Anti-Palestinian racism in Canada: The Nakba exhibit as a national test of truth and power

The Nakba exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights is far more than a cultural installation, it is a direct test of Canada’s willingness to uphold universal human rights, justice, and equality.

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

The opening of Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) on June 27, 2026 marked a watershed moment in Canadian public memory. For Palestinian Canadians—many of whom contributed family artifacts, testimonies, and archival materials—the exhibit represented something long denied to them—recognition that their history of ethnic cleansing is part of Canada’s human rights story, not a political controversy to be managed. Yet the ferocious backlash from Zionist Jewish organizations and the political pressure exerted on federal officials revealed a deeper truth—that anti‑Palestinian racism is very deeply embedded in Canadian institutions, shaping whose suffering is acknowledged and made public and whose is erased.

The controversy surrounding the exhibit did not emerge spontaneously. It exposed a long‑standing pattern in which Palestinian narratives are treated as dangerous, conditional, or illegitimate—while Zionist organizations assert a proprietary right to define how Palestinians and their history may be represented. The Nakba exhibit thus became more than a cultural installation. It became a test of whether Canada is willing to uphold truth, justice, and equality in the face of political interference and racialized suppression.

A campaign to silence Palestinian memory

Opposition to the exhibit began even before its doors opened. Several Zionist organizations—including the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA)— publicly attacked the exhibit, claiming it lacked “balance” and failed to include their perspectives. Heritage Minister Mark Miller even demanded that certain “omissions” and “errors” be “rectified.” His specific complaint was the absence of references to Hamas (an organization that didn’t exist until the early 1990s), echoing the talking points of those lobbying to undermine the exhibit. His intervention signaled a willingness to revisit the museum’s independence and to reframe Palestinian narratives through a Zionist lens.

The implications are unmistakable: Palestinians, whose lived experiences form the foundation of the exhibit, are not considered legitimate stakeholders in telling their own history. Instead, Zionist organizations asserted that they were the ones “directly impacted” by an exhibit documenting Palestinians’ history of dispossession, and pressured Miller to intervene.

CIJA escalated its objections, accusing the museum of “engaging extreme political activists” and failing to consult “communities directly impacted by its content.” This framing suggested that Palestinian testimony is inherently suspect unless validated by Zionist and Jewish voices—voices representing the very ideology responsible for the ethnic cleansing and massacre of Palestinians in 1947-48.

The hostility escalated further when Shurat HaDin, an Israel‑based legal organization, threatened legal action against the CMHR, claiming that the exhibit “erases Jewish history” and “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination.” Such accusations rest on a deeper racialized logic: the presumption that Palestinian narratives are inherently destabilizing to Jewish identity. Beneath the surface, this framing implies that the very act of Palestinians recounting their history, indeed, their existence itself, is a provocation.

Asymmetry of memory: The Holocaust vs. Palestinian erasure

The material imbalance between Jewish and Palestinian narratives at the CMHR is stark. The Holocaust exhibit occupies more than 4,500 square feet, while the Nakba exhibit occupies less than three percent of that space. Canadian governments also funds three standalone Holocaust museums—in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver—each dedicated to ensuring that Nazi crimes are remembered, studied, and taught.

When those institutions were created, no one demanded that Nazis or Nazi sympathizers be consulted to provide “context or “balance” for those institutions. Yet in the case of the Nakba exhibit, Zionist and Jewish organizations insisted that their perspectives be built into the curatorial process. This asymmetry exposes a deeper truth in Canada—that Holocaust memory is treated as unquestionable moral ground, while Palestinian memory is treated as dangerous and conditional.

The is no argument that the Holocaust should be taught in schools, commemorated annually, and memorialized.  The massive amount of cultural and academic knowledge that has been produced since World War Two through museums, monuments, films, and an enormous body of academic research, makes it one of the most studied and memorialized events in modern history. But the contrast with Palestinian history is profound. The Nakba—during which more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and thousands massacred by Jewish terrorist militias and subsequently by the Israeli army in 1948—has received a very small fraction of the institutional attention devoted to the Holocaust. There are no publicly funded Nakba museums, no national commemorations, and no high school curricula dedicated to Palestinian history.

The CMHR exhibit is the first of its kind in a major Canadian institution. Its modest scale is in contrast to the enormous outrage it provoked within segments of the Canadian Jewish community, demonstrating that Palestinian suffering is not merely ignored or forgotten, it is actively suppressed.

A systemic pattern of anti‑Palestinian racism

The reaction to the Nakba exhibit aligns with findings from major studies on anti‑Palestinian racism in Canada. The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) April 2022 report defines anti‑Palestinian racism as systemic discrimination that includes:

• denying Palestinian existence, history, and identity;
• suppressing or punishing Palestinian narratives;
• portraying Palestinians as inherently violent or antisemitic;
• erasing the legitimacy of Palestinian suffering.

Research by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) similarly documents widespread patterns of media bias, political suppression, and institutional hostility toward Palestinian advocacy.

The backlash against the Nakba exhibit is a textbook example of these dynamics. Legacy Jewish organizations’ insistence that Palestinian narratives be “balanced” with Zionist perspectives—especially in a human rights museum—reflects a racialized hierarchy in which Palestinian testimony is treated as incomplete or dangerous unless validated by those who helped produce the conditions of Palestinian dispossession.

This is not neutral “context.” It is a demand that Palestinians be denied the right to narrate their own history.

Zionist Organizations and Supremacist Logic

Zionist organizations’ efforts to shut down, dilute, or reframe the Nakba exhibit reveal the depth of anti‑Palestinian racism embedded in their political advocacy. Their objections were never rooted in concerns about historical accuracy, and instead were driven by a determination to preserve a narrative in which Palestinians appear only as footnotes to a triumphant story of Jewish nation‑building in colonized Palestine.

Any attempt to centre Palestinian experiences of dispossession is treated as a threat—not because the facts are in dispute, but because acknowledging those facts destabilizes the ideological framework these organizations defend.

CIJA’s claim that the exhibit could “contribute to discrimination, bullying and even assault targeting Jewish students” is a striking example of how Palestinian narratives are stigmatized. The suggestion that acknowledging Palestinian suffering is inherently dangerous to Jews reflects a supremacist worldview in which Palestinians are seen not as victims of human rights violations but as inherent threats to the rights of others by their mere existence.

Similarly, Shurat HaDin’s assertion that the exhibit “delegitimizes Jewish self‑determination” reveals a belief that Palestinian history must be suppressed to protect Jewish identity. This is not political disagreement; it is supremacist logic.

