As the world remembered October 7, it also continued to look away

Under ringing bells and with raised glasses, we take a moment to reflect on the year that was, carefully placing it into the past before leaping forward into newness.

These cultural markers – anniversaries, birthdays, holidays – are grounded in moments and history; in the minutes of meeting someone new, to the loss of a loved one. Change is the means by which we recognise these moments. Something that was true yesterday is no longer true today. Perhaps that is why Western leaders shared their words of support for Israel on the anniversary of October 7, while continuing to look away from the blood and dust-covered bodies of Palestinians.

Hamas’s incursion into southern Israel one year ago was a violent exception to the status quo, branded repeatedly as the single worst terror attack on Israel in its history. In its exceptionalism, it can be marked, measured and remembered.

READ MORE: John Curtice issues verdict on who will win 2026 Holyrood election

But for Palestinians, there is nothing exceptional about Israel’s brutal and violent campaign of ethnic cleansing in the occupied Palestinian territories. October 7 may be marked as a day of exceptional violence perpetrated against Israeli citizens – but for the Palestinians, to suffer such a death toll is no exception at all.

There has been a concerted effort by Western media to frame October 7 as the “beginning” of something new. And it was. The scale and barbarity of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory has increased significantly, an acceleration of the genocidal policies that Israel’s victims have lived under for decades.

Yet on October 6, one day before Hamas took a single hostage, 19-year-old Labib Dmaidi was shot and killed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, where Hamas has no foothold. The shooting took place in the Palestinian town of Huwara, south of Nablus city. The town is surrounded by four illegal settlements. The army went with the settlers. Between January 1 and October 6, Israel killed hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank – some a raid that included the Jenin hospital, bombing the Jenin refugee camp and shooting at journalists.

(Image: PA)

And since October 7 last year, Israel’s occupying forces have delivered a campaign of death and torture upon the Palestinian civilian population that eclipses the events of that day a hundredfold.

Israel’s brutal invasion of Lebanon has already claimed more lives than October 7 twice over. Yet do we honestly expect that a year from now, the British Prime Minister will publish a statement in solidarity with the Lebanese people to mark a year of atrocities? No.

Instead, Keir Starmer issued a statement of solidarity that, across the 300 words of which it comprised, continues to minimise the lives of all those suffering under the bombs and drone warfare of Benjamin Netanyahu’s terrorist state.

Most notably, there was one word that remains remarkably missing from his statement: Israel. The state enacting a bloody genocide; the state that has erased countless schools, universities and hospitals; the state that made 2023 the most deadly year for Palestinians even before October 7, is not mentioned at all.

Instead, Starmer framed October 7 as an attack against Jewish people, perpetrated by those who hate Jewish people. Gone is any acknowledgement of Israel’s apartheid and oppression.

Gone is any necessary context to understand how things have come to be as they are. Gone is any acknowledgement of the conditions imposed on Palestinians that, as it would anywhere else in the world, has spawned armed resistance.

There is more to be read in what the Prime Minister does not say than there is in what he does. Starmer cites “reports of rape, torture and brutality beyond comprehension” – some of which have been revealed to have been fabricated, such as the story of 40 beheaded babies – yet has nothing to say of the verified, video evidence of occupying soldiers committing rape, torture and brutality beyond comprehension.

(Image: Phil Noble/PA Wire)

Though if I had come out so definitively in support of Israel’s alleged right to cut off water and electricity to civilians, as Starmer and many others in his Cabinet have done, I suppose I too would be hesitant to outline the true scale of its bloody land grab.

With a renewed focus on October 7, it behoves all world leaders and Western press to remember that, as much as we acknowledge that a year has passed since the attack on Israel, we must note too that Palestine’s suffering existed before that date, as it has continued to exist every night and day since.

October 7 can be marked and measured because it represented a great change for Israel, an attack on the state unlike any that has come before it. For the Palestinians however, it might as well be another day ending in “y”.