What we leave behind: Patrick Stewart, Jean-Luc Picard, and the future to which we should aspire

The measure of a life is not the fortune accumulated, the power wielded, or the fame acquired. It is whether we left the world a little better than we found it. 

By Fareed Khan
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

Late yesterday afternoon the world learned about the death of British actor Patrick Stewart, best known for his role as Captain Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and as Professor Xavier in the X-Men film franchise.  And surprisingly the news has affected me more than I expected.

Since news of his death began to spread, social media has been flooded with tributes from former colleagues, friends, and fans. For millions of people who knew him through his television and film roles, the sense of loss feels surprisingly personal, as though someone they were close to for years has suddenly passed. There is something remarkable about the way certain people become companions on our journey through life, even when we never meet them. Patrick Stewart was one of those people for me. He was among the very few actors I genuinely admired, and news of his passing awakened a familiar feeling, one I have experienced repeatedly over the past two decades as I have lost loved ones, friends, and others whose presence once seemed as permanent as the passing of the seasons. 

Every loss forces me back to the same place. It makes me think about time, about how quickly decades pass, about how faces that once filled our days become memories, how conversations become echoes, and how entire chapters of our lives gradually transform from lived experience into stories we tell ourselves. The older I get, the more aware I become that time is the only thing any of us truly possess, and the one thing we can never keep. 

Patrick Stewart's death felt like another reminder that an era is passing. The people who accompanied many of us through our younger years are leaving one by one, and with each departure I become more conscious that I am travelling the same road. 

When I think of Stewart, I inevitably think of the role for which he will be remembered the most--Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the starship USS Enterprise D.

Like millions of others, I spent countless hours watching Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST: TNG). As a sci-fi fan, I was drawn to the adventure, the exploration, and the wonder of the unknown. As an older man, I have come to appreciate something deeper.  Star Trek: The Next Generation was never really about humanity's adventures in space in a fictional future, it was about humanity.

Stewart’s Star Trek represented a vision of what humanity could become if we chose wisdom over fear, cooperation over tribalism, and reason over hatred. In Captain Picard’s century, humanity had not become perfect, it had simply matured. Greed no longer defined society, and wealth no longer determined a person's worth. Human beings sought self-improvement, knowledge, discovery, and service to others. Conflicts still existed, but humanity had learned, through terrible mistakes, that it either rose together or perished together. As a young man, that optimistic vision felt realistic. 

When I was in my twenties, the world was far from perfect, but there were reasons for genuine optimism. Humanity had survived the Cold War without destroying itself in a nuclear armageddon. Environmental disasters that once seemed unstoppable were being confronted through science and collective action. The ozone layer was recovering, acid rain was being reduced, more nations were evolving into democracies, and human rights issues were being advanced. It felt as though humanity, however unevenly, was learning, and history seemed to bend toward progress. 

Looking back now, I realize that many of the stories told in ST: TNG were really warning labels attached to the future. Episodes such as "The Drumhead" showed how fear, paranoia, and the search for hidden enemies could corrode democratic institutions from within. The story began with a legitimate security concern and ended with a witch hunt. Watching it today, I cannot help but think about societies increasingly divided by conspiracy theories, political extremism, and manufactured outrage, where suspicion often matters more than evidence. 

"The Wounded" explored the scars left by war and how people can become trapped by old grievances and inherited hatreds. Its lesson was simple but profound: unresolved trauma can become a prison, and today's enemies are often the ones that create tomorrow's wars.

"Chain of Command" offered perhaps the most chilling warning of all. During a covert mission, Picard is captured by the Cardassians, representatives of a deeply authoritarian state, and subjected to relentless torture. Yet the objective is not merely to extract information or compel obedience. His captors are attempting something far more sinister—to break his grasp on reality itself. They seek to force him not only to submit, but to deny what he knows to be true and accept a falsehood imposed by power. 