Zionism, as practiced by these organizations, functions as a supremacist ideology—one that justifies the displacement, erasure, and dehumanization of Palestinians. The reaction to the Nakba exhibit demonstrates that these organizations are not defending historical accuracy but rather a political ideology that cannot tolerate the legitimacy of Palestinian narratives.

Institutional Power and Racialized Suppression

The resignation of Mark Berlin—the museum’s only Jewish trustee—became a flashpoint. Berlin accused the CMHR of “institutional anti‑Zionism” and denounced the exhibit as “curation by omission.” His departure illustrated how deeply Zionist ideology is expected to be accommodated in Canadian institutions, and where any attempt to tell stories about Palestinian suffering is swiftly recast as anti‑Jewish, biased, or dangerous.

This reflexive reframing does not arise from evidence. It arises from a political project that treats Palestinian memory as inherently dangerous to Jews and Palestinian voices as needing correction, containment, or counter‑narration.

Canada’s Human Rights Test

The Nakba exhibit is Canada’s human rights test. It asks whether Palestinians can exist in Canadian public memory without being filtered through Zionist ideology. It asks whether Palestinian suffering can be acknowledged without apology, without demands for “context” from those hostile to Palestinian existence, and without political interference.

Canada’s approach to historical memory makes the imbalance unmistakable. The country has invested enormous resources in memorializing the Holocaust but almost none in acknowledging the Zionist Jewish violence and atrocities that accompanied the creation of Israel through Palestinian dispossession. The CMHR exhibit is the first major attempt to acknowledge this history—and even that modest effort has been met with outrage, lobbying, and demands for ideological correction.

This opposition the CMHR display is purely political. The fury directed at the museum for daring to tell Palestinian stories demonstrates that the erasure of Palestinians is not a passive omission but an active project in Canada—one sustained by powerful Zionist organizations that insist Palestinian suffering must be  filtered through their ideological lens.

If Canada is ever to claim a genuine commitment to human rights, it must confront this reality directly. It must reject supremacist ideologies that seek to silence or reshape Palestinian narratives. And it must affirm, unequivocally, the right of Palestinians to narrate their own history—without permission from those who helped produce their dispossession.

Only then can Canada begin to live up to the principles it claims to uphold. 

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

“Anti Palestinianism” – A systemic racism equal in gravity to antisemitism (or maybe worse)

Anti‑Palestinianism is a system that devalues Palestinian life, suppresses Palestinian history, criminalizes Palestinian resistance, and punishes those who support Palestinian rights and refuse to look away.

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

You’ve probably never heard the expression “anti‑Palestinianism.”  It is a term that has become synonymous with the more commonly used term “anti-Palestinian racism” or its acronym “APR.”  Anti-Palestinianism is defined as the systematic erasure, silencing, defamation, and punishment of Palestinians and those who stand with them, and it has become one of the most pervasive and least acknowledged forms of racism and hate in the Western world. It is not merely a matter of interpersonal prejudice, but rather a structural system that operates across governments, news media, universities, policing, and public discourse.

In Canada, the most detailed data available about this racism shows a dramatic escalation of APR or anti-Palestinianism since October 7, 2023. A national report documented a 600% increase of this type of hate in the eight months following October 2023, far above the 506 incidents recorded in 2022. These incidents include defamation, harassment, employment retaliation, censorship, and political vilification. The overwhelming majority—77%—involved defamatory slander portraying Palestinians or their supporters as “terrorist sympathizers” or inherently antisemitic. This was in addition to a reported 1800% increase in incidents of Islamophobia in the year following October 7th, as reported by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM).

These are not accidental spikes. They are the visible surface of a deeper structure that mirrors, in its logic and effects, the long history of antisemitism in Europe and Western nations.

The Arab Canadian Lawyers Association (ACLA) defines anti‑Palestinian racism as a form of racism that silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives, including by denying the Nakba (ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine), justifying violence against Palestinians, erasing their human rights, and defaming them and their allies as inherently antisemitic or terrorist. This definition is not abstract. It is borne out in the way governments, police, universities, corporations, and news media in Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia have responded to Palestinian life, Palestinian grief, and resistance to Israeli oppression and occupation —not just since October 2023, but for almost eight decades since indigenous Palestinians were pushed off their land in historic Palestine.

The parallels between antisemitism and anti‑Palestinianism become unmistakable when we examine how each system constructs a racialized “other.” Antisemitism historically cast Jews as conspiratorial, disloyal, and inherently dangerous, and anti‑Palestinianism reproduces this same logic today by depicting Palestinians as violent, irrational, or terroristic regardless of their actual actions or political views. This pattern is starkly reflected in the 2023 Anti‑Palestinian Racism report by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), which found that 585 documented incidents—nearly 60 percent of the total—involved slander portraying Palestinians as “terrorist sympathizers,” a trope relentlessly circulated in Canadian media and political discourse. Right‑wing news outlets in Canada, the United States, and Europe amplified this narrative by branding peaceful, multifaith, pro‑ceasefire demonstrations as “pro‑Hamas rallies” or “terrorist‑supporting mobs,” even when the protests were explicitly framed around human rights and opposition to genocide. In doing so, these media ecosystems played a central role in dehumanizing Palestinians and their supporters, recasting anti‑genocide campaigns as threats to national security and democratic stability rather than legitimate expressions of conscience.

This racialization is not confined to Canada. Analyses of anti‑Palestinian racism in the US shows how Palestinians and their supporters are routinely framed as extremists or potential terrorists in American media and political rhetoric, especially when they criticize Israeli policy or use language of decolonization. In Europe, similar patterns appear when governments and media describe large pro‑Palestinian marches in London, Paris, or Berlin as “hate marches” or “pro‑terror” gatherings, despite the overwhelmingly peaceful character of these demonstrations. The effect is to mark Palestinian identity and solidarity as inherently suspect, just as antisemitic discourse once marked Jewish identity as inherently dangerous.

Suppression of Palestinian identity and history is another core feature of anti‑Palestinianism. It amplifies anti‑Palestinian bias and prejudice by denying the Nakba, erasing Palestinian indigeneity, and suppressing acknowledgment of decades of occupation, ethnic cleansing, brutalization, and Israeli state violence. The ACLA description, summarized in multiple Canadian and international reports, explicitly identifies “denying the Nakba and justifying violence against Palestinians” and “failing to acknowledge Palestinians as an Indigenous people with a collective identity, belonging and rights in relation to occupied and historic Palestine” as core manifestations of APR. In Canadian public discourse, 1948 is still overwhelmingly narrated as the year Israel came into being, with little or no acknowledgment of the mass expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians, and the erasure of more than 500 Palestinian towns and villages, bulldozed or having forests planted where they once existed. This erasure extends into education and media. School curricula often omit the Nakba entirely, and mainstream media coverage of Gaza and the West Bank frequently strips events of historical context, presenting Israeli violence as isolated “responses” rather than part of a long continuum of occupation and settlement.

