The Génocidaires Can Never Rest
We must haunt them and confront them wherever they go
The walls are closing in on the Israeli génocidaires, and this is just the beginning. Two IDF soldiers were briefly arrested in Belgium after the Hind Rajab Foundation filed a report documenting their roles in war crimes. While nowhere near enough, the precedent this is setting should not be underestimated. The higher the cost on the Israelis with blood on their hands, the better our chances at bringing that genocidal regime down.
There can be no normality with a state committing genocide, and its citizens who take part in the genocide cannot get away with it.
We have moved beyond the stage where the fact of genocide in Gaza is debatable. As I'm writing these words, Israel's two most prominent human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have also declared it to be a genocide. Israel is committing a genocide right now and has been committing a genocide for nearly two years. That's it. Any attempt to ‘debate’ this is nothing less than complicity in the genocide. End of.
While our energies right now should continue to be on stopping this genocide, it is just the first step. It will be up to all of us to make sure that the ‘normality’ associated with Israel is relegated to history, much like how Russia is talked about in the West today, mostly in relation to Ukraine, with Ukraine being the actual center of the story most of the time. Putin has been relegated to the dictator who invaded another country.
But here's the problem: the West's complicity in Israel's genocide is even more blatant than their complicity in Russia's genocide1 because virtually every major institution, from universities to Eurovision to FIFA to most politicial parties, has supported or excused Israel in one way or another since the genocide started.
At least with Ukraine they have tried to ‘compensate’ for their complicity. Where Israel is concerned, we have instead seen nearly two years of dishonesty and cowardice by countries that have spent my entire life telling people like me that they're better than us because they uphold some kind of international norms. Their supposed universality has been proven to be anything but, and the consequences of such a revelation is something we're only starting to understand.
The Netherlands’ intelligence agency has recently declared Israel to be among the threats to the international legal order, “citing disinformation campaigns endangering the lives of Dutch citizens.” That's where The Hague is located remember, where the International Court of Justice will spend the next few years taking in the mountain of evidence, which continue to pile-up on a daily basis, of Israel's genocide.
While I'm the last person to suggest that these steps are or will be enough, we shouldn't downplay their significance either. Instead, we should be treating these small and at times ‘symbolic’ victories as if they were bigger, if only to motivate us to keep going. It is our task to make sure that any child or adult starved to death by the Israelis are turned into political hauntings, into living nightmares to all those who have taken part in this most savage of crimes against humanity.
They have made themselves traitors to the human race and we must not shy away from what that means. The appropriate response to a state that is committing genocide is to wage a war against it. While we cannot compete with the Israelis on weapons of mass destruction, there is one terrain where we have the upper hand, assuming we're organised enough to wield the resulting power it comes with: culture.
The Israelis wouldn't be spending so much of their resources making sure that they get to sing at Eurovision2 or play football in FIFA matches if it did not matter. I would even argue that they rely on these more than, say, how many French or British MPs rhetorically oppose them (unless words turn into action of course).
And, just to be clear once more, I am not suggesting that the cultural terrain is sufficient.3 I am merely suggesting that anyone who says there is nothing they can do is simply wrong. That's just not true. There is always something that can be done, and something small is not as important as something bigger, but it is more important than nothing at all. Apologies for dropping a cliché here, but I've seen a lot of people conclude that nothing can be done, and I wish we could instead push one another - with periods to recuperate as needed - to do better.
There are good reasons to argue for (re)valuing the cultural terrain. We don't need to overstate its importance to recognise that the génocidaires themselves have long viewed it as an important battlefield. This is why, when deciding on our next moves, it is important to assess two things, among others: 1- what do they, the génocidaires, care most about and 2- of these, where can we be most impactful?
Let's take another example. It's the only other one I promise, but it's a big one.
It has become increasingly normal to compare Israel to the Third Reich.
Miriam Margolyes, who is Jewish (and one of my favorite actors), made it as explicit as it gets:
“I cannot bear to think that my people are doing exactly the same thing to another nation [...] and so my heart is broken and […] the terrible thing I have to face is that Hitler won. He changed us, he made us like him.”