The episode reaches its climax when Picard is finally freed. Throughout his imprisonment, his interrogator repeatedly demands that he acknowledge the existence of five lights when only four are visible. Picard's defiant declaration, "There are four lights!", has since become one of the most memorable moments in Star Trek history because it captures a timeless truth about tyranny. Authoritarian systems rarely seek obedience alone. Their ultimate ambition is to control reality itself, to make people reject the evidence of their own senses and accept whatever version of the truth those in power decree. That lesson feels no less relevant today than it did when the episode first aired. 

The older I become, the more I appreciate that these stories were never really about distant planets or some fictional future. They were reflections of our own fears, flaws, aspirations, and moral struggles, projected into the future so that we might recognize ourselves more clearly in the present. That is precisely why they continue to resonate decades later. The questions they explored were not about alien civilizations, but about the kind of people we choose to be and the kind of world we choose to build. Yet when I look around the world today, I cannot escape the feeling that we are moving further away from the future Jean-Luc Picard hoped humanity could achieve, and closer to many of the dangers that ST: TNG warned us against. 

Today we are witness to Israel's genocide against Palestinians, a label that has been confirmed by the UN, multiple international human rights organizations, and Jewish Holocaust scholars.  For several years we have witnessed Russia's brutal war against Ukraine. Since February of this year we have watched and wondered whether the war launched against Iran by the US and Israel will push an already volatile region closer to catastrophe. Uyghurs continue to face genocide at the hands of the Chinese state, the Rohingya continue to suffer the consequences of Myanmar's genocide against them, Sudan remains devastated by violence fuelled in part by outside powers, and across the globe, countless innocent people are being displaced, imprisoned, starved, wounded, or killed.

What troubles me most is not simply that these horrors are occurring. It is that they are occurring while all of us watch. Previous generations could often claim ignorance because information travelled slowly, and atrocities could be hidden behind borders, censorship, and distance. We do not have that excuse today because we carry the evidence on devices in our pockets.

Every day we witness bombed neighbourhoods, grieving parents, starving children, desperate refugees, and communities reduced to rubble. Never before in human history have so many atrocities been documented so thoroughly and disseminated so widely in real time. And yet they continue.

At the same time, another development has fundamentally changed our world. The rise of a global billionaire class has concentrated wealth on a scale that they couldn’t spend in a hundred lifetimes. Many of these individuals possess enough wealth to transform societies and dramatically reduce human suffering. Yet too often accumulation of wealth becomes an end in itself. Fortunes continue to accumulate while homelessness, poverty, hunger, and preventable disease endure. The irony is difficult to ignore.

In the world of Jean-Luc Picard, humanity had largely transcended the pursuit of wealth. In our world, wealth has become one of the defining obsessions of civilization. Now we live in an age where the world's most powerful billionaires command greater influence than many governments. We celebrate those who speak of colonising Mars while often neglecting the urgent work of repairing the Earth. The dream of escaping our problems increasingly seems more attractive than the responsibility of solving them.

The contrast between Picard's future and our present could not be more stark. His world was built upon moral progress. Ours often seems trapped by moral stagnation.  And so I find myself wondering how future generations will judge us.

The generations that followed the Second World War looked back at the Holocaust and asked haunting questions: How could they have allowed this to happen? Why did so many remain silent? Why did so few act? 

Increasingly, I suspect future generations will ask the same questions about us. How could they witness suffering on such a scale and do so little? How could they tolerate such inequality? How could they watch authoritarianism grow and fail to resist it? How could they know the scale of atrocities committed and yet remain indifferent? 

That thought stays with me.  Perhaps because the older I become, the more conscious I am of time.

When I was twenty-five, ten years felt endless. Now entire decades seem to pass in the space between memories.

And despite everything, despite our ambitions, conflicts, and achievements, our lives remain astonishingly brief. We are here for a few decades in a universe nearly fourteen billion years old. Against that backdrop, our existence is almost insignificant. Entire civilizations rise and fall in less time than it takes our sun to complete a fraction of its journey around the Milky Way galaxy.

