Without decisive action
by the international community to halt the Gaza genocide, Israel’s impunity
will cement its legacy as the 21st century’s exemplar of evil rivalling that of
Nazi Germany.
By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza stands as a stark monument to
21st-century barbarity and evil. As a deliberate campaign to annihilate
a people it mirrors the darkest atrocities the 20th Century and will go
down in history as the failure of the so-called “international rules
based order” that Western nations like to invoke so often against their
adversaries. Israel’s actions have convinced numerous respected voices
that their crimes constitute the crime of genocide as defined under the Genocide Convention.
Among those who have come to this conclusion have been the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Israeli academics Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg, and Omer Bartov, hundreds of Jewish health care professionals, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, the United Nations, and many others. In public statements and letters all of these individuals and organizations have cited evidence of deliberate killings, starvation policies, and conditions aimed at destroying Palestinians as a people. This horror, which the world has watched on their social media feeds for more than two years, far from being an isolated eruption of Israeli violence, is the latest phase of a century-long Zionist colonial project, rooted in ethno-supremacist ideology akin to the 20th century’s worst genocides. It has positioned Israel as the Middle East’s gravest threat to peace and a prime example of modern evil no different than what the Nazis did during the Holocaust.
The Gaza genocide evokes the Holocaust’s horror, where Nazi Germany exterminated six million Jews alongside seven million Roma, disabled individuals, political dissidents and others in death camps like Auschwitz, driven by an ethno-supremacist ideology, and a dehumanizing rhetoric labelling victims as “vermin.” Gaza’s devastation parallels this with Israeli leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoking “Amalek”, a biblical call to exterminate an entire people and lay waste to their society. Similarly, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant branded Palestinians as “human animals,” justifying a siege to deny food, water, fuel, and other things necessary for human survival. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested using nuclear weapons to annihilate the people of Gaza, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded Gaza’s erasure, echoing Nazi calls for a “final solution.” The UN’s 2025 report confirms violations of the Genocide Convention—mass killings, intentional harm, and life conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians, while Amnesty International’s 2024 report calls it a “live-streamed genocide,” with hospitals, schools, and UN shelters bombed, killing more than 75,000 directly and potentially more than 600,000 indirectly.
This brutality recalls the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1917, where 1.5 million people were killed through death marches and starvation, and the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two, where 13,000 Jews were killed and the 50,000 who remained were sent to Nazi death camps. Gaza’s blockade since 2007, tightened post-2023, mirrors these historic atrocities with Israel forcing Palestinians into so-called “safe zones” only to bomb those who had survived previous bombings. The population of Gaza numbered 2.3 million in October 2023, half of them children. Since the start of Israel’s genocidal assault they have been subjected to bullets, bombs, mortars, starvation, deprivation and disease, in a 365 square kilometre open air concentration camp, with over 90% of the hospitals, 95% of the schools and universities, and more than 80% of the homes and buildings damaged or destroyed.
The international community’s inaction—despite warnings by the UN and hundreds of genocide scholars—echoes the Allies’ indifference to Armenian pleas in World War One, and the pleas of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in the lead up to World War Two. The Rwandan Genocide of 1994, where 800,000 Tutsis were hacked to death in 100 days amid Hutu radio calls for extermination, finds its parallel in Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians. Israeli airstrikes replicates the Nazi’s orchestrated slaughter of 11 million during the Holocaust. The Bosnian Genocide’s Srebrenica massacre is echoed in the way that Palestinians were herded into Gaza’s so-called “safe zones,” and bombed while in flimsy tents just trying to survive.
B’Tselem’s 2025 report—“Our Genocide”—details the “coordinated destruction” of Gaza, with 80% of the territory’s infrastructure razed, making everything in what were once the major centres of the enclave look like Hiroshima did after the atomic bomb was dropped. Dresden’s firebombing (25,000+ dead), Tokyo’s incineration (100,000+ dead), and Hiroshima-Nagasaki’s atomic annihilation (200,000+ dead)—share Gaza’s disproportionate carnage. Israel’s use of 2,000-pound bombs in dense neighbourhoods, documented by Human Rights Watch as “extermination,” prioritizes destruction over precision. Japan’s Nanjing Massacre (300,000+ killed) parallels the rape of Gaza women by Israeli soldiers and summary executions, with IDF soldiers’ TikTok videos boasting of atrocities, echoing the confessions contained in the diaries of Japanese soldiers.