Criminalization of Palestinian political expression is another defining feature of anti‑Palestinianism. A national study of protest policing in Canada between 2021 and 2025 found that pro‑Palestinian protests accounted for only 10.1 percent of all demonstrations, yet they made up 37 percent of all police interventions. The CJPME study found that in 2024, nearly two‑thirds of all protest policing in Canada targeted pro‑Palestinian activity, despite the fact that more than 96% of these events were entirely peaceful. The report describes a coordinated architecture involving federal intelligence bodies and local police, treating a human‑rights movement as a security threat and using surveillance, bail conditions, intimidation and legal overreach to suppress speech. In several Canadian cities, police deployed riot squads and made mass arrests at peaceful sit‑ins and marches calling for a ceasefire, and imposed restrictive bail conditions that barred activists from attending future protests or using social media to express pro‑Palestinian views.

Across the Atlantic, European governments have gone even further. France issued blanket bans on pro‑Palestinian demonstrations, with the Interior Minister ordering police to disperse any such gatherings and arrest organizers. Germany banned or severely restricted many pro‑Palestinian protests in Berlin and other cities, often on the grounds of preventing “antisemitic incitement,” and has moved to outlaw organizations such as Samidoun—a Palestinian prisoner support network—under counter‑extremism laws. In the United Kingdom, senior officials described large pro‑Palestinian marches in London as “hate marches,” and then–Home Secretary Suella Braverman publicly labeled the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” a “hate slogan,” encouraging police to treat its use as potential criminality. In the United States, campus encampments and city‑center protests have been met with aggressive policing. At Columbia University and other campuses in spring 2024, police in riot gear dismantled pro‑Palestinian encampments, arresting hundreds of students and faculty on charges such as trespassing and disorderly conduct, even when the protests were nonviolent.

Punishment of allies is another hallmark of anti‑Palestinianism. Antisemitism historically targeted non‑Jews who stood with Jewish communities against persecution. Anti‑Palestinianism similarly punishes Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular supporters of Palestinian rights, branding them “antisemitic,” “extremist,” or terrorist‑adjacent for advocating equality. The “Palestine exception” documented by the Islamophobia Research Hub at York University shows how institutions that celebrate diversity and human rights routinely suspend those commitments when Palestine is involved, targeting not only Palestinians but also their allies. In Canada, the Palestine Exception report and related surveys document numerous cases in which students, academics, and professionals faced retaliation for supporting Palestinian rights. Jewish and non‑Jewish signatories to ceasefire letters have been subjected to internal investigations, contract cancellations, and public smearing. Some university instructors have even had their courses scrutinized or their professional appointments delayed after they spoke out against Israeli apartheid or about the Nakba, while student groups have faced official derecognition or funding cuts for organizing Palestine solidarity events.

This pattern is visible across the Western world. In the United States, high‑profile “doxxing trucks” have driven around elite campuses displaying the names and photos of students—many of them Jewish—who signed statements supporting Palestinian rights, labelling them “antisemites” or “terrorist supporters” and inviting employers to blacklist them. Journalists have been fired or pushed out of newsrooms for using terms like “Palestine,” “occupation,” or “genocide” in their reporting or social media posts. Clergy and lay leaders in European Christian churches who have spoken out for Palestinian rights have been denounced as antisemitic and, in some cases, removed from positions or had their events cancelled. These are not random overreactions; they are the enforcement mechanisms of anti‑Palestinianism as a system that seeks to isolate Palestinians by making solidarity socially and professionally dangerous.

Anti‑Palestinianism is also inseparable from the material system of domination under which Palestinians live. In the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, Palestinians endure military occupation, siege, settlement expansion, home demolitions, and mass incarceration. Repeated large‑scale assaults on Gaza—in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, and the ongoing Gaza genocide since 2023—have killed tens of thousands of civilians, including children, journalists, medics, and elders, with two independent studies estimating the cumulative death toll at 377,000 and more than 680,000. Yet anti‑Palestinian discourse routinely inverts this reality, portraying Palestinians as the primary source of violence while erasing or rationalizing the structural violence imposed on them by Israel. As the systemic APR study notes, justifying violence against Palestinians and denying them equal dignity and worth are defining features of anti‑Palestinianism. In Canadian media and politics, this manifests in the reflexive framing of Israeli military actions as “self‑defence,” while Palestinian resistance—whether armed, unarmed, or purely symbolic—is cast as terrorism. This dynamic is reinforced by the stark imbalance in political and media access, where pro‑Palestinian advocates are granted far less face time with elected officials and far less airtime or column space in mainstream news than pro‑Israel or Zionist voices, further entrenching a narrative that marginalizes Palestinian humanity and perspectives.

These dynamics become even more stark when viewed through the lens of the Mark Carney government’s posture toward the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. Even as international courts, UN agencies, genocide and Holocaust scholars, and prominent human rights organizations have declared that genocidal crimes are taking place as defined under the Genocide Convention, the Carney government has refused to use the word at all, choosing instead a vocabulary of euphemisms—“crisis,” “conflict,” “tragedy”—that obscures the deliberate, systematic destruction of an entire people. This refusal is not semantic, it is political. To name genocide would be to acknowledge legal obligations under the Genocide Convention, including the duty to prevent, the duty to punish, and the duty to cease all forms of complicity. By declining to name the crime, the Carney shields himself and his government from these obligations and reinforces the broader architecture of anti‑Palestinianism that treats Palestinian life as less grievable, less visible, and less worthy of protection.

The Canadian government’s decision to continue authorizing weapons exports to Israel even as the official death toll in Gaza approached 80,000, even as entire neighborhoods were flattened, even as UN experts warned of famine engineered through the deliberate obstruction of humanitarian aid, reflects the same logic. The government’s insistence that these exports were “non‑lethal” or “not directly linked” to the assault mirrors the logic of anti‑Palestinianism—a logic that minimizes Palestinian suffering, abstracts Palestinian death into technicalities, and treats Palestinian bodies as collateral rather than as human beings entitled to the full protection of international law. The government’s refusal to sanction Israeli political and military leaders—despite their explicit calls for the destruction of Gaza, despite their public statements advocating the genocide of Palestinians, despite their command responsibility for mass killing—reveals a deeper moral failure. When Israeli leaders openly invoke the biblical language of extermination, when they describe Palestinians as “human animals,” when they call for Gaza to be destroyed or completely “erased,” these are not ambiguous statements. They are incitement to genocide. Yet the Canadian government has declined to impose sanctions, declined to restrict diplomatic engagement, and declined to hold any Israeli official accountable.

