On Sunday, Hezbollah launched strikes against an Israeli military base, killing four Israeli soldiers. Sky News went to great lengths to humanise the dead: their full names and photos were displayed while presenter Kay Burley somberly repeated that they were aged just 19.

The majority of traditional media outlets chose to focus on Hezbollah’s attack that day and the following morning. Irrelevant, it seemed, that all four Israeli soldiers were fighting as part of a genocidal regime. Irrelevant, too, that at least one more 19-year-old was killed that day: Palestinian student Sha’ban Al-Dalou, burned alive in his bed after an Israeli airstrike outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. His mother and two others burned along with him.

The same day that the world woke up to Palestinians engulfed in flames, foreign secretary David Lammy announced sanctions on Iran for its attack on an Israeli military base – one Iran said was “legal and rational”, having struck the base with no fatalities. This attack could be seen as Iran fulfilling the obligation all states have under the UN genocide convention to act to stop a genocide taking place. Labour, meanwhile, is placing all blame for escalation in the Middle East squarely with Iran, with Lammy failing to name any of Israel’s recent acts of terror against Palestinian civilians, including massacres in Jabalia and across north Gaza.

That evening, Emily Thornberry was asked on Channel 4: “Do you think there should be any red lines for Britain’s political support of Israel?” In response, the MP for Islington South and Finsbury repeated a tired Labour line: that Israel has the right to defend itself. “There are war crimes on all sides during this conflict. There are war crimes being committed by Hamas, by Iran… on all sides,” she added. She didn’t explicitly name Israel once.

These responses – of establishment journalists and senior British politicians alike – seems to confirm one thing: Palestinians have become invisible. In fact, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has become so normalised that the Al Aqsa hospital attack didn’t generate a single response from the government.

Racialised communities know that they are visible when their existence is seen as equal to others – specifically white people in the West, or the “familiar self”, as described by the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said. But decades of dehumanisation abroad in the name of legitimate tactics of war, along with the ever-pervasive racism in our institutions, means the realities of white and non-white people aren’t the same. But recent media double standards, and the inability of the powerful to condemn even the most depraved acts of Israeli terror, have nonetheless been hard to swallow: that images of Palestinians, displaced multiple times, escaping death for over a year, only to be burnt alive, failed to stir outrage in the hearts of so many.

Lammy, addressing the UN in September, sharply critiqued the Russian state, explaining how he, as a Black man, knows imperialism when he sees it, invoking his ancestry and the horrors of slavery to dress down Vladimir Putin specifically. But what good is a Black man in a position of power when he betrays the most racialised and oppressed? How can it be that we’re more than a year into what the International Court of Justice has ruled a plausible case of genocide, and British politicians still consistently fail to acknowledge it – let alone condemn it? 

The answer is simple: Palestinians, for the establishment, exist not as real, individual human beings, each with a rich and meaningful life, but as a subhuman group within a ‘complex’ history narrated by liberals content with generations of occupation and apartheid. At best, they’re the helpless victims of a humanitarian crisis – an easier pill to swallow for those complicit in Israel’s settler colonialism. Because if they were viewed as more than this – were truly visible as human beings to those in power – we wouldn’t have seen more than a day of bloodshed in the name of ‘self-defence’.