One day every nation, every empire, every billionaire, every politician, and every one of us will be gone.

Our lives, which are relevant and gorgeous to us and those who know us, will be momentary blips in the cosmos.  For a while, everything will matter, and then eventually nothing will. Our time in this universe is both forever and achingly finite. 

Yet perhaps that is precisely why our choices matter so much. Because our time in this planet is limited, we have a responsibility to use it well. Not perfectly. Not heroically. Simply well.

The measure of a life is not the fortune accumulated, the power wielded, or the fame acquired. It is whether we left the world a little better than we found it. Whether we eased suffering. Whether we defended the vulnerable. Whether we showed kindness when cruelty was easier, courage when silence was safer, and humanity when the world seemed determined to abandon it.

We have lived a worthy life if we have made an effort to improve the character of human society, whether in our little corner of the world or far beyond it. In a universe of unimaginable vastness, that may seem like a small accomplishment. Yet for the people whose lives were touched by our actions, it is everything.

Perhaps that is why the death of Patrick Stewart affected so many people, including me. Through his portrayal of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, he gave voice to ideals that often seem in short supply in our own age: integrity, compassion, intellectual curiosity, moral courage, and an unwavering belief that humanity could become better than it is. At a time when the world often appears to be moving in the opposite direction, those ideals remain worth defending. 

In the end, Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard will not be remembered only because he commanded a starship. He will be remembered because he reminded us of what human beings are capable of becoming at their best. If there is a legacy worth leaving behind, it is not wealth, power, or status, but the quiet conviction that every generation has a responsibility to push humanity a little further toward justice, wisdom, and kindness than it was before. And if we can do that, however imperfectly, then perhaps we will have helped bring into existence the future that Captain Picard showed us was possible.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

The Rogue Axis: The United States and Israel represent the greatest threats to world peace

The United States and Israel have created an architecture of global hypocrisy, demanding adherence to international law from others while systematically violating it themselves. 

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

In the decades since the Second World War, the international community has repeatedly confronted states that violate global norms, destabilize regions, and undermine the foundations of collective security. Yet no two countries have done more damage to the post‑1945 international order than the United States and Israel. Their actions—spanning illegal wars, covert coups, assassinations, brutal occupations, and systematic defiance of international law—form a pattern so extensive and so destructive that it demands a global reckoning. The world once united to confront Nazi Germany when its aggression threatened international peace. Today, many critics argue that the United States and Israel present a serious threat to global peace and stability—two states that have repeatedly acted with disregard for international law, without meaningful accountability. Their record of military interventions, occupations, targeted killings, and violations of international norms has led some political analysts and human rights advocates to characterize them as rogue actors operating beyond the constraints that govern other nations. Were comparable crimes attributed to private individuals rather than states, they contend, they would likely face prosecution and imprisonment rather than continuing to exercise power with impunity.

The United States emerged from World War II as the world’s dominant military and economic power. Initially it used that position to create the global institutions that are the foundations of the international rule of law.  However, it then embarked on a decades‑long campaign of interventionism that destabilized entire continents. In Latin America, the US repeatedly undermined democratic governments, orchestrated coups, and installed authoritarian regimes aligned with its geopolitical and economic interests. The 1954 overthrow of Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz, engineered by the CIA, plunged the country into a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands. In Brazil, the US supported the 1964 military coup that ushered in two decades of dictatorship. In Argentina, Chile, and elsewhere, Washington backed juntas that tortured, disappeared, and murdered tens of thousands of civilians.

The 1973 coup in Chile remains one of the most infamous examples of US interference. The CIA helped topple Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist president, replacing him with General Augusto Pinochet, whose regime carried out mass executions, disappearances, and widespread torture. Declassified documents show that the US actively destabilized Chile’s economy and political institutions to pave the way for the coup, demonstrating a willingness to destroy democracy in the name of ideological conformity.

