Israel has made its intentions in Gaza clear: to eradicate or remove the Palestinian population. Netanyahu was recently reported talking with South Sudan about shipping Gaza’s population there. South Sudan’s government called the report “baseless” (Diplomacy 101) but Netanyahu’s notion of “voluntary migration” of Palestinians to Africa has come up before. South Sudan is also a dumping ground for ICE-abducted immigrants. There is a ghastly irony in Netanyahu’s brainstorm because the Nazis, before implementing the Final Solution, considered sending Europe’s Jews to Madagascar. Netanyahu is literally, unabashedly following Hitler’s footsteps. Never again.
West Bank Palestinians have also been targets of escalating violence. The attacks by Israeli settlers and security forces mimic on a larger tactical scale street thugs who curse, shove, and arm-punch an intended victim before building to a full-scale assault. Netanyahu’s governing cabal may well be waiting to clear out Gaza before turning their full destructive attention to the several million West Bank Palestinians. The frenzy of eradication observes no limits unless forcibly stopped.
Many Jews and Israelis balk at calling the slaughter a genocide. It is painful to apply the term to the same people who experienced the most thorough attempt at extermination in human history. And the label might seem hyperbole, ignoring the catalog of blame and counter-blame that marks the region’s conflicts.
However by now such objections carry no weight. The situation is simple. A powerful army is slaughtering civilians en masse with the goal of obliterating their presence in what has become, however involuntarily, their homeland. It is genocide whether Netanyahu’s gangsters plan to kill every last Gazan or tens of thousands, or kill them off by starvation instead of death camps.
Yet the term “genocide,” loaded as it is, can obscure the true criminality and sadism of what it stands for. It is linked forever to the Holocaust. As children in the 1950s we viewed on TV mounds of bodies towering over the disbelieving Allied officers who liberated the camps. The starving survivors, many of whom would soon die of typhus or physical collapse, or be murdered when they returned to their home villages; the torture of prisoners disguised as “medical” experiments; the evidence provided by survivors, liberators, and even Nazis; the collaboration of Germany’s corporate giants in using prisoners as slave labor until they dropped dead of starvation and exhaustion; the six million non-Jewish victims of German mass slaughter; and the dispassionate industrial efficiency with which those twelve million murders were carried out, has played a central role in how we view politics, history, and humanity itself in the 80 years since.
Most atrocities do not leave such an exhaustive record. Bodies are photographed where they fall or scattered or interred in mass graves. Jumbled bones carry less visual impact than the gas chambers and ovens of the extermination camps, or old film of Jewish families torn apart at the gates of Auschwitz, many to be gassed within hours. The Germans’ meticulous records of the dead and the wealth harvested from their bodies is unique. The impact of other genocides has been devastating but the evidence for them, while irrefutable and compelling, remains fragmentary compared to the voluminous visual and written documentation of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust points out that the Holocaust’s unique aspects in no way lessen the horror of other genocides. Nor do the numbers killed provide meaningful comparison, morally or in terms of severity. Genocides each carry their own distinctive horrors, and each marks the bottom of human depravity. Yet applying the term to Gaza can create a subliminal comparison with the Holocaust. As with the word “murder,” news reports of mass shootings in which “only” two people died, soldiers killed on a “training exercise,” or “collateral damage”, the banality of language casts a spell of indifference over events. Terms that lose the ability to shock fit easily into the background noise of contemporary atrocities and disasters.
As Americans we have to face up to our role in Israel’s invasion. While the U.S was slated to give Israel $3.8 billion a year in military aid, in 2024 alone the total was at least $17.9 billion. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has claimed that Trump has approved $12 billion in aid in 2025. So in the past year and a half what would normally be $6 billion appears to have become $30 billion, a $24 billion dollar excess mostly dedicated to destroying Gaza. The “aid” consists of financial credits given to Israel, which then passes them back to U.S. defense contractors in return for their killing machines, creating a cycle of graft and profit paid for by U.S. taxpayers. (Some direct transfers of used weapons are included). Beyond weapons, the failure of Biden, Harris, and Trump to condemn the invasion and pressure Netanyahu may have cost Harris the election and made our country an active partner in genocide.
