By Guardian - Raz Segal-Fri 28 Nov 2025 11.00 GMT

We live not in a post-Holocaust world of ‘Never Again’ but in the same world that led to the Holocaust, a world of ‘Again and Again’.

On 10 October, following two years of Israeli genocide that have turned Gaza into the new benchmark of total destruction, after Israel has killed and injured hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and inflicted on all the people in Gaza “severe bodily or mental harm,” to quote from the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Trump administration imposed a ceasefire, giving rise to the idea that the Gaza war has ended.

THE GAZA BOMBING/DESTRUCTION IS WORSE THAN BERLIN 1945

The ceasefire, however, seems to be designed mostly to move forward with the business deals of the mega rich in the Middle East, and the fire has never ceased: the Israeli government has continued its assault, killing and injuring hundreds of Palestinians since 10 October, destroying thousands of homes and buildings, and blocking the entry of sufficient aid.

The genocidal rhetoric, furthermore, has not ended. Take, for instance, Simcha Rothman, a member of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) for the Religious Zionist Party, who spoke on 28 October in an international summit in Hungary organized in support of Israel. “If we want to destroy the idea of genocide,” he said, “if we want to destroy [it] and we should destroy the idea of Muslim Brotherhood that takes over the entire west, the Middle East, but after that, the entire world, the entire western civilization, we have to define it as the enemy.”

“The enemy in Gaza,” he continued, “are not the terror tunnels, the enemy in Gaza are not the missiles, the enemy in Gaza are not even the terrible people who took the hostages; the enemy in Gaza is the idea of a genocide, the same idea that echoes in mosques all around Europe, the same idea that echoes in mosques in the US, in campuses, in encampments, the same idea, this is the enemy.”

This portrayal of Gaza as “the idea of a genocide,” a genocide against Jews, and against Jews as foundational in “western civilization,” figures within a long history of perpetrators of very real genocides who perceived themselves as acting in defense of “barbarians” threatening “western civilization.” The war in Gaza, then, has not ended, according to Rothman, because it was never a war in Gaza, but a war on Gaza.

“A war that is not only between Israel and Hamas,” as Israeli President Isaac Herzog admitted openly already in December 2023. “It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilization.” Rothman is a far-right religious politician, Herzog once stood at the head of the left-wing Labor Party, but they share the same vision: Israel’s attack on Gaza is “not only between Israel and Hamas,” but a contemporary crusade. It is, to quote one of the hundreds of videos by Israeli soldiers and officers – the Israeli crusaders – a “real war of the people of Israel,” in which “moral is to understand that every Arab is a suspect.

Maybe he is good, maybe he is a bomb, but he is suspect. Moral is to execute all the terrorists after interrogating them. Moral is to conquer and settle all of the Land of Israel, and every place we will leave a wasps’ nest, they will retaliate against us, sooner or later.” This is the morality of “the most moral army in the world”: all Arabs are suspects, terrorists, killable.

The war in Gaza has not ended, because it was never a war in Gaza but a “Gaza Nakba,” as Israeli cabinet member and minister Avi Dichter said in November 2023 and as Israel’s former military intelligence chief Aharon Haliva confirmed in summer 2025 when he said, coldly, that “the fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations. … It doesn’t matter now if they are children. … They need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price.”

This is not a war, the Israeli general is telling us, but a Nakba. And this Nakba has not ended – not in Gaza, much of which Israel has “turned to rubble” and “flattened,” which Israeli political and military leaders had promised in October 2023, and not elsewhere in Palestine, as demonstrated by the nearly complete forced displacement of Palestinian shepherd communities in the Jordan Valley, where Israeli state authorities and settlers have created a wild west that targets Palestinians, their property, lands, and animals in an unending celebration of extreme violence.

The Gaza Nakba has not ended, because it did not begin in October 2023, but in the 1948 Nakba, when Israel emerged on the ruins of Palestine and Palestinians. This reality immediately clashed with the idea of Israel as a unique state, the state of survivors of the unique evil of the Nazis, which made it seem unimaginable that Israel could perpetrate any crime in international law, let alone genocide, the new crime that was formulated also in 1948.

No one used the word “Holocaust” at the time to refer to the Nazi genocide against Jews, but the idea that it is a unique genocide emerged with the genocide concept in the year of the Nakba, which meant that the new crime of genocide, which bestowed impunity on the new Israeli state, could make sense only in tandem with Nakba denial.

But now that Israelis from top to bottom cannot but desire Nakba – in their government and parliament, on their news shows, in social media and grocery shops, in their living rooms – Nakba denial has shifted to Nakba justification: a war, a war against “human animals,” a war against the biblical evil of Amalek, a war against terrorists, and a war, to return to Rothman, against “the idea of genocide” against Jews, that is, a war against Nazis.

It was only natural, then, for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to respond to the charge of genocide that South Africa brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December 2023 by depicting Palestinians as Nazis: “In the murder tunnels of Gaza, our forces have found copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In a home in Gaza, they found a child’s tablet with a picture of Hitler as the screensaver.” More than a year and a half later, on 24 July 2025, after Israel had destroyed over 80% of homes in Gaza and killed more than 20,000 children, Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu wanted more: “all Gaza will be Jewish … the government is pushing to wipe out Gaza.

Thank god, we are wiping out this evil. We are wiping out the population that has been educated on Mein Kampf.” Direct and unashamed: “the government is pushing to wipe out Gaza” – the government, we are told by one of its ministers; it is government policy to “wipe out Gaza” and its “population.” Israel’s portrayal of Palestinians as Nazis – this grotesque weaponization of the Holocaust – cannot but reveal the truth about its function as justification for Israeli genocide.