When antisemitism and anti‑Palestinianism are placed side by side, the parallels between them come sharply into focus. Both operate by constructing an entire people as inherently dangerous or undeserving of rights, and both depend on erasing or denying the group’s history, trauma, and claims to justice. Each system suppresses political expression, punishes those who stand in solidarity, and provides ideological cover for state violence. However, one difference is that Western societies have come to terms with their historic treatment of Jews and made amends, while anti-Palestinianism is embedded within institutions that profess universal human‑rights commitments while simultaneously carving out exceptions when the victims are Palestinians. It is within this broader architecture that the Carney government’s refusal to recognize the genocide in Gaza, its continued authorization of weapons exports to Israel, and its unwillingness to sanction Israeli leaders must be understood. These are not isolated policy missteps or bureaucratic oversights; they are manifestations of a deeper, systemic prejudice that devalues Palestinian life and shields those responsible for Palestinian suffering from accountability.

Recognizing anti‑Palestinianism as a form of racism equal in gravity to antisemitism does not diminish the specificity of Jewish historical trauma, nor does it collapse distinct experiences into a single narrative. Instead, it insists that the tools we have developed to understand and combat antisemitism—attention to dehumanizing stereotypes, to structural exclusion, to the criminalization of identity, and to the role of state power—must also be applied to the treatment of Palestinians and those who stand with them. The CJPME reports and the ACLA study make clear that anti‑Palestinian racism is systemic in Canada, operating across media, politics, education, and law. Analyses from scholars and journalists show that similar dynamics are at work in the United States and Europe, where Palestinians and their supporters face erasure, defamation, repression and persecution.

If antisemitism is rightly understood as a profound moral and political danger that corrodes democratic life and paves the way for atrocity, then anti‑Palestinianism must be understood in the same register. It is a system that devalues Palestinian life, suppresses Palestinian history, criminalizes Palestinian resistance, and punishes those who refuse to look away. It is also a system that enables governments like Carney’s to continue supplying weapons to a state accused of genocide, to refuse to name the crime unfolding before the world, and to ignore the deliberate starvation of an entire population through the blocking of humanitarian aid. To confront anti‑Palestinianism is not to undermine the struggle against antisemitism; it is to extend the same ethical standard to another people whose humanity has been systematically denied. It is to insist that the universal principles invoked in defense of Jewish life must also be invoked in defense of Palestinian life. And it is to recognize that a government that refuses to name genocide, refuses to halt its material support for it, and refuses to hold its perpetrators accountable is not neutral—it is complicit.

© 2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.

We are living through a new age of evil

Israel’s actions in Gaza and its general brutality towards Palestinians is what evil looks like in the 21st century—a state committing mass atrocity crimes in full view of the world and nothing is done to stop them.

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

We are living through a new age of systemic evil—an era whose moral contours resemble the 1930s more than any period since. Then, as now, powerful states normalized cruelty, stripped entire populations of rights, and justified mass violence through the language of security, racial hierarchy, and national destiny.

Then, as now, the world’s so‑called democracies watched, equivocated, or actively enabled the perpetrators. However, the lesson humanity had learned from that history—”Never Again”—has been hollowed out, reduced to a slogan invoked selectively, applied to only one people, rather than applied as a universal moral principle.

Unlike the 1930s and World War Two where the Nazis tried to hide their genocidal crimes, today’s evil in Gaza is not hidden.

What distinguishes this moment is not only the scale of destruction unleashed on Palestinians, but the brazenness with which Western nations—the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France—the self‑appointed guardians of the post-World War Two order have chosen to enable, rationalize, and arm that destruction. The governments that claim to champion human rights and the sanctity of civilian life are now the primary suppliers of weapons, diplomatic cover, and political legitimacy to a state—Israel—that is accused by leading genocide and Holocaust scholars, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and UN bodies of committing genocide.

And yet, when most people are asked to describe “evil,” they do not think of these polished, articulate leaders of Western democracies. They think of serial killers, violent criminals, perpetrators of child exploitation, or historical tyrants like Hitler and Pol Pot. They might mention contemporary authoritarian figures such as Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un. But few would think to include Western presidents and prime ministers who deliver eloquent speeches about human rights while simultaneously providing arms and political protection to a state committing genocidal crimes.

This disconnect is itself a symptom of the age of evil we inhabit. Evil is imagined as something distant, monstrous, and obvious—not something carried out through bureaucratic memos, arms export permits, diplomatic vetoes, and press conferences delivered in calm, reassuring tones. But if this profound moral inversion does not qualify as an era of systemic evil unseen since the 1930s, then what would? When the machinery of the “rules‑based order” is deployed to protect the aggressor, while the victims’ suffering is minimized or ignored by the most powerful nations in the world, labelled a “complex issue,” the boundary between those who claim to defend “good” and those branded as “evil” dissolves.

A May 2025 survey conducted by the Israeli research firm Geocartography for Penn State University, and reported in Haaretz, revealed a stark reality— support for extreme policies is not confined to Israel’s political and military elites. According to the poll, 82% of Israeli Jews endorsed the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, while nearly half supported the Israeli military “killing all Palestinians in Gaza.” A majority—56%—favoured expelling every non‑Jew from all territories under Israeli control. These are not fringe views held by a radical minority of elites, they reflect attitudes that have become normalized across broad segments of Israeli society. Such findings underscore a critical truth, that systemic evil does not emerge solely from leaders. It is sustained, legitimized, and amplified by the public they represent that accepts, endorses, or demands it.

And this is not a matter of rhetorical exaggeration. In 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars—the preeminent professional body in the field, including numerous Israeli Holocaust specialists—ratified a resolution affirming that Israel’s policies and operations in Gaza meet the criteria of genocide under the 1948 Convention. The resolution passed with 86% support. This was not a fringe opinion. It was a deliberate, rigorous assessment by experts whose scholarship centres on mass atrocities, including the Holocaust itself.

A growing body of academics and jurists in genocide studies, Holocaust studies, historiography, and international law have reached similar conclusions. Their analyses are grounded in decades of research into the crime of genocide, codified into international law after the Second World War precisely to prevent the recurrence of the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. And it is not only scholars. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry, established by the Human Rights Council, has determined that Israel bears responsibility for genocide in Gaza since October 2023, and that high‑ranking Israeli officials have incited such acts.