Trump, an unhinged extortionate clown, has been broadcasting his own solution to the stateless condition of the Gazan population: he will line the newly emptied coast of Gaza with (Russian- and Saudi-financed?) Trump Resorts. Netanyahu’s plan to annex Gaza and ship its people to South Sudan could well be part of a deal to partner with Trump in turning Gaza into a monument to the genocide they are committing.
A few days ago Israel targeted and murdered 28 year old Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al Sharif, a father of two small children. Israel accused him of leading a Hamas cell, a bald-faced lie. Five other journalists were killed with him: four Al Jazeera staffers including Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, Moamen Alkqa, and Mohammed Noufal, and Mohammed al-Khalidi who worked for digital media outlet Sahat. Other prominent Palestinians, including doctors, have been specifically targeted for murder. For instance, Doctor Marwan al-Sultan, director of Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital, was blown up along with his daughter, wife, sister, brother-in-law and three other people. He was the 70th medical worker killed in the 50 days preceding his death on July 2.
So far, 270 journalists and media workers have been killed by Israel since the invasion, many targeted. Dozens of Gazans die of malnutrition daily. Israeli soldiers regularly kill Gazans gathering to receive food and medicine. According to IDF soldiers, they were ordered to do so. Just following orders.
I can relate to other Jews’ discomfort in using the term “genocide” regarding Israel, but as Netanyahu’s goals expand with little resistance from Israel’s armed forces, there is no other way to describe it. Yet the very term seems inadequate. Since World War II the world has provided so many examples of mass civilian killings that we have grown used to the term. It’s as if programs of death and the clamor of protests have become an expected and accepted feature of the global order, a fact of war and the transition to…
…what exactly? The current system has no end-game, no program to sustain itself. It lurches along from one psychotic killing spree to another, from local mass shootings to Oct. 7 planned massacres to sustained slaughter in one-sided wars. Each is the equivalent of a purge driven by sadists so immersed in greed for power and blinded by the infantile ideologies of nationalism and religion that they no longer accord life any value. Each killing requires that a body be torn to pieces by shrapnel and explosives, riddled with bone-shattering and organ-bursting bullets, evaporated into a reddish mist. And the deed must be repeated over and over and over again, efficiency demanding many simultaneous killings, each death shattering the lives of surviving family, friends, lovers, colleagues. Each death dehumanizes us. Reduced to powerless onlookers, we sense we are being drawn to an unavoidable reckoning. When slaughter is the standard currency of global affairs, there is no escaping the lurch towards greater massacres to come. We are so fixed on the killing we ignore the world falling apart around us.
Genocide is not a weird aberration that crops up, upsets everyone, and then subsides with comforting assurances of “never again”. Scholars of genocide have shown that it is always prepared for by a campaign of scapegoating, hate, and dehumanization of intended victims for the purposes of manipulating public sentiment to achieve political aims. In truth, the culmination can only be viewed as a collective act of ritual slaughter without rationale, purpose, or sense. We might remember this when we hear Republicans’ and other bigots’ hate speech against immigrants, transgendered people, Muslims, gays, blacks, and yes, Jews as well.
Genocide has become a pallid descriptor of what it is about. It ought to be described one killing at a time with all its attendant madness, violated bodies, and loss, horror, and grief. It should not be cushioned by terms like “collateral damage” or “unintended” or “they were being used as cover for terrorists “. It should not be dignified as a historical commonplace, an inevitable outgrowth of political contention.
It is also dehumanizing for all of us to be reduced to head-shaking, tut-tutting onlookers. Netanyahu has damaged Israel irrevocably; so too has the world wounded itself by limiting itself to impotent denunciations. Those fixated on a distant rising flood often look down to find “that the waters around [them] have grown.” It is not enough for national governments to “recognize” a Palestinian state. It is time to compel Israel, via sanctions, diplomacy, and UN enforcement, to stop the killing and any talk of forced relocation. From there, the momentum should continue into establishing a Palestinian state for the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis. It is simply no longer viable to maintain this inherently brutal status quo.