This pattern was not confined to Latin America. In 1953, the US orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after he nationalized the country’s oil industry. Operation Ajax, carried out jointly with British intelligence, installed the Shah, whose brutal secret police, SAVAK, tortured and executed dissidents for decades. The coup not only violated Iran’s sovereignty but also sowed the seeds of long‑term instability, contributing directly to the 1979 Islamic revolution and the adversarial relationship that has persisted with the West ever since.

The US has also repeatedly manufactured pretexts for war. The Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964—used to justify full‑scale US military involvement in Vietnam—was later revealed to be largely fabricated. The resulting war killed more than three million Vietnamese, devastated Cambodia and Laos, and destabilized Southeast Asia for generations. The pattern repeated in 2003, when the US invaded Iraq based on carefully orchestrated lies it presented at the UN about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. The war, launched without UN authorization, killed more than a million Iraqis, created millions of refugees, and fractured the Middle East, creating the conditions for the rise of ISIS and other extremist groups.

The “War on Terror” that followed the September 11 attacks expanded US military operations into dozens of countries, often without congressional approval or international legal justification. Drone strikes killed tens of thousands of civilians in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Secret US torture sites operated in prisons across Europe and the Middle East. The US justified these actions under an elastic interpretation of self‑defence, effectively claiming the right to kill anywhere, anytime, without accountability.

Israel’s record, though geographically concentrated, is no less alarming and destructive. Since its establishment in 1948 on Palestinian land, Israel has engaged in systematic violations of international law, beginning with the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians during the Nakba, and the murder of thousands more. Over the decades, Israel has launched pre‑emptive wars, expanded settlements in occupied territory, assassinated diplomats and political leaders, and repeatedly defied UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions. It has started or escalated nearly every major conflict in which it has been involved, including the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1967 Six‑Day War, multiple invasions of Lebanon, and the Gaza genocide.

Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory. Yet Israel has built hundreds of Jews only settlements, home to more than 700,000 illegal settlers, in direct defiance of international law. The UN Security Council has passed dozens of resolutions condemning these actions, but Israel has ignored them all, shielded by US vetoes.

The humanitarian consequences of Israel’s actions have been catastrophic. In Gaza, repeated Israeli assaults have killed tens of thousands of civilians, destroyed hospitals, schools, and infrastructure, and created conditions that human rights experts describe as meeting the legal definition of genocide. Israel’s blockade of Gaza, now in its third decade, constitutes collective punishment, another violation of the Geneva Conventions. The UN has repeatedly declared the blockade of Gaza illegal, yet Israel continues to enforce it with impunity.

Israel has also carried out extrajudicial assassinations of Palestinian leaders, diplomats, and activists across the Middle East and Europe. The 1973 Lillehammer affair, in which Mossad agents killed an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway after mistaking him for a Palestinian militant, exemplifies Israel’s willingness to violate international sovereignty. More recently, Israel has assassinated Iranian scientists and officials, actions that have led to war.

Both the United States and Israel have repeatedly violated the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force except in self‑defence or with Security Council authorization. They have breached the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through torture, extrajudicial killings, and collective punishment. They have violated the Genocide Convention by engaging in actions intended to destroy, in whole or in part, national or ethnic groups. They have undermined the International Criminal Court, refusing to recognize its jurisdiction while demanding accountability for others.

The February 2026 joint US‑Israeli assault on Iran—launched without provocation or UN authorization—illustrates the ongoing danger posed by this rogue axis. Airstrikes targeted civilian infrastructure, nuclear research facilities, and government buildings. The assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, marked a dramatic escalation, violating international prohibitions on political assassination. UN experts condemned the attack as an act of aggression, yet both countries dismissed the criticism, insisting they were acting in the name of “regional stability.”

The consequences of these actions extend far beyond the Middle East. When powerful states violate international law with impunity, they weaken the entire global system. Other nations, observing the US and Israel’s behaviour, increasingly disregard international norms themselves. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s crackdown in Hong Kong, Turkey’s incursions into Syria—all occur in a world where the leading violators of international law face no consequences.

