• apartheid in the West Bank)
• New York Times, in November 2023, in which I stated that although the statements of Israeli leaders suggested genocidal intent, there was still time to stop Israel from perpetrating genocide.
• the “anti-Zionist” B’Tselem
• activists in extreme rightwing organisations
• I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known. Although I have worked abroad for many years, Israel is where I was born and raised
• my personal and professional background.
• IDF) for four years
• During my time in Gaza, I saw first-hand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighbourhoods.
• For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people.
• what motivates soldiers to fight?
• my Oxford PhD
• the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the eastern front in the second world war
• What I found ran counter to how Germans in the 1980s understood their past. They preferred to think that the army had fought a “decent” war, even as the Gestapo and the SS perpetrated genocide “behind its back”
• the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising
• 1987
• Yitzhak Rabin
• minister of defence,
• break the arms and legs” of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops
• based on my research into the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery path.
• I received a one-line response from Rabin, chiding me for daring to compare the IDF to the German military.
• How dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht.”
• Since 1989, I have been teaching in the United States. I have written profusely on war, genocide, nazism, antisemitism and the Holocaust, seeking to understand the links between the industrial killing of soldiers in the first world war and the extermination of civilian populations by Hitler’s regime
• In the months since 7 October, what I have learned over the course of my life and my career has become more painfully relevant than ever before.
• 7 October
• rage and fear
• desire to re-establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation.
• Carl von Clausewitz
• war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction. The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self-annihilation
• the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza
• The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage
• References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness.
• The way people’s eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling
• It is not just Hamas, it’s all Gazans who agree that it’s OK to kill Jewish children, that this is a worthy cause …
• With Germany there was reconciliation, but they apologised and paid reparations, and what [will happen] here? We too did terrible things, but nothing that comes close to what happened here on 7 October. It will be necessary to reconcile but we need some distance.
• This was a pervasive sentiment among many left-leaning, liberal friends and acquaintances I spoke with in Israel.

• Instead, they feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out, and in the struggle between one just cause and another – that of the Israelis and that of the Palestinians – it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price. To those who doubt this stark choice, the Holocaust is presented as the alternative, however irrelevant it is to the current moment.

  This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October. Its roots are much deeper.
• Moshe Dayan
• Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza’s refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property.
• We are the generation of settlement; without a steel helmet and the muzzle of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Our children will not have a life if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads and dig water wells. Millions of Jews who were exterminated because they had no land are looking at us from the ashes of Israeli history and ordering us to settle and resurrect a land for our people
• Let us not flinch from seeing the loathing that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who dwell around us and await the moment they can reach for our blood. Let us not avert our eyes lest our hands grow weak. This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives – to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.
• He, too, had known this land before 1948. He recalled the Palestinian villages and towns that were destroyed to make room for Jewish settlers. He clearly understood the rage of the refugees across the fence. But he also firmly believed in both the right and the urgent need for Jewish settlement and statehood.
• In the struggle between addressing injustice and taking over the land, he chose his side, knowing that it doomed his people to forever rely on the gun. Dayan also knew well what the Israeli public could accept. It was because of his ambivalence about where guilt and responsibility for injustice and violence lay, and his deterministic, tragic view of history, that the two versions of his speech ended up appealing to vastly different political orientations.
• Shall the Sword Devour Forever?

• But in his 1956 speech, with his references to carrying the heavy gates of Gaza and the Palestinians waiting for a moment of weakness, Dayan was alluding to the biblical story of Samson. As his listeners would have recalled, Samson the Israelite, whose superhuman strength derived from his long hair, was in the habit of visiting prostitutes in Gaza. The Philistines, who viewed him as their mortal enemy, hoped to ambush him against the locked gates of the city. But Samson simply lifted the gates on his shoulders and walked free. It was only when his mistress Delilah tricked him and cut off his hair that the Philistines could capture and imprison him, rendering him all the more powerless by poking out his eyes (as the Gazans who mutilated Ro’i are alleged to have also done). But in a last feat of bravery, as he is mocked by his captors, Samson calls for God’s help, seizes the pillars of the temple to which he had been led, and collapses it on the merry crowd surrounding him, calling out: “Let me die with the Philistines!”
• Those gates of Gaza are lodged deeply in the Zionist Israeli imagination, a symbol of the divide between us and the “barbarians”.
• Herzog
• This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives – to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.”
• Since Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja’iyya facing the kibbutz, where 100,000 people had been living, has been emptied of its population and turned into one vast pile of rubble.
• Knowing that I had previously warned of genocide, the students were especially keen to show me that they were humane, that they were not murderers. They had no doubt that the IDF was, in fact, the most moral army in the world. But they were also convinced that any damage done to the people and buildings in Gaza was totally justified, that it was all the fault of Hamas using them as human shields.
• They showed me photos on their phones to prove that they had behaved admirably toward children, denied that there was any hunger in Gaza, insisted that the systematic destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, public buildings, residences and infrastructure was necessary and justifiable. They viewed any criticism of Israeli policies by other countries and the United Nations as simply antisemitic.
• Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel – namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October – but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy.
• Thousands of children were killed? It’s the enemy’s fault. Our own children were killed? That is certainly the enemy’s fault. If Hamas carry out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it’s Hamas’s fault for hiding close to these shelters
• After what they did to us, we have no choice but to root them out. After what we did to them, we can only imagine what they would do to us if we don’t destroy them. We simply have no choice.
• German noncommissioned officer
• the crimes committed here by the Jews
• We would insult the animals if we described these mostly Jewish men as beasts
• Yoav Gallant
• We are fighting human animals, and we must act accordingly,” later adding that Israel would “break apart one neighbourhood after another in Gaza”
• We are fighting Nazis
• Naftali Bennett
• Benjamin Netanyahu
• remember what Amalek has done to you”
• the biblical call to exterminate Amalek’s “men and women, children and infants”
• don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.”
• Nissim Vaturi
• Israel’s goal should be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth
• There are no uninvolved people … we must go in there and kill, kill, kill. We must kill them before they kill us
• Bezalel Smotrich
• The work must be completed … Total destruction
• Blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.
• Avi Dichter
• rolling out the Gaza Nakba”
• veteran
• wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children”
• No wonder that there have been innumerable social media posts by IDF troops in Gaza calling to “kill the Arabs”, “burn their mothers” and “flatten” Gaza. There has been no known disciplinary action by their commanders.
• logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us
• Look at what happened to us in 1918
• victimhood
• Look at what happened to us in the Holocaust, when we trusted that others would come to our rescue, IDF troops say in 2024, thereby giving themselves licence for indiscriminate destruction based on a false analogy between Hamas and the Nazis.
• Israeli
• so little respect for social niceties. There is almost a cult of sincerity
• This shared expectation creates both a sense of solidarity, and of lines that cannot be crossed. When you are with us, we are all family. If you turn against us or are on the other side of the national divide, you are shut out and can expect us to come after you.
• The country had changed in ways visible and subtle, ways that might have raised a barrier between me, as an observer from the outside, and those who have remained an organic part of it.
• On 10 November 2023, I wrote in the New York Times: “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. […] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.
• I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions.
• clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory
• In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.
• the transformation of Zionism from an ideology that sought to liberate the Jews from the degradation of exile and discrimination and to put them on equal standing with the other nations of the world, to
• state ideology of ethnonationalism, oppression of others, expansionism and apartheid?

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