It seems unbelievable that more than eleven months of the ongoing genocide in Gaza have passed, with thousands of Palestinians killed, injured and displaced. In January 2024, South Africa’s presentation to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) underlined the extraordinary circumstance that external knowledge of a genocide and its occurrence are both happening together in real-time in front of the world’s eyes. Yet, despite this, there is also an ongoing and concerted whitewashing, censorship and denial of the genocide by most western countries and the shared silence in their national media and political arenas. How do we make sense of this gap between those who see the violence, with its historic and ongoing presence every day, and those who do not, and in fact, actively deny it?

In this essay, I examine the political boundary of see-ing and not-seeing, visibility and erasure, in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and its implications through the idea of “evidence”. Evidence illustrates this boundary as a relationship between seeing and knowing. Seeing is the first layer part of visibility, and knowing is what lies underneath that, beyond that, its consequence, or its implication, the meaning we give to it. My argument has four parts.

The Political Boundary

What do I mean by a political boundary of see-ing and not-seeing, visibility and erasure? The political here refers to the us/them relation between those who can see the violence of the genocide and those cannot see it. They occupy different worlds, in the meaning they give to this genocide as part of the world they live in, respectively.

Not-seeing violence incorporates its erasure as denial. This denial takes several forms: one, that this genocide is not happening; two, it may be happening but it is not called genocide, it is something else; or three, it may be happening, but it is justified, and it doesn’t matter what it is called.

The second group, those who cannot see the genocide, also includes those who do not see it. The gap between ‘cannot see” and ‘do not see’ implies that there is a choice, a space for agency and intention – or not. This is not an individual choice however, but a structural one; there are structural factors that mediate the not-seeing for particular groups of people.

Evidence

The boundary between seeing and not-seeing becomes visible through the ‘evidence’ of Palestinian experiences, what it includes and what it leaves out, what it asks of Palestinians, and of the audience who sees it. Evidence serves as a form of empirical confirmation of Palestinian suffering.

In the simplest sense, the role of evidence in a legal context is meant to provide proof. South Africa presented its case using evidence to demonstrate that what Israel was and is doing in Gaza is genocide. I will not recount the details of their presentation, which documents the scale and numbers of Palestinians killed, areas bombed, hospitals destroyed, and the actions undertaken to deny humanitarian aid and medical care to the people left injured and displaced. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestine Territory, Francesca Albanese, has also confirmed these and other incidents of violence in her ongoing reports on the situation since the ICJ proceedings in January.

The role of evidence as empirical proof of this destruction allows the audience to see. The audience includes both the Court the South African delegation addressed, but also globally, all those who followed the proceedings and watched their oral argument. The presentation of this evidence plays an important psychological and moral role because it validates the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, of rendering them human in a world that is actively engaged in denying their humanity, both in life and in death.

For those who see, this presentation of evidence in a legal context is against the backdrop of evidence of another kind. Palestinian journalists in Gaza reporting on what was and is happening, making visible the genocide through social media and the few media outlets willing to carry them. These include Al-Jazeera Gaza Bureau Chief Wael Dahdouh, photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, and Bisan Owda, who won the 2024 Peabody Award with AJ+ in May. These three journalists, in addition to TV reporter Hind Khoudary, were nominated for Nobel Peace Prize in August for their reporting from Gaza. While they are carrying out their professional roles, despite the great personal costs, there is also a moral significance to their reportage: to make visible Palestinian experiences and suffering to the world, which has been acknowledged by a global audience.

While the South African delegation’s presentation offered evidence of genocide as a legal issue, it also played a paradoxical role of making visible the attempt to erase Palestinians from Gaza. In this sense, by ‘proving’ that genocide was and is taking place, the evidence is also evidence of the logic of elimination, which, as Patrick Wolfe (2006) has argued, is integral to settler colonialism. The elimination of the Indigenous from their land in order to facilitate settler claims to and appropriation of that territory situates this genocide within a longer history of settler colonialism in Palestine, as well as globally.

