Three years of the Gaza genocide, Zionist supremacy, and the global struggle for justice

The genocide is the culmination of decades of policies designed to erase Palestinian culture and history, and ensure that they remain vulnerable, powerless, and stateless.

 
By Fareed Khan
A version of this article is available on Substack.

As we enter the fourth year of genocide in Gaza, it becomes impossible to understand the present without confronting the deeper ideological and historical forces that made such a crime possible. The genocide did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the culmination of a century‑long political project rooted in Zionist ethnonational supremacy, colonial conquest, anti-Palestinian hate, and the dehumanization of an indigenous population. To grasp the full magnitude of what has unfolded, we must look at the ideological foundations of the Israeli state, the historical arc of Palestinian dispossession, and the global structures that have enabled Israel’s violence for generations.

Zionism’s racialized foundations

Zionism emerged in late‑19th‑century Europe, shaped by the same intellectual climate that produced colonialism, racial hierarchy, and ethnonationalist ideologies. It was born in an era when European powers carved up continents, justified conquest through pseudo‑scientific theories of racial superiority, and viewed indigenous populations as impediments to their imperial ambitions. Theodor Herzl, often described as the father of modern Zionism, envisioned a Jewish state in Palestine as a European outpost—modern, rational, and superior to the “barbaric” indigenous population. His writings framed Palestinians not as a people with agency, political rights, history, or sovereignty, but as obstacles to be managed, displaced, or subordinated.

This worldview contained structural similarities to other European ethnonationalist movements of the era. It embraced ethnic cleansing, territorial exclusivity, and a racial hierarchical vision of society in which Jewish supremacy was seen as natural and necessary. These ideas later crystallized into policies within the Zionist movement that prioritized Jewish demographic dominance over Palestinians and a goal to control the territory of historic Palestine.

Zionism’s anti-Palestinian, racialized logic was not merely theoretical. It shaped the strategies of early Zionist militias, informed the political decisions of Israel’s founding leaders, and laid the groundwork for a state built on exclusion, displacement, and mass murder. The seeds of apartheid, segregation, and ethnic cleansing were planted long before 1948 since they were embedded in the ideological DNA of the movement itself.

The Nakba and the architecture of Zionist supremacy

The Nakba of 1948—the ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians, the massacre of thousands, and the complete erasure of more than 500 Palestinian villages—was not an aberration. It was the foundational moment in the creation of the Israeli supremacist regime. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was deliberate, systematic, and essential to establishing a state with a Jewish demographic majority. It was carried out through massacres, forced expulsions, destruction of towns and villages, and psychological terror designed to empty the land of its indigenous inhabitants.

After the expulsions, Israel enacted laws to ensure that Palestinians could never return. The Absentee Property Law confiscated the homes, farms, orchards, and businesses of those who had fled or been expelled, transferring their land to Jews arriving from Europe, and entrenching a system of dispossession. The Nakba was not simply a historical event. It was the beginning of a political and social order built on Jewish ethnosupremacy, Jewish exceptionalism, Palestinian exclusion, and the start of a campaign to permanently erase Palestinian presence, culture and history in the land where they and their ancestors had lived for millennia..

Following the 1967 war, Israel extended this architecture of domination into the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza. The occupation entrenched a dual legal system, one where illegal Israeli settlers lived under Israeli civil law, enjoyed full political rights, and received state protection, while Palestinians lived under military law, faced movement restrictions, home demolitions, land seizures, arbitrary detention, and torture. Human rights organizations—including Israeli rights group B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International—have concluded that this constitutes a regime of apartheid, “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

This system is not incidental. It is the architecture of an ethnosupremacist state, designed to maintain demographic dominance, territorial control, and political power at the expense of an indigenous population whose rights are systematically denied at every turn.

Dehumanization as policy and culture

Supremacy is sustained not only through laws but through language. Israeli political leaders have repeatedly used rhetoric that erases Palestinian identity and strips Palestinians of humanity. Palestinians are often referred to not as Palestinians but as “Arabs,” a linguistic move that denies how they identify themselves and frames them as a generic, undifferentiated mass. Senior officials have used dehumanizing language that casts Palestinians as inherently threatening—for example, statements describing Palestinian children as “little snakes” that needed to be exterminated. This supremacist thinking is not restricted to the political class but has become common within Israeli society. A year ago Israeli model Sarai Givati justified the killing of Palestinian children “because they will grow up to be terrorists. While Israeli TV producer Elad Barashi posted on social media in May 2025, "I can't understand the people here in the State of Israel who don't want to fill Gaza with gas showers . . . or train cars . . . and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza."

This rhetoric is not accidental. It is part of the indoctrination process that Jewish youth in Israel and the diaspora are put through during their school years where they are programmed to see Palestinians as subhuman.  This prepares them defend Israeli atrocities against Palestinians, and prepares Zionist Jews to accept policies of collective punishment, siege, and brutal large‑scale military assaults against a defenceless population, normalizing violence and making atrocity acceptable and justifiable. When a population is consistently portrayed as subhuman, dangerous, or undeserving of rights, the moral guardrails to mass killing are eroded. Dehumanization becomes a cultural norm that shapes public opinion, political discourse, and military strategy. The result is a society in which cruelty is tolerated and justified, and in which the suffering of Palestinians is viewed as either irrelevant and normal. This cultural environment is essential to sustaining a system of domination, because without it the machinery of occupation and genocide would not function.

