I want to call you out today.
You wrote something about Gaza. And then you deleted it.
Maybe not you. But someone reading this. Probably hundreds of you.
You typed it out. the anger, the disbelief, the thing you couldn't hold quietly anymore and then you looked at it. And you thought about your employer. Your visa. Your university. Your clients. The colleague who screenshots. The algorithm that buries anyone who uses the word. And you held the backspace until the screen was clean, and told yourself you'd say it another day.
I know because I've done it.
I have reposted things about Gaza and gone back hours later and quietly removed them. Not because they were false. Because they were too political. That was the phrase I used on myself as though a child under rubble is a political position. I sanitised my own grief to stay employable.
That is what surveillance is for. Not to catch you. To make you catch yourself.
George Orwell understood it before any of us. In his book 1984, the telescreen cannot watch everyone at once. It doesn't need to. It only needs you to believe it might be and you will do the rest of the work unpaid. You'll flatten your sentences. Police your thoughts. Become, with nobody forcing you, your own informant.
They never needed a ministry. They needed our fear. We supplied it for free, at scale, in seconds.
And while we are busy editing ourselves, Gaza is being watched for real.
Families there describe drones that play recordings into the dark. A woman calling for help. A baby crying.
Sit with that. Someone selected that audio file. Someone tested it. Because they understood that no mother on earth can lie still while a baby screams outside. That she will get up, every time, in a war, barefoot, and go towards it.
And when she steps into the doorway, they fire.
Survivors say they have learned not to answer crying. Do you understand what has been taken? Not just safety. The instinct itself. A mother in Gaza now has to override the oldest reflex in her body and stay on the floor while a child sobs in the street, because the child may not exist. That is what they built. A machine that turns compassion into a targeting system.
They watch the old, too. Cameras loitering above a courtyard for days, logging when a grandmother waters what's left of her plants, which door she uses, the hour she sits outside because the tent is too hot. Nothing about her is a threat. She is simply known. Every habit catalogued.
And then, on a day chosen by someone she will never see, the watching ends and the strike comes. And there is no body to bury. Only what her family can gather, carried in a sheet, weighing almost nothing.
Watched in perfect detail. Killed in the middle of being observed. That is surveillance completed.
Ours makes us obedient. Theirs blows them to pieces.
Now the part I actually need you to sit with.
You think silence keeps you off the record. It doesn't. It puts you on a different one.
The journalists are dead. The photographers are dead. The young people who taught themselves to broadcast their own annihilation are dead, and their accounts deleted as soon as they’re killed. That is the memory hole, opening in front of us. When the witnesses are gone, the record of this era won't be made of footage. It will be made of what people did while speaking was still possible.
Your silence is in that record. Your deleted draft is in that record. The post you scrolled past on the way to something lighter is in that record.
And a child is going to ask you about this. Not a stranger's child. Yours, or one who trusts you. They will ask what you did in the year the world watched a population starve in high definition.
“I was worried about my job” is going to sound very small in that room.
So say it. Gently if you need to, but say it. In your own words, with your own name, in whatever way you can manage.
And if all you can do today is not look away, then do that. Keep looking. Keep letting it reach you. Keep refusing the quiet that tells you this is over when it is not.
Because the people still there need us to keep seeing them. That is where everything begins. Not with a perfect statement. Just with a refusal to turn the page.
Do not look away.
Hafsa