「當真相被沈默時替換」，蘇聯異己Yevgeny Yevtushenko說， 「沈默是謊言」。

它也許看來沈默在Gaza是殘破的。 小繭被謀殺的孩子，包裹以綠色，與包含他們的被肢解的父母的箱子一起和大家的哀情和憤怒啼聲在那間死亡收容所由海在BBC和YouTube可以被目擊，甚而瞥見的AlJazeera。

但俄國的不可救藥的詩人沒有提到我們叫新聞的生命短促之物。 他問為什麼知道的那些人為什麼未曾講和，因此否認它的它。

在Anglo美國知識分子之中，這特別是觸擊。 它是他們把握關鍵對知識偉大的倉庫- historiographies和檔案帶領我們為什麼。

他們知道現在下雨在Gaza的恐怖有一點做與哈姆斯或，荒謬地， 「以色列的生存權」。

他們知道相對於是真實的-巴勒斯坦的生存權被取消了61年前，并且土著人民的開除，并且，如果需要，绝種由以色列的創建者計劃并且執行。

他們知道，例如，臭名昭著的「計劃D」 1947-8導致369個巴勒斯坦鎮和村莊的凶惡的人口減少由Haganah (以色列軍隊)和大屠殺在巴勒斯坦平民大屠殺在這樣地方像Deir Yassin， AlDawayima， Eilaboun， Jish， Ramle，并且Lydda在正式紀錄指「種族洗滌」。

到達在這場大屠殺場面，大衛本Gurion，以色列的第一位總理，由將軍， Yigal Allon要求： 「什麼我們將做與阿拉伯人？」 本Gurion，報告以色列史學家安非他命藥片Morris， 「做了一拒绝，精力充沛的姿態用他的手和認為： `逐出他們』」。

逐出全部人口的命令「沒有對年齡的注意」由Yitzhak Rabin，世界的最高效率的宣傳提升的未來總理簽字作為調解人。

此的可怕的反語在通過仅演講了，例如，當Mapam黨co領導梅厄Ya』 ari注意了「多麼容易地」以色列的領導輪幅怎樣採取婦女、孩子和老人和用他們填裝路是「可能和可允許的，因為這樣是戰略命令。 And this we say … who remember who used this means against our people during the (second world) war … I am appalled.”

Every subsequent “war” that Israel has waged has had the same objective - the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first against Israel.

Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Shlaim, Noam Chomsky, Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan Papp? and Norman Finkelstein have undermined this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism.

“It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Papp? on January 2, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system … Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology - in its most consensual and simplistic variety - allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them.

“The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern (of genocide).”

In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, fall within the international standard of the Genocide Convention.

“Is it an irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and international law authority at Princeton University, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”

In describing a “holocaust-in-the making,” Falk was alluding to the nazis’ establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland.

For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews, led by Mordechaj Anielewicz, fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew.

Today’s holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project.

The F-16 jet fighters, the 250lb “smart” GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza having been approved by a congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4 billion in war-making “aid,” give Washington de facto control.

It beggars belief that president-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken about Russia’s war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama has maintained a silence on Palestine that marks his approval, which is to be expected given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of zionists as his secretary of state and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings Think, her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama’s inauguration on January 20, I trust that someone with the brave heart of Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: “Gaza!”

The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now Operation Cast Lead, which is the unfinished Operation Justified Vengeance.

This was launched by prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with George W Bush’s approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time.

In that same year, the authoritative Jane’s Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the “green light” to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel’s secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of new Labour’s enduring complicity in Palestine’s agony.

However, the Israeli plan, reported Jane’s, needed the “trigger” of a suicide bombing which would cause “numerous deaths and injuries (because) the ‘revenge’ factor is crucial.” This would “motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians.”

What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, then Israeli chief of staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks.

On November 23 2001, Israeli agents assassinated Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud and got their “trigger.” The suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.

Something uncannily similar happened on November 4 last year when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people.

Once again, they got their propaganda “trigger,” a ceasefire sustained by the Hamas government, which had imprisoned its violators, was shattered as a result of the Israeli attacks and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be called Palestine before its Arab occupants were “cleansed.”

On December 23, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Behind this sordid game is the Dagan Plan, named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon during his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Now head of the Israeli intelligence organisation Mossad, Dagan is the author of a “solution” that has brought about the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, now effectively a concentration camp.

The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mahmoud Abbas is Dagan’s achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through mostly supine, if intimidated Western media, notably in the US, which says that Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israel’s destruction and is to “blame” for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, since long before its creation.

“We have never had it so good,” said the Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. “The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine.”

In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor.

This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the Western media as “Hamas’s seizure of power.”

Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic.

Neither is its proposal of a 10-year truce reported as a historic recognition of the “reality” of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition - that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders.

As every annual vote in the UN general assembly demonstrates, most states agree. On January 4, the president of the general assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a “monstrosity.”

When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a “1948-style solution” - the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority, followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller “cantonments” and, perhaps, finally into Jordan.

This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote British-based Palestinian exile Karma Nabulsi, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed … Look to the Iraq of today: that is what (Sharon) had in store for us and he has nearly achieved it.”

Dr Dahlia Wasfi is a US writer on Iraq and Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. “Holocaust denial is anti-semitic,” she wrote on December 31.

“But I’m not talking about the World War II, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What I’m referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years … Since Arabs are semites, US-Israeli policy doesn’t get more anti-semitic than this.”

She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young US citizen who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer.

“I am in the midst of a genocide,” wrote Corrie, “which I am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible.”

Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of “responsibility.”

Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform.

With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable, invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-semitism.

The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.

Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plead for help?

Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than “intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries?”

Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third American Writers’ Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure that the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 2,500 jammed the auditorium.

Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete. The literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance. False symbolism is all.

As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabokov: “The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are.”

If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised people. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants war criminals impunity and immunity through our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or it gives us the power to speak out.

For the moment, I prefer my own memory of Gaza - of the people’s courage and resistance and their “luminous humanity,” as Nabulsi put it.

On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No-one had told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together and a few of them climbed onto a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, in the belief that the world will not forget them.

This article appeared in the New Statesman.