[News] Why Gaza’s genocide ranks among the gravest horrors of human history

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Why Gaza’s genocide ranks among the gravest horrors of human history


      By Hossam Shaker <https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250382>

Sunday 10-August-2025 
-https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/why-gazas-genocide-ranks-among-the-gravest-horrors-of-human-history/

A prevalent fallacy is to view modern brutal policies as less severe 
than previous atrocities that have scarred human history, including the 
horrors of the Second World War.

The core of this fallacy lies in neutralizing the element of time, and 
overlooking the evolution of deterrents and constraints designed to 
prevent the recurrence of past monstrosities.

These constraints are not limited to the development of global 
values-based and legal frameworks, nor to the growth of a general 
ethical conscience across humanity, regardless of the degree to which 
such standards are upheld.

They also include the fact that many of today’s crimes are exposed in 
real time through pervasive media coverage, making concealment far more 
difficult than in the past, when empires, states and armies could sweep 
grave offences under the rug.

Some early signals of the Nazi extermination program were publicly 
apparent via racist and inflammatory rhetoric, coercive legislative and 
procedural measures, and horrifying policies of persecution and 
deportation to concentration camps.

Yet many of these horrors remained hidden behind fortified walls until 
the Nazi regime collapsed, revealing the terrifying atrocities committed 
under the deceitful slogan mounted above the gates of Auschwitz: “Arbeit 
macht frei” (“Work sets you free”).

A few decades prior, Germany committed acts of genocide in Africa – 
horrors that remain largely unknown even today, despite belated official 
recognition by the German state. During the genocide against the Herero 
and Nama peoples in the early 20th century in what is now Namibia, 
German colonizers killed tens of thousands.

In stark contrast to the historical veil over such atrocities, Israel’s 
current slaughter in the Gaza Strip is being transmitted live from the 
field through screens and networks, despite Israel’s ban on global media 
entering the territory.

*Savage violations
*In this narrow stretch of land, human lives and dignity are being 
savagely violated in an era that has seen the elevation of international 
law and human rights principles, alongside the development of the United 
Nations and other global mechanisms for accountability, most notably the 
International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Were the atrocities of the past to be reactivated in the present day, 
they might find no more advanced or horrifying mode of execution than 
Israel’s genocidal program in the Gaza Strip, which continues under the 
gaze of the entire world. Indeed, they could derive an operational 
blueprint from the systematic policies and practices of Israeli war 
leaders, and the propaganda narratives they use to justify each fresh 
atrocity.

Likewise, if the horrors unfolding today in Gaza had occurred during 
previous eras, they would likely have reached even more monstrous 
scales, liberated from modern constraints and spared the need for the 
elaborate justifications required in the 21st century.

Today, any atrocity systematically committed by a modern regime, such as 
the Israeli army’s program of occupation and extermination against the 
Palestinian people, must be classified among the gravest horrors in 
human history – for these crimes are committed despite the existence of 
multiple deterrents.

One must then ask: how would Israel’s actions look unshackled from 
modern constraints, enjoying the same unchecked impunity granted to 
empires, states, regimes and armies of times gone by?

It is essential to highlight this reality in order to fully grasp the 
immense dangers posed by Israel’s program of genocide and ethnic 
cleansing in Gaza. Such ghastly atrocities – mass killing, total 
destruction, starvation as a method of warfare, impoverishment, 
humiliation, and biological and environmental warfare – are not confined 
to the past, appearing solely in black-and-white footage, as some might 
assume.

These atrocities are coming today in full color, broadcast live from the 
field of carnage, moment by moment. Their harrowing details unfold 
relentlessly before the world’s eyes, committed by a modern state 
through its administrative institutions and a contemporary army, as 
politicians adorned in silk ties ascend to podiums, justifying these 
crimes and blaming the victims.

Another danger of neutralizing the element of time lies in forgetting 
that the atrocities of the first half of the 20th century were primarily 
carried out amid two world wars – cataclysmic events that reduced the 
modern world to ashes and killed tens of millions of people across 
cities reduced to rubble and smoke.

The genocide in Gaza, by contrast, is unfolding in a context where 
modern warfare has been shaped to justify the use of force and mass 
destruction, and to minimize civilian bloodshed.

*Race against time
*To fully grasp the severity of Israel’s crimes – committed with 
western-supplied weaponry and technologies – it is crucial to consider 
the scale of killing, destruction, displacement and starvation relative 
to the exceptionally small geographic area of Gaza, which is home to 
around two million Palestinians.

During nearly two years of genocide, the Israeli army has killed or 
wounded hundreds of thousands of people, some of whom have become 
permanently disabled. The United Nations and its humanitarian agencies 
have warned that the Israeli military is killing the equivalent of an 
entire classroom of children in Gaza every single day, without any 
international power stepping in to stop it.

The direct civilian death toll has already soared to more than 61,000 
people, around half of whom are children and women – and it continues to 
rise unrelentingly, with vast swathes of residential neighborhoods wiped 
off the map. Factoring in indirect casualties – deaths from lack of 
medicine and healthcare, or because of spoiled food and a toxic 
environment – would raise these figures to even more horrifying levels.

The Israeli leadership is fully aware that it has been allowed to 
perpetrate these atrocities despite the ethical and legal constraints of 
the modern era, under the watch of international institutions and 
courts. It has thus resumed the ethnic cleansing campaign that it 
started three-quarters of a century ago with the Nakba in 1948.

Israel is now racing against time to enforce a definitive outcome in 
Gaza and the occupied West Bank through various means. Aware of its 
dilemma amid the constraints of the current era – including an 
unprecedented and growing chorus of dissent among western leaders – it 
seeks to circumvent all of this by reinforcing the notion of “Israeli 
exceptionalism”, a status that has long granted it license to override 
the international system and its conventions.

It does so by invoking a fabricated dual identity of the “exceptional 
victim”, allegedly entitled to commit crimes that others may not; and by 
selectively interpreting sacred texts, misrepresenting them as a 
genocidal manual immune to modern treaties and obligations.

In a further attempt to bypass the element of time, the Israeli 
leadership constantly reminds Americans and Europeans of the war crimes 
committed by their own states in decades past – a cheap trick aimed at 
silencing criticism, while simultaneously suggesting that the evolved 
colonial experiment in Palestine remains forever linked to the western 
context that first implanted it in this land.

/-Hossam Shaker is a journalist and an author who has extensively 
covered the topic of migration in Europe. His article appeared in the 
Middle East Eye./

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