Now, I actually don’t agree that this is a particularly Jewish problem. Of course, that aspect is inevitable given that Israel claims itself to be the world's only Jewish state and sees any Jew in the world as potential Israeli citizen.4 I've previously written about how the dominant form of Zionism today is actually Christian rather than Jewish, but most importantly, I simply refuse, as a non-Jew, to accept Israel's claim of representing a global Jewish nation. I don't want to cede the ground to any state claiming to represent any religion. Margolyes’ positionality is her own of course, and it makes her intervention all the more powerful as a result.
Regardless, what it does tell me is that the taboo is finally gone, once and for all. I used to be hesitant about these comparisons, but the truth is that comparing Israel to the Third Reich has been made much easier by the words and actions of the Israelis and their apologists themselves. The Israelis have weaponised the Holocaust for so long, and with such an obsessive regularity, that they even risk weakening the very field of Holocaust and Genocide studies (unless scholars in that field wake up faster.)5 At the very least, they have proven themselves to be shameless, willing to use and abuse the memory of the dead, including in many case their own parents/grandparents, to justify or excuse a genocide done, at least partly, in their names.
We have known that the taboo was on its way out for a good year or so, maybe more. Let's not forget that Jonathan Glazer, who directed the most acclaimed Holocaust film in years, The Zone of Interest, explicitly said in March 2024 that he refuses to have his "Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation.” In response to the controversy that followed, he was defended by over 150 Jewish creatives (while over 450 Jewish creatives condemned him.)6
My sense with this is that I am not convinced that such a ‘controversy’, which in my opinion was largely manufactured anyway, would have the same potency today.
To his credit, Glazer made that statement in the ‘early’ months of the genocide, long before the footage of emaciated corpses of babies, toddler and children have become rootine.
Perhaps there is something particularly haunting about these images. I suppose that they do bring up a certain reaction in those of us who have a functioning conscience, a sort of nothing can ever justify this reaction needed to overcome the pro-Israel filters that many Westerners have grown up with.
There will always be those who will defend/downplay the genocide for decades to come, just as deniers of other genocides continue to persuade themselves that they're right. I'm not as preocupied with that group of people as much as I am with those who can sense in themselves that there's something wrong with what they’re supporting.
The more we make it easier, culturally, to be pro-Palestine, to be anti-genocide, the more difficult it is for the génocidaires to operate in this world without thinking twice and more about where they could be met with individuals or groups who will make sure that they cannot get away with starving children.
Only then would Never Again, which has been rendered hollow by the Israelis, Germans, Americans and all those who insist on protecting the génocidaires, actually mean something.
let us remember that, for the third year in a row, EU imports of Russian fossil fuels remain greater than the financial aid they send to Ukraine
It doesn't even matter as much to the Israeli state that their representatives are booed at Eurovision by a largely unsympathetic audience. The participation is seen as a victory in itself. But to stay with this example for a moment: there is a decent chance that Eurovision losing some 25% of their viewership in 2024 is Israel-related. Israel's participation in the 2025 one was even more controversial, with many including Spain's prime minister challenging the European Broadcasting Union's lack of transparency behind the votes that went to Israel. If the EBU did indeed go the extra length to make Israel seem more popular than it actually is, this is a sign that the 2026 itiration of Eurovision could be even more of a headache for its organisers. At some point they will have to ask themselves whether the material cost sustained by insisting on having Israel participate is worth it. And we can make sure it is very costly indeed.
Even outlets such as the BBC have been finding it more and more difficult to ignore this barbaric reality. I recently wrote a critique of a radio interview on the BBC with a pro-genocide ex-IDF brigardier general, which you can read on Shado Mag if you want, but even I also had to recognise that there is a concrete shift in how Gaza was being discussed (a very low bar, let us be clear).
In other words, Israel views non-Israeli Jews as demographic foot soldiers to fight against the ‘demographic threat’, which is how Israel views the land's indigenous inhabitants, the Palestinians.
As Amos Goldberg put it, the crisis will only get worse as long as scholars do not understand how the legalistic narrowing of ‘intent’ is infiltrating History.
If you're interested, I did an episode of The Fire These Times with Daniel Voskoboynik on The Zone of Interest, Gaza and the Holocaust. Daniel is one of the hosts of the Jewish podcast Hidah, which I co-produce.