In the 1930s, the world claimed it did not know what was happening. Today’s leaders lack this defence. Today, the world knows—and chooses not to act. The Gaza conflict has been termed “the most transparent genocide in human history” precisely because victims and perpetrators have live streamed its horrors. Israeli personnel have disseminated footage of devastation and mistreatment they have inflicted; Palestinians have chronicled the systematic erasure of homes, hospitals, schools, and entire neighbourhoods in real time. Global audiences, including Western officials, have witnessed this annihilation on their phones and screens, yet global leaders have done nothing to stop it.

To understand how we arrived here, we must confront the historical foundations of Palestinian dispossession. The Nakba of 1948 was not an unfortunate byproduct of war; it was a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing. More than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled in terror from the lands of historic Palestine, as Zionist terrorist militias and later the Israeli army ethnically cleansed over 400 towns and villages, murdering thousands, and then eventually erased the communities from the map, by planting forests in their place or building over them. This was not a spontaneous collapse of a society; it was the intentional creation of a new demographic reality, documented by Israeli historians and preserved in UN archives. The new state of Israel then barred these refugees from returning, despite UN Resolution 194 affirming their right to go home. The message was unmistakable: Palestinians were to be erased from their land, their history, and their future.

The dispossession did not end in 1948. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza (the second Nakba), launching what has become one of the longest and most brutal military occupations in modern history. Palestinians were subjected to land seizures, settlement expansion, home demolitions, checkpoints, curfews, and a dual legal system that privileges Jewish settlers while criminalizing Palestinian existence. The occupation was not a temporary security measure; it was a structural project of domination designed to fragment Palestinian territory and prevent the emergence of a viable, sovereign state.

Gaza became the laboratory for a new form of control. After Israel’s 2005 redeployment and withdrawal of settlers from that territory came the blockade, imposed in 2007, which transformed the strip into what human rights groups called “the world’s largest open‑air prison.” Israel controls the borders, the airspace, the sea, the population registry, and even the caloric intake of Gaza’s residents. The blockade is not about security, it was collective punishment aimed at breaking the will of a people. Generations of Palestinians have grown up under siege, deprived of basic rights and freedoms, economic opportunity, and the ability to imagine a life beyond confinement.

This is the architecture of Palestinian dispossession—ethnic cleansing, occupation, blockade—and it is the essential context for understanding the horrors of the present. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is not an aberration. It is the logical continuation of a system fed by an ideology of Zionism built on the domination and brutal oppression of Palestinians, with Western complicity.

Defenders of Israel’s actions invoke the familiar refrain: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” But this claim collapses under even minimal scrutiny when applied to an occupying power. Under international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, an occupying state does not possess a right of self‑defence against the population it occupies. It has obligations—to protect civilians, to refrain from collective punishment, and to ensure the welfare of the occupied population. Moreover, self‑defence cannot justify the levelling of entire neighbourhoods, the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, the destruction of hospitals and universities, or the ethnic cleansing of an entire people. These are not acts of defence; they are acts of domination and control, and can be considered war crimes.

Once this rhetorical shield is stripped away, the reality becomes impossible to deny. Since October 2023, Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children. Entire neighbourhoods have been erased. Hospitals, schools, refugee camps, and cultural institutions have been bombed. UN experts warn that Gaza may soon become uninhabitable. And yet, instead of restraining Israel, Western governments—especially the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany—have continued weapons transfers, with the US blocking ceasefire resolutions, and defending Israel at every international forum.

This is not passive complicity. It is active participation. The US has shipped thousands of bombs, artillery shells, and precision‑guided munitions, even as its own officials privately acknowledge the likelihood of war crimes. The UK continues arms exports despite parliamentary warnings. Despite claiming to support international law Canada is still approving military export permits through a loophole despite a Parliamentary vote, supported by a large majority of MPs calling for the suspension of arms shipments. Germany frames its support as a moral obligation rooted in its own history, even as it arms a state committing atrocities against a defenceless people.

The horrors of what has taken place in Gaza are documented in a widely cited study, based on Israeli military data by Professor Yaakov Garb of Ben-Gurion University, published on Harvard University’s Dataverse. It estimates that more than 377,000 Palestinians are missing and presumed dead — roughly 17% of Gaza’s pre-war population. Around the same time, Australian academics Richard Hil and Gideon Polya concluded in their analysis that the actual death toll likely ranges between 680,000 and 700,000.

The consequences of Israeli actions extend far beyond Gaza. Israel’s military operations have expanded into Lebanon, displacing hundreds of thousands and destroying civilian infrastructure. In Iran, Israeli attacks have escalated regional tensions and risked a broader war. These are not isolated incidents; they are part of a coherent strategy of regional dominance, enabled by Western powers that refuse to impose consequences.

This is what systemic evil looks like in the 21st century. A powerful state commits mass atrocity crimes against civilians in full view of the world, and the nations that claim to uphold international law supply the weapons and political cover that make those atrocities possible.

The phrase “international rules‑based order” has become a hollow incantation. It is invoked by Western leaders selectively, applied inconsistently, and weaponized to justify geopolitical interests rather than universal principles.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Western leaders spoke passionately about violations of international law and the UN Charter, and the inviolability of civilian life. When Israel flattened Gaza, committing crimes no different than Russia’s, those same leaders spoke of “complexity,” “restraint,” and “Israel’s right to defend itself.” The double standard is not subtle; it is structural.

And so we return to the central question: Why are we here?

We are here because Western governments have treated Palestinian lives as expendable, and see Palestinians as sub-human. Because they have prioritized geopolitical alliances over human rights. Because they have allowed Israel to act with impunity for decades. Because they have refused to confront the root cause of the conflict: the ongoing denial of Palestinian self‑determination, and decades of obstructionism preventing the Palestinian people from having a free and independent state of their own.

The Nakba is not a historical footnote. It is an ongoing crime of ethnic cleansing and genocide which has been rolled out over 78 years. It is the moral and political origin of the present crisis. Every bomb dropped on Gaza, every home demolished in the West Bank, every refugee denied the right to return, every child killed in Lebanon, every escalation in Iran—these are all chapters in the same story.

But it is also a story of resistance. Palestinians have refused to disappear. They have insisted on their humanity, their history, and their right to live in freedom and dignity. And around the world, millions have joined them, demanding an end to the violence and an end to the complicity that sustains it.

The question is no longer whether we know what is happening.