The Gaza genocide is not a post-October 7, 2023 anomaly but the apex of Zionism’s colonial violence that began with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which ignored 700,000 indigenous Palestinians in historic Palestine to promise a “national home” to European Jews. The slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land,” coined by Israel Zangwill was Zionist propaganda that erased Palestine’s vibrant Muslim, Christian, and Jewish society, rivalling Nazi propaganda’s erasure of Jewish humanity in Germany.
Historian Rashid Khalidi notes this myth was used as a justification of the British-backed dispossession, setting the stage for the Nakba in 1948. That event, burned into the souls of Palestinians, saw Zionist terrorist militias—Haganah, Irgun, Lehi—ethnically cleanse 750,000 Palestinians, destroy 500 villages via Plan Dalet, and murder thousands of Palestinians, to secure a Jewish-majority state. Massacres like Deir Yassin and Lydda mirrored Nazi massacres of entire towns, with Palestinian survivors denied the right of return under UN Resolution 194, a condition of Israel’s 1949 UN admission which it immediately violated. More than seven million refugees and their descendants remain stateless around the world, which is a crime of ongoing displacement.
Zionism’s ethno-supremacist ideology, equating Jews as “God’s chosen people” with divine land rights in historic Palestine and beyond, parallels the Nazi slogan of Aryans being the “master race. David Ben-Gurion’s 1937 call to “expel Arabs and take their places” and Golda Meir’s 1969 denial of Palestinian existence, despite documents showing she was born in “Palestine” and therefore was a Palestinian, are reminiscent of Nazi deputy fuehrer Heinrich Himmler’s dehumanization of Jews.
Israel’s history of aggression extends beyond Gaza, instigating nearly every conflict with its neighbours in the region since 1948. The 1956 Suez Crisis saw Israel invade Egypt’s Sinai, unprovoked, alongside Britain and France. The 1967 Six-Day War, a pre-emptive strike on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, led to the illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Sinai, and Golan Heights, violating Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The 1978 and 1982 Lebanon invasions, including the Sabra-Shatila massacre (3,500 dead, facilitated by eventual PM Ariel Sharon), and multiple wars in Gaza since 2008 reflect a clear pattern of instigating violence. This is also evident in Israel’s attacks against Lebanon, and bombings of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar since 2023—often without provocation—acts which breach sovereignty, international law, and the UN Charter. Israel’s criminality can also be seen in over 50 assassinations since 1948, in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia and Syria—once again, all violations of international law.
The Zionist project’s colonial roots trace back to the late 19th century, when the founder of the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl envisioned a Jewish secular state in Palestine, disregarding its indigenous population. His disdain for the inhabitants of Palestine (Muslim, Christian and Jewish) was made clear in 1904 when he said, “The Zionist colony would form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” His vision was helped by the Balfour Declaration, which prioritized Zionist settlers over the territory’s 700,000 Palestinians, setting an ugly precedent for ethnic cleansing and exclusion.
This colonial framework, as Israeli historian Ilan PappĂ© argues in his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, mirrors settler-colonial genocides in Australia and the Americas, where indigenous peoples and societies were erased to make way for settler societies made up primarily of white Europeans. The Nakba’s ethnic cleansing was not a spontaneous event but one that was meticulously planned, with Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion (born in modern day Poland) explicitly advocating for “transfer” [ethnic cleansing] to ensure Jewish dominance in historic Palestine. In a letter to his son Amos in October 1937 he wrote, “We must expel the Arabs [Palestinians] and take their places . . . And, if we have to use force, not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places, then we have force at our disposal.” The ongoing Gaza genocide extends this logic, aiming to render the territory uninhabitable for Palestinians through systematic destruction of agriculture, water systems, cultural heritage, all manner of civilian infrastructure, and mass murder, as documented by UN reports. This calculated erasure aligns with Raphael Lemkin’s genocide definition—acts to destroy a group’s “essential foundations of life.”
