Colin Sheridan: Giving up on Gaza now is a surrender to immorality that will shame our children

My friend's mother buried her son the aid worker in her head every day for a year. She is still inconsolable about the Palestinian children she has never met — why aren't the rest of us?

Wed, 25 Jun, 2025 - 10:41

Colin Sheridan

Whenever I struggle with my own inadequacy regarding Palestine, I think of my friend's 80-year-old mother. Her son — an Irishman working for Unrwa — spent about 500 of the now 621 days of genocide in Gaza, risking his life to do a job he will never talk about.

She would often suffer a week without hearing from him, unaware if he was alive or dead. Despite everybody telling her to do otherwise, she devoured every piece of footage she could, traumatising herself in the hope of catching some proof of life.

When it finally came, it showed him rushing to give aid to a lifeless body under the glare of an Israeli sniper. That clip unleashed an avalanche of relief that was quickly tempered by the horror of his reality. It was also a small window into the world of every Palestinian, everywhere. Is that my son? My friend? My brother? My baby?

Her poise amid such unimaginable anxiety was remarkable, but what floors me now is not her grace under immense pressure, but the consistency of her caring. Because he is no longer in Gaza, ejected by Israel for the crime of doing his job, so you would think his enforced exile — though undoubtedly traumatic for him — would signal the end of something terrible for his mother and a reason to celebrate.

Instead, she is even more bereft, because all she can think of is the men, women and children left behind. She is inconsolable because nobody wants to talk about them. Because her friends — obviously worried for her — tell her to count her blessings and move on.

Imagine that this woman chooses to care so much when her caring should be done? That she despairs because others find it too uncomfortable a reality? Imagine there are those who would call her anti-semitic for cursing the killers of children she never knew?

About a fortnight ago, we reached a new phase in our moral reckoning. The revisionist history phase. The “it’s safe to come out now” phase. Despite the evidence being there, held aloft before our eyes in the form of bloodied corpses of dismembered children for over 600 consecutive days, it took a major market shift for the indifferent to find their voices.

A commercial cooling-off around all things Israel had to occur before the powerful minority came around to what the powerless majority have long been screaming. And even then, their sudden outrage was selective and carefully curated. Bespoke and designer, edited by a PR teams adept at the art of performative pearl-clutching and careful apology.

A makeshift tent camp for displaced Palestinians in Muwasi, west of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip. Picture: AP/Abdel Kareem Hana

If you index-linked people’s opinion on Palestine (and Iran for that matter) to their salaries, chances are you would discover those who earn more care much less. Why is that I wonder? Are they privy to dossiers compiled on newborn terrorists, tiny anti-semitic infants born with Kalashnikovs in their little brown hands and grenade pins between their baby teeth?

Does this make it easier to have no opinion on genocide whatsoever? To change the subject when it’s brought up, or worse, offer a variation on the classic “it’s complicated” defence as a way of asserting their intellectual superiority on the matter.

You could perhaps forgive the postman in Buncrana for not being abreast of the nuances of the Abraham accords and therefore lacking in empathy for his fellow postmen in Beit Hanoun. But I’d bet if you did ask him, he’d have much more to say about children butchered in their sleep than the wealth managers in Dublin, the TDs in the Dáil, and the tenured columnists for some Sunday papers, all of whom are fully aware of Israel’s metaphorical stock price, especially as it pertains to their own bottom line.

Of course, you can argue my cynicism is unhelpful. That any expression of solidarity and support, however late, is welcome. Well, I am not the arbiter of that. Palestinians are, but I’d guess they too have noted the timing and tenor of many of the open letters signed by rich and prominent writers, the vapid social media posts from politicians and the vague, half-hearted hints of camaraderie from Hollywood stars, all of whom profit handsomely from billion-dollar industries that are themselves marinated in the blood of black and brown people.

Even as the sun sets on this new phase, we are nowhere near the point of everyone being against this. A cursory glance at the rhetoric regarding Iran is enough to reveal there are many people who will go to their graves unequivocally for it.

That, if they speak slowly and condescendingly enough, they can use the words “October” and “Seventh” and “existential threat” as bywords for impunity.

They do so conveniently ignoring all historical context, as well as the right of armed resistance against an occupying power being enshrined in international law. Not to mention the long-proven use of the Hannibal Directive by Israel to murder its own.

Those who choose to ignore these facts surely believe Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians are getting exactly what they deserve, and despite that — or maybe because of it — they find themselves platformed all the broadcast channels. Those people are not for turning and will never be against any of this.

Which brings us to Ireland and the cowardice of our political leaders. They are cowards, and their cowardice is not just manifest in their performative inaction, it's amplified by their selective weaponisation of Irishness as a badge of pseudo-solidarity.

Because our ancestors went hungry, we know the plight of the oppressed and so can express concern and tweet about it. Fuck that. There is nothing moral about knowingly trading with evil.

I buried my best friend in my head every day for over a year. He survived. I'm sure his mother buried him every day, twice a day. That grief does not disappear, it lives on in the death of children we never knew. The children he watched walk silently with their little arms in the air, raised in quiet surrender. So many of them now certainly dead. That grief lingers in his insistence that his life was never worth more than those he stayed to protect.

Fatigue makes cowards of us all. To give up now is a surrender to immorality that will shame our children.

'I left rubble, death and fear as Gaza became a graveyard'