Seeing and Knowing

Having outlined briefly the role of evidence, I turn to the relationship between seeing and knowing. How do we make sense of evidence in its relationship to knowledge? What is it possible to know through evidence and what is left out?

Evidence understood as empirical proof makes seeing equal to knowing. Simply put, if evidence of genocide is shown to the world, then people will know that it is “real” and “really happening”. This will then allow the ICJ to hold Israel accountable to international law, and by association its western allies who have been and are supporting it, materially and politically.

However, if we see evidence as limited to the empirical, we limit the possibilities for knowing what can be seen, what we can see, and therefore if it is not seen or documented, then it becomes erased. I propose a more expansive relationship between seeing and knowing which goes back to the idea of the worlds we live in and how we give meaning to the political events in relation to those worlds.

Those who see the genocide do so because they can see its violence in a world already made through the violence of coloniality and white supremacy. This genocide, while beyond horrific, is not novel. It is part of a much longer history and ongoing present of the settler colonial project in Palestine, with its echoes and connections to other ongoing settler colonial projects in the US, Canada, and Australia. The attempt to erase the Indigenous from their lands is part of a global project of white supremacy, one in which only the methods have changed in the past few hundred years, not the logic.

This brings us to Charles Mills’ work on the epistemology of ignorance, which allows us to situate the violence of white supremacy in relation to the construction of knowledge in and of the world.

Whiteness and World-Making

Mills (1997) argues that global white supremacy, or whiteness, as a system is maintained by and through the Racial Contract which privileges white groups over non-white groups. While whiteness takes different forms in different contexts, the Racial Contract remains the structuring rationale behind its global and historical forms; for example, in the conquest of the Americas or in the establishment of white settler colonies. The epistemology of ignorance is a feature of the Racial Contract such that it requires a refusal to see the world created through whiteness in order to maintain its global order.

Referring to the construction of this world, Mills writes, “Part of what it means to be constructed as “white”, part of what it requires to achieve Whiteness…is a cognitive model that precludes self-transparency and genuine understanding of social realities. To a significant extent then, white signatories will live in an invented delusional world, a racial fantasyland…”(Mills 1997, 18).

He goes on to say,

“One could say then, as a general rule, that white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion and self-deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization and enslavement. And these phenomena are in no way accidental but prescribed by the terms of the Racial Contract, which requires a certain schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity” (Mills 1997, 19).

Mills is talking primarily about matters of race rather than offering an analysis of genocide or white settler colonialism in particular. If we accept the idea of the Racial Contract as a structuring force, it leads us to consider the idea of multiple worlds. We do not all live in the same world because of how knowledge of and about that world is constructed through whiteness. More specifically, a world is, and can be made through the denial of whiteness as its constitutive feature. Thus, Mills’ idea disrupts the linear, positivist, relationship between seeing and knowing through evidence as empirical proof, such that if we detail what is happening in Palestine, then it will be known as the genocide that it is.

In fact, empirical evidence is not enough – it will never be enough – because that is not the problem. The problem is an ontological one, of how worlds come into being. The erasure of this genocide is a structural feature of how the world of not-seeing is constructed in the first place, a world constructed through whiteness as settler colonialism. The boundary between see-ing and not-seeing, between visibility and erasure, is not limited then to what is happening now in Gaza, but it encompasses something much bigger – historically, geographically, politically – that links together critiques of many other white settler colonial projects, past and present.

Global Justice and a Free Palestine

Despite the ICJ’s provisional ruling at the end of January in support of South Africa and calling on Israel to cease its military actions in Gaza, the past eleven months (and counting) have made visible the concerted power, strength and violence put into the systematic efforts to erase the genocide from view, particularly among western countries, their governments, and their media. At the same time, this genocide has also mobilized people globally, onto the streets and in universities to express their solidarity and support for Palestinians through protests and encampments. The world that is made through this mobilization encompasses the Global South as more than a particular geographic location; it is an epistemic place. It includes a way of knowing that integrates an understanding of coloniality, and offers hope for those who see, for the possibility of global justice and a free Palestine.