The United States and Israel have created an architecture of global hypocrisy. They demand adherence to international law from others while systematically violating it themselves. They lecture the world on democracy while undermining democratic norms around the world. They speak of human rights while committing egregious abuses that dwarf those of many states they condemn. Their actions erode trust in international institutions, fuel radicalization, and destabilize entire regions.

The world once united to confront Nazi Germany when it threatened global peace. Today, the international community faces a different but equally dangerous challenge—two states whose conduct consistently undermines the foundations of international peace and order. Confronting this threat requires collective action—sanctions, diplomatic isolation, arms embargoes, and international prosecutions of American and Israeli leaders. It requires supporting domestic elements within both countries that seek to dismantle structures of militarism, occupation, and imperialism. And it requires a renewed commitment to the principles of the UN Charter, which were designed to prevent exactly the kind of lawlessness and impunity the United States and Israel now embody.

The survival of a rules‑based international order depends on confronting these rogue actors. Without accountability, the world will remain trapped in a cycle of aggression, instability, and impunity. The time has come for nations to act—not out of hostility, but out of necessity. Peace cannot be built on exceptions. It must be built on universal principles, applied equally to all.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

NAZA documentary illustrates Hanna Arendt’s “banality of evil” in Israel’s genocide in Gaza

Evil usually arrives in the form of ordinary people who have stopped seeing the humanity of those they have been taught to fear, hate, and dehumanize, even if they’re children. 

By Fareed Khan 
A version of this article can be found on Substack.

One of the most important moral lessons of the twentieth century is that evil is not confined to a particular nation, religion, ethnicity, or people. The Holocaust did not occur because Germans were uniquely evil. It occurred because enough people embraced evil ideas of racial superiority, supported evil policies, obeyed evil orders, or looked away while evil was being committed in their name.

That lesson is universal. It applies to everyone, to every society. And if we are unwilling to apply that lesson universally, then we have to accept that in the face of the evil being committed by Israel in Gaza, we have learned nothing from history.

The growing significance of the documentary NAZA, written and directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, lies not merely in its allegations about the crimes committed in Gaza, but in the profound moral questions it raises about the individuals who designed, managed, justified, and implemented the destruction of an entire people and society. According to published reviews, the film draws on testimony from 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers who describe the operation of AI-assisted targeting systems and the bureaucratic machinery used to facilitate mass killing on an industrial scale. What emerges is not simply a portrait of military violence, but a disturbing examination of how evil can become normalized, routinized, and embedded within institutions, allowing ordinary people to participate in extraordinary crimes while convincing themselves they bear no personal responsibility. In that sense, NAZA is not only a film about the Gaza genocide, it is a film about the mechanisms through which human beings become agents of evil.

The importance of the Israeli testimony is not merely evidentiary but rather philosophical. It forces us to confront a question that many would prefer to avoid: What happens when ordinary people become participants in extraordinary crimes and acts of evil?

The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt confronted exactly this question while reporting on the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. Her famous phrase, “the banality of evil” did not mean evil was trivial. It meant that some of history’s greatest evils were committed not by obvious monsters but by ordinary people who surrendered their moral judgment to ideology, authority, institutions, and career advancement. During his trial Eichmann repeatedly portrayed himself as a man who was merely doing his job and “following orders”. Arendt found that explanation profoundly disturbing because it revealed how easily human beings can participate in acts of evil while convincing themselves they bear no responsibility.

The testimonies described in NAZA evoke similar questions. According to reports of the film, Israeli military personnel discussed targeting systems, civilian casualty calculations, surveillance technology, and mass killing with a striking degree of bureaucratic detachment. Palestinian civilians became numbers, entire families became data points, and inflicting death and destruction became an administrative exercise.  The horror lies not only in what was done by Israeli officials but in how easily it was normalized.

