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<h1 class="gmail-single_title">Why Gaza\u2019s genocide ranks among the
gravest horrors of human history</h1>
<div class="gmail-article-author">
<h3>By <a href="https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250382"
moz-do-not-send="true"> Hossam Shaker </a></h3>
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<p class="gmail-single_date">Sunday 10-August-2025 -<font size="1"> <a
href="https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/why-gazas-genocide-ranks-among-the-gravest-horrors-of-human-history/"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/why-gazas-genocide-ranks-among-the-gravest-horrors-of-human-history/</a></font></p>
<div class="gmail-post_content">
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>They also include the fact that many of today\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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: \u201cArbeit macht frei\u201d
(\u201cWork sets you free\u201d).</p>
<p>A few decades prior, Germany committed acts of genocide in
Africa \u2013 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.</p>
<p>In stark contrast to the historical veil over such
atrocities, Israel\u2019s current slaughter in the Gaza Strip is
being transmitted live from the field through screens and
networks, despite Israel\u2019s ban on global media entering the
territory.</p>
<p><strong>Savage violations<br>
</strong>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.</p>
<p>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\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Today, any atrocity systematically committed by a modern
regime, such as the Israeli army\u2019s program of occupation and
extermination against the Palestinian people, must be
classified among the gravest horrors in human history \u2013 for
these crimes are committed despite the existence of multiple
deterrents.</p>
<p>One must then ask: how would Israel\u2019s actions look unshackled
from modern constraints, enjoying the same unchecked impunity
granted to empires, states, regimes and armies of times gone
by?</p>
<p>It is essential to highlight this reality in order to fully
grasp the immense dangers posed by Israel\u2019s program of
genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Such ghastly atrocities
\u2013 mass killing, total destruction, starvation as a method of
warfare, impoverishment, humiliation, and biological and
environmental warfare \u2013 are not confined to the past,
appearing solely in black-and-white footage, as some might
assume.</p>
<p>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\u2019s 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.</p>
<p>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 \u2013
cataclysmic events that reduced the modern world to ashes and
killed tens of millions of people across cities reduced to
rubble and smoke.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Race against time<br>
</strong>To fully grasp the severity of Israel\u2019s crimes \u2013
committed with western-supplied weaponry and technologies \u2013 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The direct civilian death toll has already soared to more
than 61,000 people, around half of whom are children and women
\u2013 and it continues to rise unrelentingly, with vast swathes of
residential neighborhoods wiped off the map. Factoring in
indirect casualties \u2013 deaths from lack of medicine and
healthcare, or because of spoiled food and a toxic environment
\u2013 would raise these figures to even more horrifying levels.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 \u2013 including an unprecedented and growing chorus of
dissent among western leaders \u2013 it seeks to circumvent all of
this by reinforcing the notion of \u201cIsraeli exceptionalism\u201d, a
status that has long granted it license to override the
international system and its conventions.</p>
<p>It does so by invoking a fabricated dual identity of the
\u201cexceptional victim\u201d, 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.</p>
<p>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 \u2013 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.</p>
<p><em>-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.</em></p>
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