Gaza: “Holocaust” Is the Necessary Word in the Fight for Historical Memory
No other word than Holocaust suits what is occurring now in Gaza. Perhaps the future will provide a unique term to suit the unique horror, but for now we we need to know this as a Holocaust with a capital H.
The world has never witnessed atrocities in the way that they have witnessed this the excruciation of the people of Gaza. The Gaza Holocaust stands out as defining historical event of our time.
We have seen bags filled with pieces of children. We have witnessed people burned alive. We have seen massacres with the eagle’s perspective and deaths with wrenching intimacy. We have forgotten things that would once have been unforgettable. We have seen a country driven mad by racist hate: posting war crimes for likes, destroying food meant for the starving, and rioting for the right to torture and rape prisoners.
They cannot erase this experience. This will define us in the same way that the antiwar activists of the 60s and 70s saw that struggle as the central uniting aspect of their political and civic identity. Opposing the War in Viet Nam did not lessen other struggles, it created the greatest sinews of solidarity. It created clarity. It created a culture.
The establishment elite and the fascist plutocrats believe that we will forget. They are drunk on the power that they have used to control the mass mind of the West. They think we are a collection of easily distracted children who are by definition far less intelligent and knowledgable than they are. They rely on public amnesia.
We need to be careful that we don’t merely assume that the gravity of what is occurring (and the fact that it is all on record in excruciating detail) will set the tone of the historical record. The institutions of Western political culture work by creating areas of doubt and confusion in the face of the obvious and then exploit those areas of uncertainty as wedges to open the path to a long slow gaslighting that isolates the educated activist core from the public. So, for example, the public might retain a belief that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was wrong but come to misunderstand it as a series of errors, while the establishment figures who acted to facilitate that crime against the clear opposition of the majority reinvent themselves as the leading voices of caution.
The 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side was a critically lauded. It exposed the realities of the US torture and rendition programme. It grossed about $300,000. The 2012 pro-torture propaganda film Zero Dark Thirty presented a ridiculous sickening fantasy of the US torture programme, balanced finely in such a way that misinformed people might see it agnostic and even potentially critical of the US use of torture. It grossed about $130,000,000. This followed director Katherine Bigelow’s and screenwriter Mark Boal’s prior collaboration, the 2008 “antiwar” Iraq film The Hurt Locker which received near universal critical acclaim and grossed about $50,000,000. Boal and Bigelow followed an established tradition of propaganda which suggests that the real victims of US aggression are US military personnel who, by being immersed in the barbarism that is natural to a heart of darkness like Iraq, are forced into being barbarians themselves. The film depicts the protagonist being forced to kill a child and centres his victimhood in this act, as if guided by Golda Meir’s words: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”
The US can no longer do effective propaganda that portrays noble heroes fighting in unambiguous bad guys, so they present anti-heroes in gritty grey morally ambiguous struggles against unambiguous Bad Guys. That is all they need, and public opinion is informed by mainstream news and entertainment that reinforces this narrative. The path forward for Western leaders is clear. For the hardcore racists they will continue to play on the sense that Palestinians are innately barbaric, for the Western mainstream (also racist, but more discreet) they will continue the demonisation of Hamas. They will not admit that this is a genocide carried out successfully with direct participation by the US and UK and widespread and crucial support from most Western countries. They will instead present a righteous war against evil Hamas gone off the rails because of right-wing fanatics in the Israeli government. It is the propaganda of the moral grey of realpolitik in the face of the undeniable unambiguous Bad Guys called Hamas. Fortunately they do not seem to understand how they have gotten away with this in the past, and they cannot succeed to the same extent now.
Lawyer Tayeb Ali said the following in an interview:
I asked this [US official] how can you possibly back Israel in its attack on Palestinians in this way? And the answer was mind-blowing. “We did it before. We did it in Iraq and you all forgot about it, and you’ll forget about this too.” That was the answer from the lips of an American diplomat to me about this question.
