Everyone’s talking shite. I’m just breathing it in.

There’s a spreadsheet in every agency. It doesn’t tell you what to design or which fonts to use. It tells you who it’s polite to care about — and who you should pretend doesn’t exist.

Column one: approved clients.
Column two: embargoed suppliers.
Column three: human-rights concerns — investigate.

Ethics used to be a checkbox. Now they have bodies attached.

I’ve sat in meetings where someone nodded gravely at a “supply-chain review,” and in the same breath we’d debate a colour palette for a product launch. Somewhere in that spreadsheet, Gaza might have a line item: approved / unchecked / unknown. The irony is not lost on anyone.

The Hard Reality.

Over the past two years, the war on Gaza has turned a small strip of land into a graveyard of families.

UN and OCHA reporting says more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed — almost one-third children (Al Jazeera, 11 Oct 2025).

193,000 buildings are damaged or gone: homes, hospitals, schools — whole neighbourhoods erased (UN OCHA).

The survivors move south and back again, displaced more times than any spreadsheet could count (UN OCHA Displacement Data).

The numbers have become almost antiseptic, like metrics in a pitch deck. Yet each digit hides faces, accents, birthdays, laughter. And still, in boardrooms and parliaments, the contracts keep renewing.

Western Supply Chains of War.

The complicity isn’t abstract.

• The United States has sent $21.7 billion in military aid since October 2023 — precision weapons whose precision rarely seems to reach children (Associated Press News).
• The United Kingdom, between export approvals and joint programmes, has authorised roughly $17–22 billion in related support (House of Commons Library / Reuters).
• And Germany — the moral conscience of post-war Europe — has supplied around 30% of Israel’s major arms imports in recent years: Sa’ar 6-class frigates, DM2A4 torpedoes, armoured engines — the hardware now grinding Gaza into dust (SIPRI Arms Transfers Database).

There’s no way to put “values-led leadership” in a deck slide beside those numbers and not feel sick.

Corporate Complicity.

The UN OHCHR database names over 150 companies entangled in the occupation economy — from construction giants like Heidelberg Materials to travel platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com. Their software, logistics, and cement literally help hold the settlements in place (UN OHCHR, Sept 2025).

Meanwhile, the rest of us keep using the same tools — project platforms, banking partners, ad servers — that link back to the same systems of money and war.

Inside the branding world, that contradiction has its own language: “portfolio risk,” “stakeholder review,” “client alignment.” These are euphemisms for look away.

The Worker’s Bind.

If you work in design, marketing, or tech, you know the quiet contortion.

“We don’t work with arms companies,” someone says, adjusting their ethical halo.

Then they sign off copy for a bank financing one.

The rest of us keep clicking approve, because bills are due and outrage doesn’t pay rent.

But morality by payroll is a luxury the dead don’t have.

(See: Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International on corporate responsibility and complicity.)

Echoes of the Past.

History keeps leaving the same fingerprints:

• Cherokee Trail of Tears — thousands perished during forced relocation, yet some hid, resisted, returned (Britannica).
• Australia’s Stolen Generations — families torn apart, but culture and language kept alive through whispered memory (AIATSIS).
• India’s colonial famines — manufactured starvation met with uprisings and underground presses (BBC History).
• Ireland’s famine and rebellion — dispossession met by a century of revolt and poetry (History Ireland).
• Vietnam — villages bombed flat, resistance outlasting empire (HistoryNet).

Each story begins with the same logic — order, safety, necessity — and ends with mass graves.

Each time, the survivors rebuild and resist.

Now it is Gaza’s turn to stand in that unholy lineage (UN OCHA Situation Reports).

What the Brief Doesn’t Say.

Every agency has its disclaimers: We don’t engage in political commentary.

But design, by nature, is political. Every poster, every logo, every silence.

The same industry that can convince people to buy bottled hope now convinces itself that neutrality is virtue.

The truth is simpler. Neutrality is a billboard paid for by whoever’s winning.

Moral Accounting.

Creative people like to measure impact — engagement, reach, conversion.

Try measuring conscience.

How many hospitals have to be flattened before a supply chain becomes a crime scene?

How many “we condemn all violence” posts before language itself feels obscene?

It’s not just governments that have failed Gaza.

It’s every institution that has learned to turn ethics into a style guide.

From Moral Fatigue to Moral Demand.

Despair is easy. The world offers it wholesale.

But despair is just another luxury — a way to look away politely.

What’s harder is staying with the horror long enough to insist: this cannot stand.

We can boycott, divest, speak, march — refuse the sanitised neutrality that keeps the killing polite.

We can refuse to make the next poster, the next campaign, the next brand narrative that hides complicity behind typography.

Because if design has any purpose left, it’s not to make genocide aspirational — it’s to make indifference impossible.

Global Voices of Resistance.

From oppression to resilience, from Gaza to Hanoi, from Dublin to Delhi, the chants of survival can be heard:

• “Nihi’na” – We will survive (Cherokee / Indigenous communities)
• “Stolen Generations – Culture Lives On” (Australia)
• “Swaraj” – Self-rule (India)
• “Tiocfaidh ár lá” – Our day will come (Ireland)
• “Độc lập – Tự do – Hạnh phúc” – Independence, Freedom, Happiness (Vietnam)
• “فلسطين حرة” – Free Palestine (Gaz

History doesn’t repeat. It remembers.

And it’s remembering Gaza now. 

– Tom Kite.