The Gaza Genocide as a continuation of history

The ongoing genocide in Gaza—which has killed more than 80,000 Palestinians, destroyed hospitals, universities, mosques, churches, cemeteries, and civilian infrastructure, and weaponized starvation—is the latest chapter in a long history of Israeli depravity. It reflects the same logic that drove the Nakba, the occupation, the illegal settlement enterprise, and decades of military assaults on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and beyond.

Israel’s actions in Gaza are not a deviation from their decades-long racist policy, they are the fulfillment of it. The siege imposed on Gaza since 2007, the repeated bombardments, the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, and the use of starvation as a weapon all stem from the same ideological foundation—Palestinians are a population to be controlled, contained, and eliminated when necessary to fulfill the Zionist agenda.  The genocide is the culmination of decades of policies designed to make Palestinian life unbearable, to fragment Palestinian society, erase their culture and history, and to ensure that Palestinians remain stateless, powerless, and vulnerable. It is the logical endpoint of a system built on Zionist supremacy and sustained through violence.

Western complicity and the collapse of international law

Western powers have enabled this system for generations. The United States has provided more than $150 billion in military aid to Israel since 1948, supplying the weapons, intelligence, and diplomatic cover that make Israel’s crimes possible. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada have supplied arms, defended Israel at the UN, and undermined efforts to hold Israeli officials accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This complicity has destroyed the credibility of the post‑war international legal order. The Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were designed to prevent atrocities like those unfolding in Gaza. Yet Western governments have ignored ICJ rulings, opposed ICC investigations, and only enforced international law selectively—condemning adversaries while excusing allies. The message couldn’t be more clear—international law applies only when it is politically convenient, Human rights are conditional and racialized, justice is selective, and geopolitical interests override moral and legal obligations.

Media complicity and the Palestinian exception

Western media has reinforced this system through biased coverage that marginalizes Palestinian suffering and amplifies Israeli narratives. Studies show that Palestinian deaths are reported as statistics, stripped of humanity, while Israeli deaths are described with emotive language that evokes sympathy and outrage. Palestinian voices are marginalized, Israeli claims are amplified without verification, and historical context is erased.

In addition, Palestinian resistance is almost reflexively framed as terrorism, while Israeli state violence—no matter how indiscriminate—is framed as “self‑defence.” This asymmetry mirrors propaganda tactics used by the Nazis to dehumanize Jews and other targeted populations. It desensitizes audiences to Palestinian suffering and normalizes their slaughter.

The result is a media landscape that manufactures consent for genocide, shaping public opinion in ways that protect Israel from accountability and obscure the reality of Palestinian oppression.

The global struggle for justice

Despite Western complicity, global momentum for Palestinian justice and freedom is growing. More than 149 countries recognize Palestinian statehood. Millions have marched in the streets around the world demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza. Scholars, activists, and human rights organizations have demanded accountability. The International Court of Justice has issued provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent genocide, and the International Criminal Court has sought arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

This global movement reflects a deeper truth which shows that justice for Palestinians is inseparable from the struggle to rebuild the international legal order. It requires dismantling the structures of supremacy, ending Western military and diplomatic support for Israel, and confronting the anti-Palestinian racialized biases that shape Western foreign policy.

The post‑war human rights system was created because those who witnessed the horrors of World War II understood that nothing less than an entirely new moral architecture was needed to prevent humanity from descending again into barbarism. It was built by people who had seen genocide with their own eyes, who understood the cost of indifference, and who believed that universal human rights must be protected through binding international law. But those architects of the post‑war order—along with the generation that carried their memory forward—are now gone. With their passing, the moral clarity that animated the system has faded, and the institutions they built have been left in the hands of leaders who neither share their historical experience nor uphold their ethical commitments.

In the absence of those witnesses, the system they created is now collapsing, if it has not already collapsed. The principles forged in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Nuremberg have been hollowed out by decades of selective enforcement, geopolitical self‑interest, and the willingness of powerful states to ignore international law when it constrains their geopolitical ambitions. Gaza has made this collapse undeniable. The very nations that once championed “Never Again” have tolerated, enabled, and rationalized a genocide in real time. The moral architecture built to prevent atrocity has been abandoned, not because it failed, but because those entrusted with preserving it chose convenience over conscience.

Rebuilding it requires ending Western support for states like Israel that commit genocide, reconstructing international institutions capable of enforcing human rights, holding media corporations accountable for promoting dehumanizing narratives, supporting global movements for justice, recognizing Palestinian humanity and rights, and dismantling structures of ethnosupremacy wherever they exist.

The crossroads

As the fourth year of the Gaza genocide begins humanity stands at a crossroads. One path leads back to the barbarism of the mid-20th century, where human life is expendable and genocide is accepted. The other leads back toward justice, where human rights are universal and protected. The genocide in Gaza has become the moral crisis of our time. It has exposed the collapse of Western moral authority, the failure of international law, and the absolute fragility of human rights. It has shown that the preservation of human dignity requires not neutrality but courage—the courage to confront injustice, to speak truth to power, and to demand accountability from those that consider themselves as above the law.

As American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead reminded us, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Her words tell us that the future will not be shaped by presidents or prime ministers but by ordinary people who refuse to be neutral, who refuse to accept a world where genocide is normalized and human dignity is negotiable.

The choice is ours on which path we take, and history will remember whether we forced out leaders to meet this moment with courage or allowed them to watch a world slide, once again, into darkness.

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