A palpable shift on the question of Israel’s genocide in Gaza is transpiring in American politics.

Over the past week, prominent figures who have said nothing about or even actively supported Israel’s nonstop killing spree have suddenly woken up with the same disgust and heartache as the rest of us who have watched this obscenity for two years. We’re seeing it from politicians who have made slavish fealty to anything Israel does core to their brand, like former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, Sen. Cory Booker, and Reps. Richie Torres, Hakeem Jeffries, and Dan Goldman. We’re seeing it from Barack Obama, who has largely been too busy producing a sketch show to bother weighing in until now. And we’re seeing it from Amy Klobuchar, who two weeks ago posed grinning alongside Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the man responsible for what she now says is “unacceptable” human suffering.

We’re seeing it from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the MAGA congressperson who has become the first Republican lawmaker (and one of the first lawmakers from any party) to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide. We’re even, to some extent, seeing it from Donald Trump himself, who publicly contradicted Netanyahu to acknowledge the starvation in Gaza.

We’ve also seen it among media figures like the conservative Ross Douthat, the pro-Israel Yair Rosenberg, and pro-Israel outlets like the Forward. And we’re seeing it from supine world leaders like the UK’s Keir Starmer, Australia’s Anthony Albanese, and France’s Emmanuel Macron.

All of them are unequivocally condemning the human-made famine Israel has deliberately engineered in Gaza, and expressing in often emotional terms their outrage at that unspeakable crime and sympathy for its Palestinian victims, most of them children.

This might not sound like much. You’re supposed to condemn the deliberate starvation of children, after all. And yet, getting US politicians and the mainstream press to exhibit any emotion over the mass murder of Palestinians has been a heavy lift for the past two years.

Multiple studies and media analyses have found that media outlets consistently used more emotive language for, gave more sympathetic coverage to, and more frequently talked about violence inflicted against Israelis than to Palestinians. Israelis who were killed, brutalized, or kidnapped received appropriately detailed and sympathetic write-ups, while Palestinians were relegated to a faceless mass whose killing received a sentence at best. High-profile politicians barely bothered to say anything at all about what was being done to Palestinians, even when the Palestinians who were killed have been US citizens.

You could say a lot about the absurdity of this. Like the fact that many of these people have given Israel everything it needs to carry out this atrocity and every other one that came before. Or that while the famine Israel has created in Gaza is horrific and unconscionable, it’s still confusing why it has proven a bridge too far, while the cavalcade of similar or equal horrors they all watched for the past twenty-one months didn’t.

Regardless, the more important thing is that it has shaken people awake, or at least shamed them out of continuing acquiescence, and led them to the place they should have been many, many months ago. To them I say, welcome.

The problem is, if it takes this long, and this magnitude of human suffering, for those with power and influence to get around to simply criticizing Israel, how long is it going to take for them to bring themselves to actually do anything to stop it? Because we are out of time here.

Mass starvation is only one of the ways that Israel is trying to bring about the destruction of Palestinian existence in Gaza. Israel has also cut off safe drinking water, fuel, and medicine, all of which has already killed Palestinians in the territory, and with many children having passed the tipping point, thousands of deaths are likely over the coming months. This is alongside what has perversely become accepted as Israel’s run-of-the-mill daily slaughter of dozens of Palestinians by bomb and firearm, including the dozens of aid seekers that it mows down every day after luring them with promises of food handouts.

This, of course, goes in tandem with its systematic flattening of Gazan cities and neighborhoods, which has seen Israel deliberately raze almost every institution that allows organized life in the territory, including hospitals, schools, critical infrastructure, and places of worship. Experts already estimated Gaza’s true death toll was in the six figures, or 7 to 9 percent of the population, as early as a year ago. That figure was already multiple times the 2.5 percent of Americans who died in the bloodiest war in US history, the Civil War, and it has more than likely grown far higher in the year since.

As usual, Israeli leaders aren’t being secretive about the dreadful endgame of all of this. A little over a week ago, the head of its spy agency visited Washington to discuss a plan for the “evacuation” — in other words, the ethnic cleansing — of Gaza, which will involve putting most of whatever’s left of the Palestinian population in a concentration camp, before they are deported to three countries Israel has been in talks with. Now there are reports Netanyahu is also set to propose formally annexing Gaza, something that got an official OK from the Trump administration. In other words, Israel is planning to kill and expel all the Palestinians in Gaza, then take the territory for itself and resettle it.

Simply put, if it takes anywhere near as long for the world’s powerful to actually act on their outrage as it did for them to muster it in the first place, it will be too late: there will be no more Gaza, and no more Palestinians left inside it, for them to save. The time for harsh statements of condemnation and emotional speeches was well over a year ago. As two experts, one on international law and another on famine, wrote yesterday in Just Security, “Time has run out.”

Yet, at this point, world leaders are still dragging their feet. Just yesterday, the EU shelved a proposal to impose a highly specific, limited economic penalty on Israel — something that even if it had been done, could only generously be called a half measure — delaying it until, most probably, after August. Countries like Canada, Germany, and the UK are continuing to send Israel the weapons it’s using to massacre Gazans.

The announcements by the UK and France that they will recognize a Palestinian state are almost comical, as if world leaders are having to find new, ever bolder ways to avoid actually ending their material support for Israel’s genocide. (In the case of the UK, the announcement is extra pathetic, with the spineless Starmer announcing he would revoke the recognition offer if Israel changed course.) There is another vote today to cut off US weapons to Israel; last time, just fifteen senators voted for it. We will see how that number grows, but as of Tuesday, a politician like Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin was still bragging about signing on to a letter about how the “humanitarian situation remains dire” in Gaza, while refusing to commit to cutting off military aid to the country that’s causing it.

So let me take a moment to address the leaders of the world’s most powerful nation. You have a golden opportunity right now to cleanse the shameful stink of genocide from your names. You can claim you did not know how bad things were until now, and that once you found out, you acted with all haste to revoke military, economic, and political support for a genocidal state and end its barbarism.

But that opportunity is slipping away. You and countless others have now made clear, loudly, publicly, that you know full well how ghastly the situation Israel has created is. If, after all that, you continue to find new, innovative ways to do nothing to end it — or worse, keep actively supporting it — this will be your legacy. No one remembers Neville Chamberlain for his social reforms; no one will remember you for anything but this, either.

The people of Gaza do not have another two years for you to find some courage and do what’s right. If you believe what you’re saying about Gaza, you must do everything you can to stop Netanyahu and Israel.