SINCE Israel unleashed its genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people, the world has been turned upside down.

No crime in history has been so loudly and indeed proudly confessed by its perpetrators as it happened. Some of the most obscene atrocities humans are capable of have been livestreamed on a daily basis. Legal authorities and prestigious international organisations have spent months warning of an endless litany of war crimes and crimes against humanity, to the extent the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor issued requests for arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister five months ago. Yet it is those who have opposed this obscenity who have faced being hounded, demonised and silenced.

ITV’s Big Brother is a case in point. When forensic psychologist Ali Bromley wore a pro-Palestine watermelon jumper, she was subjected to vexatious complaints, not least by a group calling itself the Campaign Against Antisemitism, which has repeatedly conflated the deeply serious question of hatred against Jewish people with support for Palestinian rights.

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And so ITV bowed to their pressure, apologising and literally erasing the watermelon through digital alteration. The irony would be delicious if it was not so serious: Big Brother is of course inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, when a totalitarian regime turned reality on its head.

Here is a recurring theme. While the pro-Palestine movement has been demonised by chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – overwhelmingly understood as a call for equal rights for Palestinians throughout historic Palestine – Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly makes clear only an Israeli state based on apartheid, occupation and indeed genocide will be permitted on that land.

He’s repeatedly turned up to the United Nations, unfurling a map showing the West Bank and Gaza as annexed by Israel. Indeed, the West Bank has been subjected to the longest belligerent occupation in modern times, colonised by 720,000 Israeli settlers, all condemned for rampant illegality recent by the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court. This isn’t a chant by a protester: It’s the prime minister of a state allied to the west, and armed and backed by it, implementing the actual – not hypothetical – erasure of an entire nation. But it’s the powerless protester cast as the real violent menace.

ITV’s erasure of the jumper, of course, has a profound symbolism. Erasure has always been the lot of the Palestinian people and their cause. The attempt to start the clock on October 7 2023 is one notorious manifestation: Decades of violent ethnic cleansing, occupation apartheid, land theft, colonisation, the incarceration of a million Palestinians after 1967, torture – all erased. Even if you looked at just 2023 before October 7: The killing of 200 Palestinians, among them nearly 40 children, in the West Bank, or the bombing of Gaza four months before the Hamas attack, with several children killed – all erased. There’s the erasure of Palestinian voices, too, with so few platformed to be able to describe the annihilation of their own people.

And then there’s the erasure of the current reality. In an editorial this week, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz declares that its government is implementing a programme of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, implementing the so-called “general’s plan” to deliberately starve and violently displace its surviving population.

Yet the British media has failed to frame its coverage on terms even an Israeli newspaper managed – with the commendable exception of the outlet you are currently reading. You instead have to use Twitter to discover what is really happening, relying on the testimonies in particular of six Palestinian journalists who the Israeli authorities have smeared as terrorists in a transparent attempt to justify their assassination and stop the world witnessing Israel’s crimes.

From the repeated bombing of hospitals, to multiple reported massacres because of aerial bombardment, to the mass detention of men and boys, including medics and patients – the evidence for some of the most depraved atrocities of our age is overwhelming. But Western media coverage routinely fails to reflect this hideous reality or emphasise its gravity. Instead, it keeps offering credibility to official Israeli statements despite endless proven examples of deceit from its authorities – rightly not a courtesy extended to their Russian counterparts.

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The consequences of this, by the way, will not be containable. The world has watched the west – which frequently tries to justify its global hegemony with moral claims – facilitate some of the most unspeakable crimes of our age.

The erasure of Palestinian voices and the Palestinian past and present can only achieve so much. A crime this extreme, this colossal in scale, this confessed to by its culprits – well, a total cover-up is clearly impossible. Turning the world on its head undoubtedly has its achievements: Demonising the people who oppose the genocide, rather than those who facilitate it, has made all too many remain silent for fear of repercussions. But too many have seen too much: This genocide has changed many people irrevocably. What will the consequences of all that be: I honestly do not know, but I know for certain that we are going to find out.