Genocide doesn’t occur overnight

History demonstrates that genocidal atrocities rarely begin with killing. They begin with the dehumanization of a targeted population in a process that takes years.  Before people can tolerate mass suffering inflicted upon a defenceless population they must first be taught that those others are less human, less deserving of protection, less worthy of empathy, somehow collectively guilty, or an existential threat to the dominant population. Once that process begins, moral barriers collapse. Violence that would once have been unthinkable becomes acceptable, cruelty becomes state policy, and indifference becomes a virtue.

That process was visible in Nazi Germany beginning in the early 1930s, and it has appeared in numerous genocides and campaigns of ethnic cleansing throughout history.  And many critics, including Jewish scholars, Holocaust survivors, Israeli human-rights advocates, UN investigators, and genocide scholars, have argued that similar patterns of dehumanization and collective punishment are visible today in attitudes toward Palestinians.  What makes this argument especially significant is that some of the strongest warnings are coming from Jewish voices themselves.

The late Holocaust survivor Hajo Meyer spent years warning that the lessons of the Holocaust were being betrayed when they were applied selectively. For Meyer, “Never Again” was not a slogan reserved for Jews alone. It was a universal moral principle.

Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos has publicly spoken about similarities he perceives between aspects of Palestinian suffering and experiences he witnessed as a child during the Second World War. He has criticized attempts to weaponize Holocaust memory as a shield against criticism of contemporary Israeli policies that justify genocide, and has insisted that survivors and their descendants have a duty to speak against injustice wherever it occurs.

Holocaust survivor Marione Ingram, who lost family members to Nazi persecution, has likewise condemned the devastation in Gaza and publicly called for an end to the violence.

These individuals are not arguing that history is repeating itself in identical form.  The Holocaust was a unique event without historical precedent. But they are saying that there are parallels between what the Nazis did to them and other Jews and what Israel is doing and has done to Palestinians.

History matters

The purpose of studying history is not merely to catalogue differences, it is to recognize recurring patterns. These include: dehumanization, collective punishment, exterminationist rhetoric, the treatment of an entire population as expendable, the rationalization of mass suffering, and the replacement of morality with immoral obedience.  These are patterns that appear repeatedly throughout the history of human atrocity.

Since late 2023, a growing number of respected organizations, international legal experts, genocide scholars, and human-rights bodies have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza either constitute genocide or display characteristics consistent with genocide under the Genocide Convention. These include the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, the UN Special Committee, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, the International Federation of Human Rights, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. In addition, Prominent Jewish and Israeli Holocaust and genocide scholars, including Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg, Raz Segal, Daniel Blatman, and Shmuel Lederman, have voiced similar concerns.

People may disagree with those conclusions. Ongoing legal proceedings and historical debate will continue for years. But it can no longer be credibly argued that such assessments come only from political activists or ideological opponents of Israel. Some of the most authoritative voices making these warnings are Jewish scholars, Israeli academics, genocide specialists, and Holocaust survivors themselves.

The most troubling aspect of the present moment is that the evidence of Palestinian suffering has been visible to the entire world.  It has been called “the most transparent genocide in human history.”  No one can plausibly claim ignorance. The destruction has unfolded live on social media, in photographs, in videos, and through the testimony of humanitarian organizations, journalists, doctors, aid workers, and survivors. Yet even amid this devastation, large numbers of people have continued to justify, excuse, minimize, or celebrate the suffering.

That reality demands moral scrutiny. If an individual supports the extermination of a people, that is evil. If a religious leader justifies the annihilation of a people, that is evil. If a political leader advocates the destruction of a people, that is evil. If a military commander orders actions intended to destroy a population, that is evil. And if citizens knowingly support such objectives, they are embracing evil.

This principle of human rights is universal. It does not matter whether the victims are Jewish, Palestinian, Armenian, Tutsi, Bosniak, Rohingya, or members of any other people. The moral standard must remain consistent. Indeed, one of the central lessons of the Holocaust is that no society is immune from moral corruption, that historical victimhood does not confer permanent innocence, and that the suffering endured by one people does not eliminate the possibility that some among them may one day inflict grave suffering on others. The tragedy of history is that persecution does not automatically produce wisdom, compassion, or justice. Many Holocaust survivors and Jewish scholars have warned precisely against this danger—that the memory of oppression can be transformed from a universal call for human dignity into a justification for denying the dignity of others. If the same processes of dehumanization, collective punishment, and indifference to mass civilian suffering reappear, they must be confronted and condemned regardless of who the victims are or who the perpetrators may be.