The US committed genocide in Iraq. Over a million people died during the “occupation” and “insurgency” and the majority of them died from traumatic injury at the hands of the US-led coalition. Like Gaza today there were cruel attacks on all aspects of life, calculated to leave lasting agony and devastation long after the perpetrators withdrew. It was a nightmare. The Iraqis tried their best to reach the world, but the world was served a twisted version in which the true source of fear and violence was the civil war – a story that still dominates. On a gut level the Western public cannot really understand that people who look and sound like them are capable of the worst atrocities. The sense of shared identity is weaponised by propagandists such that it is the barbaric other who must be the Bad Guy on an emotional level, The victims were made the perpetrators of their own genocide.
People who tried to document what was going on were systematically killed by US forces. Rules of engagement were promulgated that designated people with cameras as “insurgents”.
More journalists were killed in Iraq than have been killed in Gaza.
It was a lonely time for activists who could oppose the occupation, but not the apologism and misdirection. Plenty of information was available but it was kept from the mainstream and politicians, media and academics could all plausibly avoid the most inconvenient facts. Using the term “genocide”, a valid framing which has the potential to abolish the obfuscations of the nature of the violence, was academic suicide.
This time is different.
The loneliness of knowing is far less acute. As with Iraq, the job of the mainstream media is not to convince people that nothing bad is happening, but that it is complicated and largely unavoidable. They do everything they can to normalise the events, such that anyone who gets emotional or accuses the perpetrators of intentionality is seen as a fanatic. Now, though, the ordinary people you meet may know very little, but they know that something notable is happening. This time, many are willing to listen.
In November of 2023 I wrote a piece entitled “The Gaza Genocide: “Genocide” is the Necessary Word”. I was very clear in that article that the assault on Gaza was not a discrete case of genocide that only began on October 8 2023, but rather that it was part of an ongoing Palestinian Genocide. At the time it was still common to treat the word “genocide” as a restricted commodity that only the anointed experts could bestow in select instances of special gravity. My point was that if we are to understand the nature of Israel’s violence in Gaza then we must understand that it is genocide. This isn’t a war against Hamas in which they have merely by accident systematically destroyed all of the universities and municipal buildings. The target of the violence is the Palestinian people of Gaza as such.
In the last week Israel has unleashed a particularly deadly wave of killing and destruction in Jabalia. They have dropped leaflets telling people to leave the area (after killing hundreds). Can any sane person say that these strikes are because they have coincidentally found a series of legitimate military targets in Jabalia at the exact time that the want to drive the population from the area? Of course not. The Israelis might rationalise this as being a necessary step in their fight to destroy Hamas, but that is beside the point. They may claim that their motive is to destroy Hamas, but their chosen means are genocidal. If their manner of waging “war” against Hamas is by attacking civilians then their intent is genocidal and their claims relating to motive are completely irrelevant.
Israel’s claims about human shields and Hamas tunnels have become so rote that they don’t even attempt to make themselves believable any more. After multiple deadly airstrikes on the European Hospital in Khan Younis last week they released the usual boilerplate propaganda wherein they had overlay red shading on an aerial photo as if this somehow proves the existence of tunnels. To be fair, the US has used this trick hundreds of times since 1990 to show everything from mobile WMD plants, to concentration camps, to exotic execution grounds. The Western media always lap it up as if they had been vouchsafed revelations from on high. In this instance, though, the Israeli hasbarists had become so lazy and slapdash that they did not even draw their little tunnel overlays on the right building. The process by now has become so routine that I doubt any of the faithful will be moved to question the validity of their beliefs. What was once sold as crucial sophisticated and exclusive “intelligence” is revealed as being just some guy using Google Photos, but by now this is no longer an exercise in persuasion. Israel’s hasbara does not aim to change minds, it aims to give people pretexts for not changing their minds (or not changing their position).
The commentary in our media is monopolised by an obscurantist priesthood of a Whiggish religion that mystifies war and genocide in equal measure. When a Western power commits genocide it is not really genocide, it is a series of missteps and miscalculations in their war against terror or their counterinsurgency. When an enemy of the West commits genocide it is not strategic, it is an expression of demonic savagery and a personal hatred. The discourse is just shit piled on shit, and I wish with all my heart that I could say that this does not apply to anti-Zionist pundits, but they are just as bad. They simply slot Netanyahu into the demon slot.