Western complicity, particularly from the United States, amplifies Israel’s impunity. Beyond financial aid, the US provides diplomatic cover, and has vetoed multiple UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s actions, a pattern since 1972. This protection has emboldened Israel’s violations, from the 1967 occupations to Gaza’s siege, mirroring how Nazi Germany exploited the League of Nations’ weakness. Western media often sanitizes Israel’s atrocities, framing Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” while ignoring Israel’s state terror, as noted in critiques of news outlets like CNN and BBC. This double standard dehumanizes Palestinians, the same way Nazi propaganda vilified Jews, thereby enabling public indifference to Gaza’s suffering. The supply of American precision-guided munitions, used in Gaza’s indiscriminate bombings, implicates the US directly in war crimes, as stated by respected human rights organizations and legal scholars.
Since its creation Israel’s actions have destabilized the Middle East, leading to wider conflicts. Its unprovoked strikes on Iran and Syria, alongside proxy wars via US-backed militias, have inflamed regional tensions. The 2025 Qatar attack, targetting Hamas officials, underscores Israel’s disregard for international law, and territorial sovereignty, provoking responses from groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis. This recklessness, fuelled by Zionism’s expansionist zeal, threatens to draw the US and other Middle East nations into a wider war, echoing how unchecked aggression in the 1930s led to global conflict. The International Criminal Court’s 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes signal growing global concern, yet Western inaction to stop the genocide persists.
The Gaza genocide’s scale is compounded by Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, a tactic rooted in Zionist goals to erase Palestinian presence, and mimicking tactics the Nazis used in the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two. Hospitals have been bombed repeatedly while medical staff and patients have been targeted and killed, violating Geneva Convention protections for medical facilities. UN reports document the destruction of over 90% of Gaza’s healthcare system, leaving millions without access to care, a strategy to maximize civilian suffering and death. This mirrors the Nazi destruction of Warsaw’s infrastructure to crush resistance, prioritizing annihilation over military objectives. Such actions, as Segal notes, aim to “destroy the group as such,” fulfilling genocide’s legal definition.
Israel’s religious and political rhetoric further exposes its genocidal intent. Beyond Netanyahu’s Amalek invocation, religious leaders have called Palestinians “beasts” and “animals” unfit for coexistence, while Knesset member Avi Dichter described Gaza’s assault as “rolling out the Nakba.” These statements, combined with half of Israeli Jews supporting genocide, and policies like cutting off Gaza’s electricity and water, reflect a supremacist ideology that justifies extermination, akin to Nazi depictions of Jews as subhuman. The Balfour Declaration’s legacy, seeing Jews as humans while dehumanizing Palestinians, continues to shape this violence, with Western powers complicit in its perpetuation. American historian Norman Finkelstein (a child of Holocaust survivors) argues that Israel’s actions constitute a “public genocide,” conducted openly with Western-supplied weapons.
Global inaction mirrors historical failures, enabling Israel’s crimes. The UN’s inability to enforce resolutions, hampered by US vetoes, recalls the League of Nations’ collapse before Nazi aggression. The failure to act in Rwanda and Bosnia (also hampered by UNSC vetoes) allowed genocides to unfold, and Gaza faces a similar fate as Western leaders deflect accountability with claims of “Israel’s right to self-defence.” International law, including the Genocide Convention, is rendered toothless when powerful nations shield perpetrators, as seen with US support for Israel’s war crimes. Grassroots movements, like global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns, represent growing resistance, but political elites remain complicit as they ignore or willingly support Israeli actions.
The broader implications of Israel’s actions threaten global stability. Its attacks on multiple nations—Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Qatar—risk escalating into a regional war, potentially involving nuclear powers, reminiscent of pre-World War Two escalations. Unconditional support by the US, including sale of advanced weaponry, fuels this danger, implicating it in Gaza’s atrocities. The Zionist ideology’s expansionist vision, as articulated by Herzl and the current Zionist leadership of Israel aiming for a “Greater Israel,” drives this aggression, and threatens to destabilize the Middle East and beyond. The international community’s failure to hold Israel accountable risks normalizing genocidal violence, undermining global human rights frameworks and political stability.