That uncomfortable truth is exactly why so many Holocaust survivors and scholars have chosen to speak out. They understand that memory has value only if it informs present conduct. The real question raised by NAZA is therefore not whether Israelis are uniquely evil. The question is whether individuals who knowingly participate in, justify, or support the destruction of another people have crossed a moral line that should be recognized for the evil that it is.

The answer is yes. Because if genocide is evil, then those who incite it, facilitate it, normalize it, celebrate it, or participate in it are engaging in evil. If ethnic cleansing is evil, then those who advocate, implement, or support it are engaging in evil. If mass killing, dehumanization, and collective punishment are evil, then those who knowingly carry out such acts are engaging in evil.

The lesson of history is not that evil belongs to one nation. The lesson is far more frightening.

Evil can emerge anywhere. It can emerge in technologically advanced societies, among educated people, within democracies, and among those who regard themselves as civilised and moral.  When it does, it usually arrives not in the form of obvious monsters, but in the form of ordinary people who have stopped recognizing the humanity of those they have been taught to fear, hate, and dehumanize.

That was Hannah Arendt's warning. It is also what makes the testimony presented in NAZA so profoundly unsettling. The film is not simply a record of what has happened in Gaza during more than three years of genocide. It is a mirror held up to humanity itself. It forces viewers to confront how easily moral boundaries can erode, how ordinary people can become indifferent to the suffering of others, and how individuals and institutions can participate in immense human tragedy while continuing to see themselves as righteous, civilized, and justified.

The message of NAZA extends far beyond Gaza. History's greatest atrocities are not merely stories about the past. They are warnings written in the blood of their victims, cautioning future generations about what happens when hatred is normalized, when human beings are stripped of their dignity, and when conscience is surrendered to ideology, fear, tribalism, or blind obedience to an ideology.  We’ve seen this in Nazi Germany and we’re seeing it again today in Zionist Israel.

The events documented in the film remind us that mass atrocities do not begin with mass killing. They begin with words that dehumanize, stereotypes that demonize, and narratives that deny the humanity of an entire people. They begin when suffering is rationalized and when violence is reframed as necessity, security, revenge, self-defence, or historical destiny. As Arendt understood, evil rarely presents itself as evil. More often, it disguises itself as duty, patriotism, or moral necessity.

This is why NAZA is not simply a film about the victims of Gaza. It is a challenge directed at the conscience of the entire world. More than three years of death and destruction have unfolded before a global audience connected by unprecedented technology, instant communication, and constant access to information. Future generations will not be able to claim that humanity did not know. The more troubling question is what people chose to do, or chose not to do, with that knowledge.

Remembering history alone has never been enough to prevent atrocities. Humanity has repeatedly pledged "Never Again" since World War II only to watch new horrors emerge under different names, in different places, and against different victims. The price of those failures has always been paid by the vulnerable, the defenceless, and the dead. NAZA therefore stands not only as a testament to suffering but as a moral challenge to the living. It calls on us to reject indifference, to resist the normalization of injustice, and to defend our common humanity before cruelty becomes accepted as ordinary and atrocity becomes routine.

Ultimately, NAZA’s warning is not only about what happens to those who are targeted by violence and oppression. It is also about what happens to the societies, institutions, and individuals who tolerate, excuse, or ignore it. When conscience is silenced and injustice is allowed to flourish, the damage does not remain confined to its victims. It spreads outward, corrupting moral judgement, degrading human values, and diminishing the humanity of all who become complicit through action, silence, or indifference. That is the enduring lesson of NAZA, and it is a lesson the world ignores at its peril.

© 2026 The View From Here. © 2026 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.