During my high school Holocaust trip to Poland, we drove past the town of Oświęcim that was located right next to Auschwitz. I wondered how people could go about their normal lives with a concentration camp directly adjacent to their town, and if they knew there was a death machine operating right beside them.
A recent mainstream news article in Israel presented the current water crisis in Gaza. It laid out the standard of living in plain, neutral facts. Two million displaced people spend hours every day standing in lines for aid trucks with plastic jerrycans and buckets with no guarantee of getting water, as most water infrastructure has been destroyed. Families shower at most once a week. Skin infections, rashes, and other outbreaks are spreading through overcrowded tent camps. The article includes footage of these scenes and reports these facts without challenge or critique. It simply reports it as daily news under a new recurring header on the website: “Phase Two in Gaza”.
These articles sit on mainstream homepages directly alongside political reporting, lifestyle pieces, economic updates, and entertainment news. While people in Israel sit at cafes, go to yoga, and attend weekend raves, the reality of two million people living under these conditions a few kilometers away is published for everyone to see.
Scrolling down to the moderated comment section shows how this coverage is absorbed, with the vast majority celebrating:
“Just put rat poison in the water.”
“I’m in shock that they shower at all, those cockroaches.”
“I have a suggestion for you: shoot yourselves in the head so you don’t have to wait three days for water.”
“I hope they also get boils and scabies. Even this water is a waste on them.”
“May cholera and malaria wash over them, inshallah amen!”
“Who cares about them? Let them not shower at all and die in severe agony.”
“They are breeding. They need to be eradicated.”
The media’s new rollout of the header “Phase Two in Gaza” is not an accident. It reflects the exact real estate language used by political leadership. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke at a real estate conference, addressing developers and investors. He explained that a professional business plan built by experts exists to divide, market, and profit off the land in Gaza after its destruction. He explicitly described the flattening of Gaza as the completed “demolition phase”, clearing the ground for the real estate development he called a “real estate bonanza”.
The marketing of Gaza as a for-profit real estate project is not some sort of conspiracy. The official “Board of Peace” plan revealed by unelected real estate developers and political advisers presents the redevelopment of Gaza under the explicit real estate term “Master Plan”. In polished PowerPoint presentations, they outline turning the Gaza coastline into luxury beachfront property for wealthy tourists alongside high-tech AI data centers. The local Palestinian population is mapped into biometrically monitored camps, designated to serve as a labor force for the surrounding infrastructure.
In the days of Auschwitz, one could argue that the reality of the camp was hidden behind its walls, and the lack of public information made denial, at the very least, possible.
Today, that excuse is completely gone. The decimation is streamed live, the situation is documented in mainstream reports, and the plans for Gaza are presented publicly for all to see.
Every latte, yoga class, music festival, and regular routine of life while this human catastrophe exists a few kilometers away requires an active choice to ignore what is openly visible. The plausible deniability of “I didn’t know” has collapsed, and choosing to be in denial is a choice to be complicit.
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