Ending Israel’s apartheid, “de-Zionizing” Israeli society, enforcing Palestinian refugees’ right of return, and prosecuting war crimes demand urgent global resolve. The moral failures evident in the Gaza genocide, as in the Holocaust, Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, lies in the collective silence and inaction of most of the global community. The Zionist myth of a “land without a people” and Jews being “God’s chosen people” continues to justify ethnic cleansing, echoing colonial genocides worldwide. Without decisive action—sanctions, arms embargoes, and ICC enforcement—Israel’s impunity will cement its legacy as the 21st century’s exemplar of evil, a state whose supremacist ideology and Western-backed genocidal violence rivals that of Nazi Germany.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
Among those who have come to this conclusion have been the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Israeli academics Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg, and Omer Bartov, hundreds of Jewish health care professionals, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, UN Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, the United Nations, and many others. In public statements and letters all of these individuals and organizations have cited evidence of deliberate killings, starvation policies, and conditions aimed at destroying Palestinians as a people. This horror, which the world has watched on their social media feeds for more than two years, far from being an isolated eruption of Israeli violence, is the latest phase of a century-long Zionist colonial project, rooted in ethno-supremacist ideology akin to the 20th century’s worst genocides. It has positioned Israel as the Middle East’s gravest threat to peace and a prime example of modern evil no different than what the Nazis did during the Holocaust.
The Gaza genocide evokes the Holocaust’s horror, where Nazi Germany exterminated six million Jews alongside seven million Roma, disabled individuals, political dissidents and others in death camps like Auschwitz, driven by an ethno-supremacist ideology, and a dehumanizing rhetoric labelling victims as “vermin.” Gaza’s devastation parallels this with Israeli leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoking “Amalek”, a biblical call to exterminate an entire people and lay waste to their society. Similarly, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant branded Palestinians as “human animals,” justifying a siege to deny food, water, fuel, and other things necessary for human survival. Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested using nuclear weapons to annihilate the people of Gaza, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded Gaza’s erasure, echoing Nazi calls for a “final solution.” The UN’s 2025 report confirms violations of the Genocide Convention—mass killings, intentional harm, and life conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians, while Amnesty International’s 2024 report calls it a “live-streamed genocide,” with hospitals, schools, and UN shelters bombed, killing more than 75,000 directly and potentially more than 600,000 indirectly.
This brutality recalls the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1917, where 1.5 million people were killed through death marches and starvation, and the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two, where 13,000 Jews were killed and the 50,000 who remained were sent to Nazi death camps. Gaza’s blockade since 2007, tightened post-2023, mirrors these historic atrocities with Israel forcing Palestinians into so-called “safe zones” only to bomb those who had survived previous bombings. The population of Gaza numbered 2.3 million in October 2023, half of them children. Since the start of Israel’s genocidal assault they have been subjected to bullets, bombs, mortars, starvation, deprivation and disease, in a 365 square kilometre open air concentration camp, with over 90% of the hospitals, 95% of the schools and universities, and more than 80% of the homes and buildings damaged or destroyed.
The international community’s inaction—despite warnings by the UN and hundreds of genocide scholars—echoes the Allies’ indifference to Armenian pleas in World War One, and the pleas of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in the lead up to World War Two. The Rwandan Genocide of 1994, where 800,000 Tutsis were hacked to death in 100 days amid Hutu radio calls for extermination, finds its parallel in Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians. Israeli airstrikes replicates the Nazi’s orchestrated slaughter of 11 million during the Holocaust. The Bosnian Genocide’s Srebrenica massacre is echoed in the way that Palestinians were herded into Gaza’s so-called “safe zones,” and bombed while in flimsy tents just trying to survive.
B’Tselem’s 2025 report—“Our Genocide”—details the “coordinated destruction” of Gaza, with 80% of the territory’s infrastructure razed, making everything in what were once the major centres of the enclave look like Hiroshima did after the atomic bomb was dropped. Dresden’s firebombing (25,000+ dead), Tokyo’s incineration (100,000+ dead), and Hiroshima-Nagasaki’s atomic annihilation (200,000+ dead)—share Gaza’s disproportionate carnage. Israel’s use of 2,000-pound bombs in dense neighbourhoods, documented by Human Rights Watch as “extermination,” prioritizes destruction over precision. Japan’s Nanjing Massacre (300,000+ killed) parallels the rape of Gaza women by Israeli soldiers and summary executions, with IDF soldiers’ TikTok videos boasting of atrocities, echoing the confessions contained in the diaries of Japanese soldiers.