Genocide is not a thoughtless exercise of hatred, it is a strategy. Almost everything that Israel has done in its “war” against armed militants in Gaza can only be understood as genocide carried out with obvious intent. The actual counter-insurgency has been a minor note in the orchestration of murder, maiming and destruction. Why, for example, do they keep shooting kids? In Viet Nam all of the GI’s had their heads filled with lurid tales of children throwing grenades (always second- or third-hand testimony as far as I know). In 2000 the propaganda film Rules of Engagement based its entire final act pro-massacre plot-twist on a vicious Yemeni six year-old with a revolver. These are mere pretexts, of course, but where is there even a pretext in shooting kids with a drone? Are we supposed to believe that an Israeli operator is suddenly spooked and fearful that a four-year old is a threat to their quadcopter? Nor is this violence some sort of uncontrolled racist rampage. Israel is shooting, dismembering, incinerating and starving civilians with intent and at a controlled pace.
Israel’s genocidal purpose is pretty clear. This is a country that refuses to say where its borders are, is engaged in a massive decades-long settlement programme in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, and in which they talk of the “demographic problem” posed by Palestinians continuing to live in Palestine. If anyone needs a picture drawn, they have already drawn it, then added more pictures with helpful captions which then were collated into a graphic novel, adapted into an animated feature, then staged as a fucking Broadway musical. No one since 1945 has been so explicit about their underlying genocidal intent which has hidden in plain sight because so many Westerners harbour weird Islamophobic and racist attitudes about the victims.
“Genocide” is therefore the necessary word to understand what Israel is doing. Used correctly it strips the nonsense away. It shows the common purpose between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in the West Bank. Otherwise how can we explain the accelerating violence destruction and ethnic cleansing happening in all parts of the occupied territories. 40,000 have been forced to flee their homes in the north of the West Bank in recent times. Are there Hamas tunnels there too? Israel always has its pretexts but no analysis in good faith can ignore the clear co-ordination and the professed intent to dispossess Palestinians and inscribe “national pattern” of the Jewish state on the land that is cleansed of Palestinians. It is just a shame that good faith is in such short supply when it comes to talking about Israel.
Genocide is not a word that denotes a given level of gravity. Genocide is always morally indefensible, but there is no threshold to be guarded against those who would overuse the term and debase the coinage. Something is either genocide or it is not genocide. “Holocaust”, on the other hand, is meant to denote a subjective judgement. That does not mean that we should tolerate the horrified pearl-clutching of the self-appointed word police who are full of wailing passion over the some victims of past horrors, but only those whose remembrancehappens to promote their current politics.
In 2012 Māori scholar Keri Opai opined that most Pākehā did not understand the extent of suffering and violence inflicted on Māori and that it was “awful stuff that really does break down to a holocaust”. The screams of outrage reached right around the planet to the pages of the UK’s Daily Mail. Ironically the gammon of that right-wing organ decided it wasn’t kosher to profane the memory of those killed in The Holocaust. Yet the word holocaust has never been exclusively about Nazi genocide, and certainly not specifically about the Shoah or Judeocide.
In reality the word “holocaust” has long been used to refer to many events of death, destruction, or conflagration. Writing in the Journal of Genocide Studies in 2000 Jon Petrie gives pre-Nazi instances of the use and definition of the word:
The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies of carpet-baggers … left the bewildered serf with no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. (W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903)
It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925)
Holocaust, strictly a sacrifice wholly destroyed by fire … The term is now often applied to a catastrophe on a large scale, whether by fire or not, or to a massacre or slaughter (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn, 1910/11)
Petrie adds:
…[T]he implicit denial within the Holocaust Studies community that “holocaust” had a significant secular history prior to its employment as a referent to the Nazi Judeocide helps to support the idea that “h/Holocaust” can only be legitimately applied to the Nazi killings which, in turn, supports the pernicious ahistorical idea that since other massacres require a different vocabulary, other massacres are incomparable to the Judeocide…. [S]ubtly supporting a pernicious intellectual climate in which a well-regarded Holocaust historian can wonder if “the Holocaust … [is] an event whose mysteries were … meant to be understood.”
To put it another way the term “holocaust” is policed by people who want to mystify and confuse historical matters. The outrage of holocaust exceptionalists is based in the same studied ignorance and cry-bullying sentimentality that is used by fascists, racists, misogynists, nativists, transphobes, homophobes and authoritarians.
