The contemporary world seems trapped in a machinery designed for forgetting. A machinery made of foolish algorithms that reward banality and one-minute trending topics, while rendering invisible the struggles that should shake consciences. The solidarity flotilla that sailed toward Gaza with hundreds of international volunteers was a historic event, yet it did not become a trend on X. Not because it lacked importance, but because the logic of those platforms operates to distract, to bury the essential beneath layers of trivialities, memes, and fleeting controversies. What does not generate clicks is discarded—even if what is discarded is the truth of a massacred people.
To this planned distraction is added political cynicism. Governments that know, that see, that hear, but choose to look the other way. Governments that have grown accustomed to coexisting with Israeli apartheid as if it were a natural, untouchable fact. Israel’s impunity is no accident: it is an international architecture sustained by Washington and accepted by Europe, tolerated by emerging powers, and blessed by the inertia of those who fear discomfort. The most shameful aspect is that even governments that define themselves as progressive join this game. Chile, for example—whose president has previously shown gestures of empathy toward Palestine—now publicly states that it looks “favorably” upon the so-called “peace” proposal that the United States and Israel have issued as an ultimatum.
This is not a peace proposal, but a diplomatic imposition. The United States and its Israeli partner drafted a document that demands immediate acceptance under threat of further devastation, and presented it to the world as if it were an act of magnanimity. It is the same logic used by the colonizer with the colonized: peace as surrender, peace as capitulation. That a government like Chile’s—so proud of its democratic tradition and closeness to the people—would publicly claim to view this masquerade “favorably” is an act of alignment with farce. They played with the good faith of the world when they “recognized” the State of Palestine in international forums, knowing that in practice no state remained, only besieged enclaves, open-air concentration camps. To recognize what no longer exists was the perfect gesture of hypocrisy: conceding symbols to nullify substance.
Meanwhile, the United Nations continues to stage its own theater. The body once conceived to guarantee peace has become a stage for hollow resolutions, predictable vetoes, and solemn speeches that do not stop a single bomb. The UN “recognizes” rights while tolerating their systematic destruction. The UN “warns” of the risk of genocide when the facts already confirm it day after day. It is an institutional farce, an empty ritual that perpetuates impunity.
And yet, against this backdrop of blind algorithms, cynical governments, and international organizations turned into shadows of themselves, one uncomfortable truth remains: true memory is not built in parliaments or trending topics. Memory is built in the persistence of those who do not remain silent. The activists of the flotilla who are now in Ketziot, seated on the ground while Ben-Gvir shouted “terrorists” at them for the cameras, are already part of that memory. Half the world saw those images because the perpetrators themselves chose to disseminate them, confident in their impunity. But in that very decision another truth was revealed: that the obscenity of their power will remain recorded, that the humiliation cannot be erased from the moral archive of humanity.
Ketziot is not an ordinary prison. It is a place with a history of abuses, documented in human rights reports as a site of overcrowding, psychological torture, and systematic medical neglect. There, where thousands of Palestinian prisoners have been confined, doctors, journalists, parliamentarians, and human rights defenders from more than forty countries are now held. Testimonies circulating indicate that interrogations lasted more than fifteen hours, without giving them water or food. Punishment disguised as procedure. A cruel message: “you are nothing more than political hostages.” Israel remains silent, concealing the lists of detainees, keeping names in the shadows, manipulating processes. It is not known whether some signed deportation documents that amount to self-incrimination, or whether others resisted and now face imprisonment.
What is known—confirmed by Arab and European media—is that a group of the kidnapped began a hunger strike. This desperate act is, at the same time, an act of dignity. It is the tradition of political prisoners who transform their bodies into a field of resistance, who make fragility into an ethical weapon against the power that seeks to break them. It is also an echo of the voyage itself: just as the flotilla sailed the sea despite the blockade, the bodies of the detainees push themselves to the limit of life in order to affirm the truth that is being crushed.
Here, philosophy becomes flesh. True memory is not measured by how many times an event appears on the front page of a newspaper or how many retweets it accumulates. True memory is sustained in the stubbornness of those who do not give up, in the insistence of those who narrate, denounce, and resist even when the entire world prefers distraction. That persistence is what later, when the farces collapse, will give rise to recognized truth. It is what happened with the disappeared in Latin American dictatorships: at the time of horror, the world looked away; decades later, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo proved that their memory was stronger than any trending topic.
Today, the Sumud Flotilla embodies that same principle: it does not matter if the press minimizes it, if social networks ignore it, if governments betray it. What matters is that it existed, that it dared, that it defied—and that now, even in Ketziot prison, it keeps dignity alive. The world may remain anesthetized, but the memory of those who do not remain silent will continue to break through. That memory, insistent and unyielding, will be the one to outlive the mask of global cynicism.