The Gaza genocide is not a post-October 7, 2023 anomaly but the apex of Zionism’s colonial violence that began with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which ignored 700,000 indigenous Palestinians in historic Palestine to promise a “national home” to European Jews. The slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land,” coined by Israel Zangwill was Zionist propaganda that erased Palestine’s vibrant Muslim, Christian, and Jewish society, rivalling Nazi propaganda’s erasure of Jewish humanity in Germany.
Historian Rashid Khalidi notes this myth was used as a justification of the British-backed dispossession, setting the stage for the Nakba in 1948. That event, burned into the souls of Palestinians, saw Zionist terrorist militias—Haganah, Irgun, Lehi—ethnically cleanse 750,000 Palestinians, destroy 500 villages via Plan Dalet, and murder thousands of Palestinians, to secure a Jewish-majority state. Massacres like Deir Yassin and Lydda mirrored Nazi massacres of entire towns, with Palestinian survivors denied the right of return under UN Resolution 194, a condition of Israel’s 1949 UN admission which it immediately violated. More than seven million refugees and their descendants remain stateless around the world, which is a crime of ongoing displacement.
Zionism’s ethno-supremacist ideology, equating Jews as “God’s chosen people” with divine land rights in historic Palestine and beyond, parallels the Nazi slogan of Aryans being the “master race. David Ben-Gurion’s 1937 call to “expel Arabs and take their places” and Golda Meir’s 1969 denial of Palestinian existence, despite documents showing she was born in “Palestine” and therefore was a Palestinian, are reminiscent of Nazi deputy fuehrer Heinrich Himmler’s dehumanization of Jews.
Israel’s history of aggression extends beyond Gaza, instigating nearly every conflict with its neighbours in the region since 1948. The 1956 Suez Crisis saw Israel invade Egypt’s Sinai, unprovoked, alongside Britain and France. The 1967 Six-Day War, a pre-emptive strike on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, led to the illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Sinai, and Golan Heights, violating Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. The 1978 and 1982 Lebanon invasions, including the Sabra-Shatila massacre (3,500 dead, facilitated by eventual PM Ariel Sharon), and multiple wars in Gaza since 2008 reflect a clear pattern of instigating violence. This is also evident in Israel’s attacks against Lebanon, and bombings of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar since 2023—often without provocation—acts which breach sovereignty, international law, and the UN Charter. Israel’s criminality can also be seen in over 50 assassinations since 1948, in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, Tunisia and Syria—once again, all violations of international law.
The Zionist project’s colonial roots trace back to the late 19th century, when the founder of the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl envisioned a Jewish secular state in Palestine, disregarding its indigenous population. His disdain for the inhabitants of Palestine (Muslim, Christian and Jewish) was made clear in 1904 when he said, “The Zionist colony would form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” His vision was helped by the Balfour Declaration, which prioritized Zionist settlers over the territory’s 700,000 Palestinians, setting an ugly precedent for ethnic cleansing and exclusion.
This colonial framework, as Israeli historian Ilan PappĂ© argues in his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, mirrors settler-colonial genocides in Australia and the Americas, where indigenous peoples and societies were erased to make way for settler societies made up primarily of white Europeans. The Nakba’s ethnic cleansing was not a spontaneous event but one that was meticulously planned, with Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion (born in modern day Poland) explicitly advocating for “transfer” [ethnic cleansing] to ensure Jewish dominance in historic Palestine. In a letter to his son Amos in October 1937 he wrote, “We must expel the Arabs [Palestinians] and take their places . . . And, if we have to use force, not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places, then we have force at our disposal.” The ongoing Gaza genocide extends this logic, aiming to render the territory uninhabitable for Palestinians through systematic destruction of agriculture, water systems, cultural heritage, all manner of civilian infrastructure, and mass murder, as documented by UN reports. This calculated erasure aligns with Raphael Lemkin’s genocide definition—acts to destroy a group’s “essential foundations of life.”
Western complicity, particularly from the United States, amplifies Israel’s impunity. Beyond financial aid, the US provides diplomatic cover, and has vetoed multiple UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s actions, a pattern since 1972. This protection has emboldened Israel’s violations, from the 1967 occupations to Gaza’s siege, mirroring how Nazi Germany exploited the League of Nations’ weakness. Western media often sanitizes Israel’s atrocities, framing Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” while ignoring Israel’s state terror, as noted in critiques of news outlets like CNN and BBC. This double standard dehumanizes Palestinians, the same way Nazi propaganda vilified Jews, thereby enabling public indifference to Gaza’s suffering. The supply of American precision-guided munitions, used in Gaza’s indiscriminate bombings, implicates the US directly in war crimes, as stated by respected human rights organizations and legal scholars.
