Never Again. Even When It's Israel.
Holocaust memory has become a shield against present responsibility.
There is no greater moral wound in the Jewish imagination than the Holocaust. But that wound is now being used to shield us from the truth: that what Israel is doing in Gaza constitutes genocide. Coined in 1944 by a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, the word genocide combines the Greek prefix genos “race, kind” with the Latin root cide “a killing,” to mean “killing a race.” In his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, where the term first appears, Lemkin writes, “[Genocide] is intended to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”
The United Nations further specified this definition four years later in the 1948 Genocide Convention. As they write, “To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group.” Proving this kind of intent has been difficult to do conclusively, but many scholars point to Israel’s longstanding attempts to dehumanize the Palestinian population, culminating in the large-scale death and destruction that has been carried out since October 7, 2023.
Two days after the October 7th massacre, the Israeli Defense Minister argued that a complete siege of Gaza — cutting off energy, food, and supplies to the entire 2.1 million population — was necessary because, “We are fighting against human animals.” This phrase has been repeated multiple times, along with other intellectual arguments, to justify the increasing scale of destruction. Additionally, Israel continues to expand settlements in the West Bank, expelling Palestinian residents who are not offered the same legal protections as Israelis.
Beyond rhetoric and policy, it is well documented that the ~10,000 Palestinian prisoners, 3,600 of whom are being held without charge, are subject to psychological and physical abuses, including sexual torture. The UN Human Rights Commission writes, “Countless testimonies by men and women speak of detainees in cage-like enclosures, tied to beds, blindfolded and in diapers, stripped naked, deprived of adequate healthcare, food, water and sleep, electrocutions including on their genitals, blackmail and cigarette burns. In addition, victims spoke of loud music played until their ears bled, attacks by dogs, waterboarding, suspension from ceilings, and severe sexual and gender-based violence.” The horrific abuses do not end here.
92 percent of housing units in Gaza have been either severely damaged or destroyed; around 60 percent of all land in Gaza has been bombed; over 600 healthcare workers have been killed, about one a day; 94 percent of all healthcare facilities have been damaged or destroyed; 20 percent of the population faces acute levels of starvation; and over 60,000 people are dead.
In determining genocide, a consideration is whether or not the state is “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” This seems evident. Israel is deliberately inflicting a horrific quality of life on all residents in Gaza. Many in Israel have no shame in admitting this intent. A recent poll, published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, found that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the total expulsion of Gazans. Additionally, 47 percent believe that “all residents of a conquered city should be killed.”
Last month, on Jerusalem Day, far-right protestors took to the streets, waving banners that read “67 - Jerusalem in our hands. 2025 - Gaza in our hands.” And, “Without a Nakba, there is no victory.” The legacy of the Holocaust cannot hide the truth of the moment: Israel’s political goal is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. As Jewish Americans, we must unequivocally condemn this. It is a moral travesty that meets the conditions to be defined as genocide.
What is needed now, as a Jewish community, is for us to recognize that safeguarding the linguistic borders of Holocaust memory does nothing to help us overcome our trauma. We must, with uncompromising clarity, oppose this genocide and the machinery of collective punishment wherever it appears. Even if it is Israel. Especially if it is Israel.