As things stand it makes sense to talk of the Gaza Holocaust. It is the term we have that most suits this type of historical event. Time will probably reveal a real term – a word, presumably in Arabic, that resonates with survivors as they come to terms with the as yet unthinkable meaning of the time they are living through.
The singular nature of these events cannot be denied. In terms of relentless and unremitting peril and privation I can only think to compare the Gaza Holocaust with the Siege of Leningrad. By design what is happening in Gaza is a trauma that will live for generations.
Trauma is often buried. Sometimes it is literally buried in mass graves like those of Guatemala or Franco’s Spain. In South Korea there is a word especially to denote the fearful shameful silence of not being able to talk about what was suffered at the hands of the dictatorship. We are used to giving full voice to outrage and grief over the atrocities of the enemies of the West. We weep over the dead of Rwanda, rage over the crimes of Bosnian Serbs, and are struck silent with queasy horror when we confronted with the intimate brutalities of Tuol Sleng. With the partial exception of Viet Nam, we are not used to seeing ourselves in the perpetrators boots.
We have never really looked in the mirror of our victims’ eyes. At a very deep level of racism – a profound Western chauvinism that even transcends issues of skin colour – people are genuinely incapable of sensing the suffering inflicted by the West. They are so invested in the underlying benevolence of Western intentions that they will not and cannot imagine the agonies of those on the receiving end of Western violence. Our victims do not suffer, they are mere lights that blink out in the passive voice. Whether the killing was necessary or yet another tragic failed attempt to do good, we need not even contemplate their fear, their lonely death agonies, or the grief of those left behind. We need not contemplate these things because they are unintended. Unlike our demonic enemies we bear no ill will to those who become collateral damage. This is a preconception so strong that no evidence of atrocities can overcome it.
As the title of Omar al Akkad’s book on Gaza tells us, One Day Everyone will Always Have Been Against This. He did not mean that as a positive optimistic statement. Western leaders are already positioning themselves to twist reality to the point where they are on the right side of history. Emmanuel Macron has been using strong words for months, clearly trying to milk as much as possible from rhetoric while doing as little as possible in real terms. UK’s Labour Party has now joined him. Keir Starmer and David Lammy have used words like “unacceptable” and “monstrous”. They have cancelled trade deal negotiations. This might seem to be substantive, but it really isn’t. The UK has sent over 500 surveillance flights to Gaza during this Holocaust to support Israel. On paper the UK imposed a partial ban on arms exports to Israel, but in reality exports have “skyrocketed”. The UK’s military base in Cyprus is available for the US to use and almost certainly is a launchpad for special operations exercises. In June of 2024 US special forces were involved in the rescue of 4 hostages that left over 200 Palestinians dead. One witness said: “I saw dead children and body parts strewn all over… I saw an elderly man killed on an animal-drawn cart… It was hell.”
The UK is a culpable perpetrator in the Gaza Holocaust. His Majesty’s Government is guilty of the crime of genocide. After 20 months of slaughter it should be seen as a joke that they would now use strong language. It is a certain sign of bad faith and duplicity, yet the strength of human suffering in Gaza is so strong that people are pulled into a sense of relief, a false belief in change that seems natural when people use terms like “monstrous”. Things are changing, of course. There was always going to be a time when the genocide in Gaza would reach a point of such obvious obscenity that even Keir Starmer would need to distance himself. Once that point comes it makes sense to use your newfound humane concern both to gain popularity and to distance yourself from the position you have taken and held previously.
UK Labour’s manoeuvring is painfully obvious if you look for it. They clearly want to separate the legitimate “war” against Hamas from the excesses of Israel’s execution of it’s right to self-defence. (In reality this is not a war and Israel has no right to exercise self-defence until it ends its occupation of Palestinian territory). The playbook is once again to allow Western actions to be seen as questionable but to reinforce the idea that they are reacting to the Bad Guys, rather than the reality of being the aggressors, the occupiers, and the perpetrators of genocide. Even Piers Morgan is ostentatiously changing his tune, but only by rearranging his notes. He is now “forced” to admit there is a genocide, but with the assistance of an unctuously collegial Mehdi Hasan, he effortless reinvents his bullying support for genocide into a mere misreading of the situation. (You can find the video online of you want, but I will not link here because, unlike Hasan et al., I refuse to do anything to provide views to that cunt’s channel.)