We clearly do.

The central question is whether Western leaders can finally confront their entrenched anti-Palestinian racism, push back against the outsized influence of the pro-Israel and Zionist lobbies that have long dominated the West’s Middle East policy, and rediscover their moral compass. Only then can they muster the courage to halt a state whose act of evil—marked by decades of systematic violence, ethnic cleansing, and collective punishment—echo the gravest atrocities committed by Germany and Japan during World War Two.

History will harshly judge those leaders who continue with a business as usual attitude in their dealings with Israel. As the racist, apartheid, genocidal regime continues its assault against Gaza and Lebanon, as it continues to commit genocide and torture detainees, it is shredding the post-World War Two international order—the very framework built to prevent future horrors and honour the millions who perished in that war. The architects of that order, if they could see it today, would be outraged that the sort of evil they tried to prevent is happening again, and that the system they built is being deliberately destroyed by the actions of a single fascist state supported and shielded by powerful Western patrons.

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

Reflections on the 78th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe)

There will be no peace in the Middle East until the foundational injustice at the heart of the region—the creation of Israel on stolen land, and its repercussions—is addressed.

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

As Palestinians and their allies mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba we need to reflect on how the world arrived at this moment in history and what it means. 

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Western governments watched Nazi Germany’s escalating persecution of Jews with a mixture of indifference, appeasement, and self‑interest. That moral failure helped clear the path to the Holocaust. Today, a parallel pattern of ambivalence, active support for Israel, and deep anti‑Palestinian racism among Western political elites is enabling another catastrophe in full view of the world—the ongoing Nakba and the Gaza Genocide being perpetrated by Israel on Palestinians.

This is not rhetorical excess. It is what emerges when one takes Palestinian history seriously, listens to the growing number of Jewish and Israeli voices breaking from Zionist orthodoxy, and examines the historical record—including the United Nations’ own documentation of its permanent responsibility on the question of Palestine, and its role in creating the situation of the Palestinian people.

The reality is the Nakba—“catastrophe” in Arabic— never ended. It refers to the mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing and dispossession of approximately 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war and the erasure and depopulation of more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages. For decades, Western discourse treated this as an unfortunate but closed chapter, a tragic birth pang of a necessary state. But for Palestinians, the Nakba is not a date, it is an ongoing structural injustice that has affected generations of their people.

The UN itself acknowledges that the Nakba was not merely a by-product of war but a systematic process of displacement and dispossession that created one of the world’s largest and longest‑standing refugee populations. The UN’s “About the Nakba” page explicitly states that the events of 1948 “resulted in the displacement of more than half of the Palestinian Arab population” and that the consequences of this displacement “remain unresolved to this day.”

Palestinian writer Aziz Abu Sarah describes the Nakba as having “a dual meaning”—both the razed villages and refugee camps of 1948, the daily reality of land confiscation in the years and decades that followed, settlement expansion, family separation, and legal discrimination that continues to this day. His parents cannot legally live in the house they built just outside Jerusalem without losing their Jerusalem IDs, while nearby illegal Jewish settlers enjoy full rights. Every checkpoint, every denied permit, every demolished home is experienced as a renewed Nakba.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV) reinforces this understanding, arguing that the Nakba is “not a historical event but an ongoing process,” one that has evolved from ethnic cleansing in 1948 to what they describe as genocide in Gaza today. Their analysis emphasizes that the logic of elimination—removing Palestinians from their land—has been consistent since the creation of Israel.

Human rights organizations and Palestinian institutions now explicitly frame Israel’s current genocide in Gaza as a continuation of that same project of displacement and replacement. The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights calls the present war “a renewed Nakba manifested in a genocidal war,” noting mass killing, starvation, siege, and the displacement of nearly two million people in Gaza as part of an “ongoing colonial policy based on population replacement, land control, and the erasure of Palestinian national identity.”

The UN’s 2024 Nakba commemoration made the same point: “The Nakba of 1948 and today’s Nakba in Gaza are not two separate events, but an ongoing process of Palestinian displacement and replacement.”

The truth is that to call Israeli oppression of Palestinians merely “a conflict” is to participate in the erasure of Palestinian history and almost eight decades of Palestinian suffering.

Western complicity: From 1948 to Gaza today

The Nakba was not only the work of Zionist terrorist militias and the Israeli army. It was made possible by Western powers—particularly the United States—that endorsed partition of historic Palestine, recognized the new state created on lands beyond the UN partition plan, and then looked away as refugees were barred from returning by Israel in defiance of international law.

Ardi Imseis, in his 2024 UN‑commissioned study The Nakba and the United Nations’ Permanent Responsibility for the Question of Palestine, argues that the UN bears a unique and ongoing responsibility because it played a direct role in partitioning Palestine and then failed to enforce the rights of the displaced population. Imseis notes that the UN’s responsibility is “not episodic but permanent,” rooted in the fact that the organization “helped create the conditions that made the Nakba possible.”

UN Resolution 194 affirmed the right of Palestinian refugees to return or receive compensation, but Western governments never seriously enforced it. Their strategic interests—Cold War positioning, oil, and alliance with a self‑styled “outpost of the West”—took precedence over Palestinian rights.

The same pattern is evident today. As Gaza is bombed into ruins, with hundreds of thousands killed and many more maimed or starved, Western states continue to arm, fund, and diplomatically shield Israel. Legal experts, UN rapporteurs, and civil society groups have warned of a serious risk, and ultimately, the reality of genocide. Just as Western governments once found reasons to downplay or rationalize Nazi persecution of Jews until it was too late, they now supply endless justifications to excuse or minimize Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life. Then, the rationales centered on fear of refugees, antisemitism, and geopolitical calculations. Now, they invoke “counter-terrorism,” “self-defence,” and the imperative to stand with an ally—no matter what that ally does.

Suppressing the story: Nakba denial as a Western project

The Nakba is not only being continued on the ground, it is being suppressed in classrooms, parliaments, and media studios across the West.

In the United States, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy barred Palestinian‑American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from holding a Nakba commemoration at the Capitol after lobbying from the Anti‑Defamation League, forcing the event to move to a different room offered by Senator Bernie Sanders. Senator Jacky Rosen condemned the very idea of calling Israel’s establishment a “catastrophe” as “deeply offensive,” erasing the lived catastrophe of Palestinians in favour of a sacrosanct (albeit false) state narrative.

