The greatest taboo of our time is finally falling—the facade of Israel’s untouchability has been shattered by the brave statements of Israeli organizations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (PHRI), who are unafraid to use the word genocide
According to international law, genocide exists only when intent is confirmed—but it seems the global public only accepts the term once Israelis themselves confirm it. That is exactly what just happened: two leading Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and PHRI, have issued a once-unthinkable judgment—Israel is “deliberately destroying Palestinian society” in Gaza, thereby committing genocide against the enclave’s population. This has demolished the last semantic barrier that for 21 months masked the devastation behind euphemisms like “war on terror.”
The numbers coming daily from Gaza confirm the scale of the crime—over 60,000 dead (and once all those still buried under rubble are counted, the real number will surely be even higher), nearly half of them women and children. Meanwhile, 90% of the population has been displaced. Hunger and lack of medicine claimed an additional 130 lives just this month, and the healthcare system is virtually nonexistent. The humanitarian catastrophe is no longer a consequence of war—it is the method of war.
A particularly horrifying precedent is that over a thousand Palestinians have been killed in recent months while trying to obtain a bag of flour or a can of beans. Israeli forces opened fire on starving crowds at checkpoints in Rafah, Zikim, and Netzarim, killing 115 people in a single day (!).
B’Tselem’s report Our Genocide precisely breaks down the mechanism: systematic bombing of “humanitarian zones,” creation of “kill zones” without clear rules, and open statements by ministers and generals about the need to “wipe Gaza off the face of the earth.” Together, these constitute “a coordinated action to destroy a social group.” When an Israeli organization makes such a claim, the weight and importance are even greater.
PHRI, for its part, has documented the deliberate collapse of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure: hospitals bombed, over 1,800 medical workers killed or detained, evacuation of the wounded forbidden—all of this, the doctors write, is not a side effect of war but “a precisely calibrated policy aimed at the biological destruction of the population.” They assert that three out of five criteria of Article II of the Genocide Convention are clearly fulfilled.
Amnesty International calls the publication of these two reports a “historic moment of accountability” and urges states to finally put an end to Israel’s impunity. This is also the collapse of a decades-old propaganda doctrine: until recently, it was almost unimaginable that Israeli institutions would expose their own regime of apartheid and colonial engineering.
At the same time, mainstream Western media still struggle to say the word genocide. Yet the silence has been paradoxically filled by a broad spectrum of voices outside the establishment: from left-liberal The Young Turks, to Joe Rogan, and even conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who now openly accuses Netanyahu of waging a war of annihilation and dishonoring “Jewish values.” When both the left and the right speak the same language about Israeli crimes, it reveals the moral freefall of the Israeli government’s official narrative.
The propaganda myth of “the most moral army in the world” is collapsing under the pressure of images showing ruins and children’s skeletons.
This is not just a momentary shock—it is the beginning of a long-term consequence from which Israel may never recover. More and more people are now reexamining 1948: if today it is possible to displace 2 million people under the pretext of “fighting Hamas,” what really happened during the Nakba (Arabic: catastrophe)? UN records make it clear that even then, more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled, over 530 villages were burned, and numerous massacres were committed.
Israeli dissidents rising against Netanyahu today deserve unconditional solidarity. Demanding even more from them might sound harsh, but they are breaking the internal silence that has kept the regime alive. The next step must come from the diaspora: influential American Jews, especially liberal intellectuals and entrepreneurs, must clearly break with the policy committing crimes in their name. This is in their own interest too—Netanyahu risks turning Israel into a global pariah. He has destroyed Gaza, but he may also destroy Israel.
For decades, the world viewed Israeli actions through the lens of the Holocaust—with the moral credit naturally afforded to survivors. But Netanyahu has squandered that historical dividend: trauma cannot justify the deliberate starvation of children. “Holocaustism,” as historian Omer Bartov calls it, has become a moral posture used to justify any violence; now, for the first time, that veil has been pierced from within.
People are now asking questions they never dared to before—and that, in the long term, is what will cost Israel the most. Who, after all, is Hamas? In Tel Aviv’s rhetoric, it is absolute evil, “ISIS on the Mediterranean.” But if we view Gaza as a modern-day Warsaw Ghetto—fenced in, blockaded, starving—then every armed rebellion begins to resemble a desperate attempt at survival. Are we proud of the Jewish rebels of 1943? Yes! So why demonize Palestinians breaking the siege? The issue is not about sympathy for Hamas’s ideology, nor the attacks on Israeli civilians, but rather understanding the root causes of violence: blockade, occupation, and 75 years of dispossession.
Ultimately, truth never disappears—it can be suppressed, but every system of violence inevitably comes to light. When Israelis themselves admit genocide, anyone who remains silent becomes complicit in the crime. Time is running out: preventing Gaza from becoming the graveyard of an entire people means preserving the last shred of moral legitimacy of the international order—and the future of Israel.
The average citizen has never been aware of how dangerous it is to mention Israel critically. The Israeli government developed a notorious modus operandi in which any critic is automatically labeled an “anti-Semite.” For a long time, only the bravest Jewish intellectuals “dared” to call out Israel—people like Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and others. The Israeli government despised them but clearly could not label them as anti-Semites.
Everyone else faced massive censorship—uneven but highly effective. This is the first time in a very long while that we’re seeing the emergence of an “influential margin” that refuses to bow to Israeli propaganda dictates. In America, we are witnessing an energetic movement spanning the entire political spectrum, recognizing how deeply their country is complicit in Israel’s genocide—even Trump may have lost millions of young supporters who now reject him in disgust because of his support for Israel.
The horrifying scenes from Gaza will undoubtedly also embolden genuine anti-Semites. Attacks on Jews in Europe have risen—yet another terrifying consequence of the anti-Jewish policies led by Netanyahu’s criminal government. Interestingly, the far right, with its vulgar nationalism, enthusiastically supports Israel’s campaign to destroy the Palestinian people. Extremes attract extremes—nothing surprising there. But on the other side stands the humanist majority, which unreservedly condemns genocide and every war crime. That side is larger—and more awake—than ever before.
The alliance of people against monsters is growing, thanks in large part to the courageous testimony of Israeli organizations like B’Tselem and PHRI. The groundwork is laid, the taboo is finally breaking, and the world is about to be shocked by everything it was never allowed to know—until now.
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