Once the immediate violence in Gaza comes to an end there will be the usual pressure to minimise and bring into question the amount of suffering and death caused. A lot of emphasis will be placed on any violence or strife between Palestinians. There will be hand-wringing about not foreseeing things and many BBC-toned uses of “journalistic” absolutes such as “nobody could have foreseen…” an eventuality or “nobody can doubt…” a well-meaning intent.
Every Western country will be following the same basic procedure. They are all guilty. Almost every Western leader has provided significant aid to a genocide, but they will all claim to have always been against it.
There are two ways in which Western self-exculpation and self-adulation will fall apart, though one is far from certain. The first (and uncertain) way is that the demonisation of Hamas is completely one-dimensional and therefore may break. It derives its strength from its complete lack of intelligence or intelligibility. It works by forcing people to submit saying Hamas are terrorists and condemning October 7. This sets up the framework of a just war that has been derailed by a few bad Israelis. The fragility in this is that there is nothing to back this argument – if you can weather the outrage that questioning the assumption prompts. If someone can cut through the berating and point out that Palestinian armed factions, including Hamas’s Al Qassam Brigades, have a right to use armed resistance and no one apart from a truly militant pacifist has any moral standing to condemn them for October the 7th (notwithstanding that war crimes were committed during that assault) then the anti-Palestinians will have no answer. We should not underestimate how effective a screeching fascist can be when they are in a position of authority, but it is an intellectually indefensible position and if it propaganda breaks once it will happen more easily thereafter.
A more certain thing is that the Gaza Holocaust will overwhelm the narrative of October 7th. They have stretched the unconscious tendency of Westerners to value Western life more highly than the lives of our victims past breaking point. They took for granted the idea that they can create an exclusive concern about the suffering caused in a single event by the Bad Guys, and destroyed it by an excess of violence that cannot be remedied or hidden enough to make sense. Ordinary Westerners are racist, but not racist enough for this. The sociopaths in charge clearly either do not understand the limits of their propaganda abilities or their desperation is far greater than we can see from the outside. Either way, there will never be a discussion about October 7th that occurs without the shadow of Gaza suffering destruction, starvation, dismemberment, torture, immolation and grief beyond measure. We are not going to forget and we will not let other people forget.
Caitlin Johnstone recently wrote:
I will never forget the Gaza holocaust. I will never let anyone else forget about the Gaza holocaust.
No matter what happens or how this thing turns out, I will never let anyone my voice touches forget that our rulers did the most evil things imaginable right in front of us and lied to us about it the entire time.
I will never stop doing everything I can with my own small platform to help ensure that the perpetrators of this mass atrocity are brought to justice.
I will never stop doing everything I can to help bring down the western empire and to help free Palestine from the Zionist entity.
I will never forget those shaking children. Those tiny shredded bodies. Those starved, skeletal forms. The explosions followed by screams. The atrocities followed by western media silence.
I will never forget, and I will never forgive. I will never forgive our leaders. I will never forgive the western press. I will never forgive Israel. I will never forgive the mainstream US political parties. I will always want for them exactly what they wanted for the Palestinians.
No matter what happens or what they do in the future, they will always be the people who did this to Gaza. They will always be the people who inflicted this nightmare upon our species. That will always be the most significant thing about them. It will always be the single most defining characteristic about who they are as human beings.
I feel the same as Johnstone. I feel the same way about the genocide in Iraq. I won’t ever forget, but I also know that in that instance I have been isolated and powerless. But this genocide is different. There is a framework for us built from years of organising that allows us to use these feelings, because these feelings are judgements that carry real weight and real justice. We will not let these fucking scum rewrite history and paint us as the unreliable premature anti-Zionists. We will not let them rest easy.
What we do now will define us in future. We need militancy. There is only one fight and there are only two sides. We cannot welcome Starmer, Macron and Morgan as late-blooming anti-genocide voices, because they are not. Those who really come to understand that they are in error will be humbled and the last thing they would do is to publicly promote their new opinion as being worthy of other people’s time. Everyone needs to understand this, and everyone needs to understand that the people who chose to be on the side of massacring Palestinians are not ever on our side in any respect.
Some times there can be no compromise.