The Jewish Currents newsletter that reported this incident drew a sharp parallel between this discomfort with Nakba education and white uneasiness about teaching Black history in the United States. It described a “collective narcissism” that reads any expression of Palestinian identity—flags, commemorations, the kheffiya Palestinian scarf, even grief—as an attack on Jews, and noted that Israel‑advocacy organizations are increasingly using the charge of antisemitism to preemptively repress Palestinian speech, from the U.S. to Germany, where Berlin police have repeatedly banned Nakba Day protests.

Inside Israel, the state has passed laws penalizing public institutions that commemorate the Nakba, and Palestinian educators face constant pressure. Abu Sarah notes that the Israeli government not only ignores Palestinian history but “is also trying to force Palestinians to forget their own narrative, by forbidding commemoration of the Nakba.” Organizations like Zochrot, which work to educate Israeli Jews about the Nakba and Palestinian return, have been marginalized and attacked, even as they collaborate with groups like BADIL to bring Nakba testimony to international audiences.

In the U.S., Jewish Voice for Peace’s “Facing the Nakba” curriculum exists precisely because mainstream Jewish and general education has erased this history. The curriculum explicitly teaches that the Nakba “began with Israel’s establishment, and continues to this day,” and is designed to help U.S. Jews confront why they were never taught this story and how that omission shapes their politics. It is initiatives like this that are attempting to resist the Zionist attempt to deny the reality of what Palestinians have endured.

From Nakba denial to a new form of Holocaust denial

Holocaust denial is not only the crude claim that the gas chambers never existed. It is also any attempt to relativize, justify, or erase the systematic destruction of European Jewry. We rightly treat such denial as a moral red line.

Yet when it comes to Palestinians, Western political and media elites routinely engage in analogous forms of denial. They:

• Erase the original crime by refusing to acknowledge that Israel’s creation involved mass expulsion and dispossession.

• Justify ongoing violence as unfortunate but necessary “self‑defence,” even when it clearly targets civilians on a massive scale.

• Suppress testimony by banning Nakba commemorations, criminalizing Palestinian solidarity, and smearing critics as antisemites or terrorist sympathizers

The UN’s 2024 Nakba commemoration made explicit what Palestinians have long said: “The Nakba is an enterprise of displacement and replacement of people that continues to this very day,” and Gaza’s people now face a choice between “displacement, subjugation, or death—in other words, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or genocide.” To deny this reality, or to insist that it cannot be named because it offends Western sensibilities, is to participate in a form of historical and moral erasure that echoes the mechanisms once used to minimize the Holocaust while it was unfolding.

Jewish voices breaking the spell

One of the most hopeful developments is that more Jewish and Israeli voices are publicly challenging the myths that sustain this denial. The Al Jazeera feature on Jewish voices around Nakba Day highlights historians like Avi Shlaim, who calls Israel “a pariah and a war criminal state” whose brutality in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank have created a crisis with world Jewry. Within Jewish communities, projects like “Facing the Nakba” and the work of Jewish Currents, Jewish Voice for Peace, and others are insisting that Jewish ethics demand confronting Palestinian dispossession, not denying it.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada adds that confronting the Nakba is not only a moral obligation but a necessary step toward ending what they describe as Israel’s “genocidal campaign” in Gaza.

Their message is simple: acknowledging the Nakba and opposing genocide in Gaza is not anti-Semitic, it is a Jewish obligation grounded in the very lessons of the Holocaust that Western elites claim to honour.

Justice for Palestinians: The defining human rights struggle of our time

Because the Nakba is ongoing, justice for Palestinians is not one issue among many, it is the central test of whether the international human rights system means anything at all.

The UN’s own language now recognizes that 1948 and Gaza are part of a single process of displacement and replacement.[5] Anthropologists describe Israeli institutions, including universities, as “settler universities” embedded in a 78‑year project of ethnic cleansing and “Judaization.” Palestinian and international human rights groups document patterns of apartheid, persecution, and now genocide.

If the world cannot—or will not—stop a state that openly talks of a “second Nakba,” that has destroyed every university in Gaza, that starves children and then blames their parents, then the post‑1945 promise of “never again” has been hollowed out and is meaningless, not only for Jews, but for everyone.

There will be no peace in the Middle East until the foundational injustice at the heart of the region is addressed—the creation of a state on stolen land, the exclusion of its indigenous people, and the ongoing attempt to erase their presence. 

The UN’s worst decision and what it would mean to undo it

In hindsight, the UN’s endorsement of the partition of historic Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state in a region where Palestinians were the majority may be the single most disastrous decision it made in the 20th century. Not because Jews did not deserve safety after the Holocaust, but because that safety was pursued through the dispossession of another people rather than through de‑Nazification, open borders, and genuine global responsibility for refugees.

Ardi Imseis argues that the UN’s failure to uphold Palestinian rights after partition created a “permanent responsibility” that the organization has yet to fulfill. The turmoil, wars, occupations, and cycles of violence that have followed are not unfortunate side effects, they are the predictable consequences of building a state on a foundational injustice and then refusing, decade after decade, to confront it.

The Nakba was not an accident. It was a choice. Continuing it is also a choice.

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

How the Gaza genocide shattered the illusion of Western humanity

The nations that are complicit—the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, and others—aren't just bystanders, they are architects of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and have shown their inhumanity with their inaction to stop Gaza's horrors. 

By Fareed Khan

A version of this article can be found on Substack.

We have often heard political leaders talk about “Western humanity” over the decades. But the phrase is now a sick joke. A bedtime fable for adults who want to believe that their governments are the “good guys”. After more than two years of Israeli bombardment, engineered famine, and industrial-scale murder in Gaza, the fairy tale of Western governments being defenders of human rights or humanity is dead.

 

Over the last 25 months the self-anointed guardians of the so-called “rules-based international order” have proven they are nothing but a criminal cabal heading so-called “Christian” nations that weaponize international law against the powerless and suspend it for the powerful and their friends. They have shown that anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia runs deeper in Washington, London, Berlin, and other capitals in the Western alliance than any commitment to human life.

As children we are told that monsters live only in myths and fairy tales. As adults we learn the terrifying truth. Monsters live among us, they are always human, they wear suits and ties, and they lead nations like Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. What else but monstrous hatred explains the refusal to stop Israel's genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, even after every single Israeli hostage has been returned? What else explains a refusal to act when major human rights organizations, hundreds of genocide and Holocaust scholars, the United Nations and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has labelled Israel's actions as genocide?