The war in Gaza has thus not ended, because it is a war only insofar as it is a genocidal war, a war that aimed not to defeat Hamas, as Herzog admitted in December 2023, but to destroy a people, so that Gaza “will be Jewish” – a government policy of settler colonial genocide that officers like Captain Hemo understood precisely as intended.

Many others saw and heard genocidal intent: when the ICJ reiterated in March 2024 its decision from the previous January that Israel was plausibly perpetrating genocide in Gaza, Judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf noted in a separate declaration that “all the indicators of genocidal activities are flashing red in Gaza.” Indeed, “plausible” here means a clear risk of genocide, which activates the legal obligations of states that signed and ratified the UN Genocide Convention to prevent and punish genocide (Article I) and not to be complicit in it (Article III).

The unimaginable has thus happened: the crime of genocide became a tool in the struggle against Israel’s ongoing Nakba rather than a mechanism of its denial. Yet, by March 2024, genocide prevention – the promise of a post-Holocaust world of “Never Again” – had already failed miserably in Gaza. Israel had killed by mid-March, according to official figures, more than 32,000 Palestinians, including at least 13,000 children, leaving over 70,000 injured.

Israel had also damaged more than 60% of all housing units, including hospitals and dozens of other healthcare facilities, while a million Palestinians were facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity and hundreds of thousands were suffering from acute repository infections and acute diarrhea.

And all along, Israel’s allies, primarily in the west, continued to provide Israel with weapons, ammunition, essential parts, and diplomatic cover that made the genocide possible, making hash of even a façade of international law with their complicity with genocide, with every bullet sold to Israel, with every lie that criticism of Israeli genocide is antisemitism, with every US veto of Gaza ceasefire resolutions in the UN Security Council.

With genocide prevention in shambles and with crude complicity in genocide on display, can we expect accountability? Netanyahu and his former war minister Yoav Gallant face arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not genocide, and in any case, it seems that it would take a miracle for them to stand before judges in The Hague one day.

But perhaps we should look elsewhere for accountability. After all, major Nazi criminals stood trial in Nuremberg after World War II, which changed nothing in the ideological and political structures that had brought them to power in the first place – that is, the exclusionary nation-state system that emerged after World War I and overlapped with the white supremacy that stood at the heart of European empire building, colonialism, and settler colonialism.

The “Third Reich” was indeed a vision of a white supremacist empire, based on extreme nationalism, “purified” of its racial others and enemies, with “Aryan” settlers tilling the land in its vast occupied regions in eastern Europe, always ready to replace the pitchfork for the gun to fight for their superior civilization.

But the victors of World War II had no intention of coming to terms with white supremacy, because the US, the UK, and France were white supremacist empires themselves. The victors of World War II similarly sought no accountability for nationalism, because they were, all of them, including the Soviets, nationalists and true believers in national “homogenization” as the essential precondition for security and peace.

Nowhere was the meaning of such peace, this post-World War II reproduction of nationalism and white supremacy, clearer than in the Israeli state, a self-proclaimed exclusionary nation-state and a self-proclaimed exclusionary settler state – what Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the father of revisionist Zionism, described in his well-known essay from 1923 as a settler colonial project that can only work with an “Iron Wall.”

The genocidal war in Gaza, the ongoing Nakba, cannot therefore end within the international political and legal system that had envisioned it from the outset, even if Netanyahu and Gallant find themselves somehow in The Hague. As the current crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina makes clear, that former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević ended up in unexpected circumstances in The Hague in 2001 changed nothing in the conditions and dynamics that led to the mass violence in the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, including the Srebrenica genocide.

We live not in a post-Holocaust world of “Never Again,” but in the same world that led to the Holocaust, a world of “Again and Again,” a world that has therefore cast beyond its borders, quite literally, nearly 120 million forcibly displaced people, including more than 9 million Palestinians, among them survivors of the 1948 Nakba and their descendants. We also live in a world heating at a pace beyond what anyone could have imagined just a decade or two ago, which means that we will likely face hundreds of millions of people on the move by mid-century.

In this context, for Israel and its supporters, the Gaza genocide is a model. It is not only that Israeli soldiers and officers who have documented their own crimes in Gaza and uploaded them to social media are unashamed; they help spread the message of lawlessness: this is what awaits people who will dare to resist whatever measures imposed on them by extremely violent states in a world shaped by brute force, now without even the pretense of Holocaust memory and international law.

But most people around the world do not want this future, this present. Most people see through the doublespeak of their leaders who claim to meet in Sharm El-Sheikh to make peace, as they continue the flow of the means of destruction to Israel and, while they’re at it, promise a phone call from Eric because, you know, peacemaking is a business. Most people know that their governments, left and right, do not represent them, do not care for them, nor for the future of their children.

Most people know that day is not night, and they refuse to say otherwise. And many, many people around the world have taken to the streets, risking arrest, violence, losing their jobs, facing stigmatization as antisemites, drifting apart from family members and close friends – yet they have showed up, and they continue to show up, because the struggle continues, for Gaza, for Palestine, for their lives, for our world. Be there.

Raz Segal

Raz Segal is an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide

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WHY MAJORITY IS TURNING A BLIND EYE TO GENOCIDE

How is it possible we can all sit dumbed-down accepting all the cruelty which has been going on the past years? A total of 127 thousand Palestines removed with Genocide by the Jews, controlled by Netanyahu and cohorts, EVERY day more, adding to the un-acceptable. War and crime goes on also in Ukraine, no-one can agree how to stop it. We must pour some ice-water over our heads and re-install our Common Sense, our Honour to overcome the Paranormalism we have been tricked into.