Since its creation Israel’s actions have destabilized the Middle East, leading to wider conflicts. Its unprovoked strikes on Iran and Syria, alongside proxy wars via US-backed militias, have inflamed regional tensions. The 2025 Qatar attack, targetting Hamas officials, underscores Israel’s disregard for international law, and territorial sovereignty, provoking responses from groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis. This recklessness, fuelled by Zionism’s expansionist zeal, threatens to draw the US and other Middle East nations into a wider war, echoing how unchecked aggression in the 1930s led to global conflict. The International Criminal Court’s 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes signal growing global concern, yet Western inaction to stop the genocide persists.
The Gaza genocide’s scale is compounded by Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, a tactic rooted in Zionist goals to erase Palestinian presence, and mimicking tactics the Nazis used in the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War Two. Hospitals have been bombed repeatedly while medical staff and patients have been targeted and killed, violating Geneva Convention protections for medical facilities. UN reports document the destruction of over 90% of Gaza’s healthcare system, leaving millions without access to care, a strategy to maximize civilian suffering and death. This mirrors the Nazi destruction of Warsaw’s infrastructure to crush resistance, prioritizing annihilation over military objectives. Such actions, as Segal notes, aim to “destroy the group as such,” fulfilling genocide’s legal definition.
Israel’s religious and political rhetoric further exposes its genocidal intent. Beyond Netanyahu’s Amalek invocation, religious leaders have called Palestinians “beasts” and “animals” unfit for coexistence, while Knesset member Avi Dichter described Gaza’s assault as “rolling out the Nakba.” These statements, combined with half of Israeli Jews supporting genocide, and policies like cutting off Gaza’s electricity and water, reflect a supremacist ideology that justifies extermination, akin to Nazi depictions of Jews as subhuman. The Balfour Declaration’s legacy, seeing Jews as humans while dehumanizing Palestinians, continues to shape this violence, with Western powers complicit in its perpetuation. American historian Norman Finkelstein (a child of Holocaust survivors) argues that Israel’s actions constitute a “public genocide,” conducted openly with Western-supplied weapons.
Global inaction mirrors historical failures, enabling Israel’s crimes. The UN’s inability to enforce resolutions, hampered by US vetoes, recalls the League of Nations’ collapse before Nazi aggression. The failure to act in Rwanda and Bosnia (also hampered by UNSC vetoes) allowed genocides to unfold, and Gaza faces a similar fate as Western leaders deflect accountability with claims of “Israel’s right to self-defence.” International law, including the Genocide Convention, is rendered toothless when powerful nations shield perpetrators, as seen with US support for Israel’s war crimes. Grassroots movements, like global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns, represent growing resistance, but political elites remain complicit as they ignore or willingly support Israeli actions.
The broader implications of Israel’s actions threaten global stability. Its attacks on multiple nations—Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Qatar—risk escalating into a regional war, potentially involving nuclear powers, reminiscent of pre-World War Two escalations. Unconditional support by the US, including sale of advanced weaponry, fuels this danger, implicating it in Gaza’s atrocities. The Zionist ideology’s expansionist vision, as articulated by Herzl and the current Zionist leadership of Israel aiming for a “Greater Israel,” drives this aggression, and threatens to destabilize the Middle East and beyond. The international community’s failure to hold Israel accountable risks normalizing genocidal violence, undermining global human rights frameworks and political stability.
Ending Israel’s apartheid, “de-Zionizing” Israeli society, enforcing Palestinian refugees’ right of return, and prosecuting war crimes demand urgent global resolve. The moral failures evident in the Gaza genocide, as in the Holocaust, Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, lies in the collective silence and inaction of most of the global community. The Zionist myth of a “land without a people” and Jews being “God’s chosen people” continues to justify ethnic cleansing, echoing colonial genocides worldwide. Without decisive action—sanctions, arms embargoes, and ICC enforcement—Israel’s impunity will cement its legacy as the 21st century’s exemplar of evil, a state whose supremacist ideology and Western-backed genocidal violence rivals that of Nazi Germany.
© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.
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