Look at the timeline from the current bleak vantage point. The latest “ceasefire” was sold to the world as simple—if Hamas returned all Israeli hostages Israel would stop their military assault on Palestinians. The last living hostages were freed weeks ago. Even the bodies of the deceased have been repatriated. Yet Israel's murder spree continues. In the past month alone—during the so-called ceasefire—Israeli forces have murdered another 242 Palestinians, including 85 children, while injuring 619 more with live fire and tank shells. On November 19th, in Khan Younis, 33 civilians waiting for flour were shredded by an Israeli airstrike. This is not merely a breach of the ceasefire, but rather proof that the ceasefire was always a lie to allow Israel to rearm and continue its genocidal crimes.

The scale of the crimes are beyond comprehension. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, one of the few organizations still able to document on the ground, reports that as of October 2025 Israel has killed at least 75,190 Palestinians in Gaza—including 21,310 children and 13,987 women—with 173,200 wounded and tens of thousands facing lifelong disability. But these official figures are grotesque undercounts. Israeli academic Yaakov Garb, using satellite imagery and data from the Israeli military, published a report via Harvard Dataverse which estimates that between 377,000 and 400,000 Palestinians have simply “disappeared”—their bodies blown apart or buried beneath 51 million tons of rubble. Australian academics Richard Hil and Gideon Polya, factoring in direct killings plus deaths from starvation, disease, and the total collapse of Gaza's healthcare system, calculated over 680,000 excess deaths by April 2025 alone. A number that is likely to be far higher today.

This is the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) multiplied—a catastrophe not born in 2023, but forged in the fires of 1948, when Zionist militias unleashed a calculated campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing to carve out a Jewish state from the land of Palestine. Over 750,000 Palestinians—more than half the non-Jewish population—was violently expelled from their homes in what historians like Ilan Pappé have unflinchingly documented as the crime of ethnic cleansing. It began with a blueprint drafted in 1948 aimed at “clearing” Palestinian villages to secure strategic corridors for the nascent Israeli state. Massacres followed, like the infamous Deir Yassin slaughter on April 9, 1948 where Irgun and Lehi terrorists gunned down hundreds of villagers, including women and children. By war's end, 531 Palestinian villages were wiped from the map, their centuries old olive groves and orchards torched, wells poisoned, and inhabitants herded like cattle toward Gaza, the West Bank, or exile in Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria—creating the world's longest unresolved refugee crisis, with 6.1 million descendants still denied the right of return today.

If the Nakba was the overture, Gaza's horrors are the crescendo—a genocide that not only echoes the Holocaust but indicts its solemn vow of “Never Again” as a hollow lie. The Holocaust, that meticulously documented abomination that claimed 11 million lives, including six million Jews, was a six-year frenzy of industrialized death, hidden from prying eyes until Allied boots kicked down the gates of Nazi concentration camps in 1945. Gaza's slaughter, by contrast, is a brazen spectacle, live-streamed in high-definition horror—drones assassinating aid-seekers, so-called “precision” bombs vaporizing hundreds in tents, emaciated toddlers crying as starvation ravages their bodies, and even Israeli soldiers flaunting their crimes on TikTok. Where Nazis shrouded the cattle cars filled with their victims in secrecy, Israel's genocidal killing machine operates under global spotlights, with impunity.

Israeli scholars like Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg and Omer Bartov decry Israel’s actions as settler-colonial genocide, a perversion where “Never Again” mutates into “Never Again to Us,” dooming brown and Muslim bodies. The perversity deepens with the duration of the criminal acts. Where the Holocaust's terror ended with the defeat of the Nazis, Gaza is a 77-year dirge of attrition, only lacking the moral outrage that toppled Hitler.

Ha’aretz polls reveal the depth of the rot and anti-Palestinian hate in Israeli society. More than 80% of Jewish Israelis back ethnically cleansing all Gazans, while 47% endorse the mass slaughter of every Palestinian, children included, echoing the Nazi dehumanization that once targeted Jews as “vermin.” This is an escalation which shows that Israeli society has sunk to lows last seen in Nazi Germany, and illustrates that Israel's actions have the social licence of almost half of Israeli Jews.

South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ is one of the few things that gives hope to Palestinians seeking justice. Armed with their own research and additional data from Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and the UN, the ICJ case stands as a lone legal bulwark against Israel, yet faces US threats and sanctions on truth-tellers like UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Gaza surpasses the Holocaust not in raw numbers but in its “prolonged generational agony,” a structural evil sustained for decades by Israeli cruelty and Western support, where grandparents fled Zionist massacres in 1948 only for their grandchildren to perish during a two year long genocide. This moral hierarchy—Jewish suffering enshrined in memorials while Palestinian agony is dismissed as “tragic” and “collateral damage”—mirrors forgotten horrors like the Congo genocide of the early 20th Century under Belgium's King Leopold where 10 million were killed, or Winston Churchill's orchestrated Bengal Famine in 1943 where three million were starved.

Those nations that are complicit—the US, Canada, Germany, the UK, and others—aren't just bystanders, they are architects which, with their silence and inaction to stop Gaza's horrors, are no less criminal than those who wore Nazi uniforms as they slaughtered Jews. The West knew Gaza was a genocide from the very first weeks because the experts made it clear that it was. Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal called it a “textbook case of genocide” before October 2023 was even over. By the end of that month more than 800 genocide scholars and international-law experts issued a public warning that Israel was committing genocide in real time. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor branded it “the most transparent genocide in human history.” The ICJ called Israel's actions “plausible genocide,” and ordered them to prevent genocidal acts in January 2024. But none of it mattered. The US ignored the words of those who had studied the crime for decades, vetoed every meaningful UN resolution to halt the slaughter quickly, shipped billions more in military hardware to Israel as it committed atrocities, while Israel ignored the ICJ’s judicial orders, and global community’s condemnations.

There is no complexity here. This is anti-Palestinian hatred plain and simple, so deeply embedded in Western governments, media and civil society institutions that it's a part of their cultural and political DNA. It's clear that Palestinians are not seen as human in the corridors of Western power, the same way Jews weren't considered human in the halls of European power in centuries past. They are an obstacle, a demographic problem, “human animals” in the words of Israeli leaders, a term borrowed from European history once used to describe Jews. The same governments that weep crocodile tears over the Holocaust now fund, arm, and defend a 21st-century Holocaust in Gaza.

The West's failure to take action to halt the Gaza genocide has shown us that monsters are real and they walk among us, and they lead us. So let's never talk again about Western “humanity” nor Canada’s defence of “international rule of law” again. Let's see Western leaders for what they are—criminals and monsters. And those of us that have a moral compass, let's join together to build the just society that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau once spoke of more than half a century ago.

©  2025 The View From Here. © 2025 Fareed Khan. All Rights Reserved.