks and aims to show the same children that they do not matter in comparison to their white counterparts.

Unless there is a call for collective humanity—where peace is not selectively given to those who are in Europe, and peace is not merely whispered in the corridors for those who make up the Middle East and Africa—this will not only be a failure of our time now but a failure of all humanity to show that we are collective and one.

My grandfather says life repeats itself with different details. The neglect of Black suffering in South Africa by the United States and much of the West for the majority of Apartheid let the world sit on its moral high horse. The same cannot happen to the people of Palestine, the DRC, or even Sudan—because if we do not learn from history, we are definitely doomed to repeat it. The saddest thing is not the conflict but the suffering, failed dreams, and generations that lose out on their childhood.

Children across the world are accustomed to war-torn environments where the world does not care for their livelihood but rather cares to protect their allies who mobilize mass destruction against civilians. The weapons of mass destruction that they searched for in Iraq were not in Iraq—but rather in the forces of America and its allies.

This is the situation in Gaza, explained from someone.

Haaretz editorial:

“On Tuesday, the Israel Air Force killed nine children, between the ages of 3 and 14... The Israeli military said that the target was a 'Hamas command and control center' and that 'steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming uninvolved civilians'... We can continue to ignore the number of Palestinians in the Strip who have been killed—more than 52,000, including around 18,000 children; to question the credibility of the figures, to use all of the mechanisms of repression, denial, apathy, distancing, normalization and justification. None of this will change the bitter fact: Israel killed them. Our hands did this. We must not avert our eyes. We must wake up and cry out loudly: Stop the war.”

We need peace. We need global leadership. And we need collective humanity to be placed at the forefront of all these conflicts. Suffering anywhere affects everyone everywhere. We call for peace in Palestine, Sudan, the DRC, Ukraine, and all other places in the world that remain neglected and left to suffer without the necessary attention.