I visited the Holy Land around a decade ago. How I was treated cemented everything I had learned outside of colonialist textbooks. I swore never to return.

Let me paint a very brief picture for you. You arrive and your passport is seen by people in army garb who look like they are in their late teens. If you’re Maltese, they ask you repeatedly about your Arab-rooted surname. If you’re unlucky enough to have a surname like Zahra, like one of the 80-year-old women with us, you’re detained in a room for hours and interrogated mercilessly. When you’re finally released, your first thought is to get on a plane and return home.

You travel around in a bus and Israeli soldiers randomly stop you every few miles. Their machine guns graze your legs as they push past you roughly but you can’t say anything except look ahead in wide-eyed fear and try to make yourself smaller.

When you visit Tel Aviv, you are ignored and even spat at for looking “too Arab”. Although he too is Maltese, your light-haired, light-skinned boyfriend of the time is welcomed everywhere and you are given dirty, suspicious looks.

I can’t even begin to explain to you how cheap and fragile my life felt. It could have been snatched away from me at any moment in time without much justification and no one would have been able to do much. And don’t even get me started on the rhetoric constantly being used about the Palestinians being “cockroaches”. I heard it with my own ears.

It is these things I keep in mind when our European leaders look away as children are butchered in Gaza. It is these experiences I return to when people rightfully condemn what Hamas did earlier this month.

As many have already pointed out before me in perhaps better words than I, one can feel pity for the people attacked and taken hostage at a music festival and still be angry that a Palestinian life continues to matter less globally than a Jewish one.

Can no one see what is happening in Gaza for what it is? A genocide- Anna Marie Galea

Can no one see what is happening in Gaza for what it is? A genocide. A systematic wiping out of a people long seen as nothing more than an inconvenience for daring to live on land that was theirs.

Does no one have anything to say about how big the parcel of land marked Israel has become compared to what it started out as? Does no one want to talk about the expulsion and flight of 700,000 Palestinians so that their homes could be handed to another people?

As more and more leaders and our own Roberta Metsola file to pay their respects to Israel and pointedly shake hands with Jewish leaders to show their solidarity, it makes me sick to my stomach that Palestinians continue to be ignored. The unfairness of it all is grating.

It’s almost like an entire people have been reduced to one terrorist organisation. Where are the prayers for Palestine? Where is the humanity?

Is the world to continue to remain blind, deaf and dumb in the face of such horror?

Silence is an answer, too.