What do you call what’s happening in Gaza?

This text was initiated by Iris, out of that awful feeling shared by the few who actually follow what Israel is doing in Gaza. She then shared it with me, and we started writing it together. Afterwards, we tried to publish it in various places, but all we got back were apologies tinged with fear and discomfort – but always refusals. I think that after what happened this week – with the entry into Gaza City accompanied by bombings and tanks, the demolition of residential towers on their residents, Bengvir’s disgusting remark about building a luxury neighborhood for police personel on Gaza’s beach, and Smotrich’s sick joke about expensive real estate and the costs of war needing to yield some profits – this text is even more relevant than before.

Ayala Shalev, Editor, That’s About Us

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What do you call what’s happening in Gaza?

Iris Gur and Ayala Shalev

First, the facts:

Almost two years have passed since the October 7 attack on the Gaza periphery, in which about 1,200 people were killed. Since Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza began, the death toll now approaches nearly 65,000, almost 20,000 of them children and more than 10,000 women. About 160,000 have been injured. These are official numbers. They don’t account for those still trapped under rubble that cannot be cleared, those alive but doomed to die there; or the wounded who cannot receive treatment and will succumb; or those that will starve to death, due to lack of food; or thirst, due to lack of clean drinking water; or sickness caused by the poor sanitary conditions and lack of infrastructure. It’s all our doing, and we should be ashamed.

The brutal assault on Gaza City earlier this week, where Israel directly attacked civilian residential buildings without even trying to justify or hide it like before, marks a new stage of annihilation.

So what do we call this?

It started with “war,” then came “war crimes,” and finally we reached “genocide.” All these words represent destruction, ruin, annihilation, and disaster happening right before our eyes. Holocaust.

But the word Holocaust is a red flag for the vast majority of Israelis and Jews.

From a clear-eyed, honest, agenda-free view, Holocaust (Shoaa, in Hebrew) is simply a Hebrew word from our Bible – Isaiah mentions it, Job too, Psalms as well – meaning destruction, ruin, disaster, devastation. Only after World War II, and the horrors inflicted on the Jews, did it take on the meaning of “the terrible catastrophe the Nazis brought upon the Jewish people.” Since then, Israel’s policy refuses any other use of the term. The Holocaust did not and will not happen to any other group besides the Jewish people, even when they faced destruction or genocide, like the Armenian people or others throughout history. Israel fights fiercely against any attempt to call such disasters a “Holocaust.” It’s part of the Jewish narrative, part of Israeli public diplomacy, so don’t touch our Holocaust.

Yet, even if the horrors change faces, hands, and methods of destruction, it’s still humans inflicting terrible suffering on other humans. Right now, in Gaza, destruction, ruin, disaster, starvation, and annihilation are being carried out either directly or indirectly by Israel. Bombings 24/7 for two years have left almost no buildings standing, and life in Gaza has fully broken down. People, women, men, children and elders, are uprooted and repeatedly moved under threat of bombings, like pawns on a game board. They carry with them only a bag or a cherished item, knowing they have nowhere to return to; all their possessions, livelihoods, and means of reasonable living are gone. Israel is creating total destruction, killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of innocent people; it openly blocks food entry as declared policy and boasts about using starvation as a weapon; it bombs community centers like schools and hospitals that often serve as shelters for the weary displaced; it prevents bringing in medicine and equipment that could help and save the wounded, as well as tools to clear rubble and rescue people trapped beneath. The bombings also target infrastructure to make sewage flow in the streets, creating unsanitary conditions, and electricity is nonexistent. In short, Holocaust.

"But this isn’t a Holocaust because we’re not killing them just to kill," the Israeli-Jewish voices automatically shout. "We’re killing them so they don’t kill us! And besides, Hamas is to blame! We’ve already seen they’re Nazis!"

And just like that – the Holocaust is in the room.

That’s how the collective Jewish mindset works. The Holocaust is only what the Nazis and their helpers did, and only to Jews. That’s what we’ve been taught since we could stand on our own two feet, and even before. Indeed, the images from that terrible day on Simchat Torah, October 7^th, resemble the ones we all carry inside from the Jewish Holocaust in Europe. The connection is instinctive. The internal logic makes that calculation immediately and automatically: piles of corpses = Holocaust. Who did it? Hamas. So Hamas = Nazis. End of story.

It goes on – “They did the Holocaust to us (since they’re Nazis, and that’s what Nazis do). We know that ‘never again’, we’ll never let them do it to us again, no way! So we must immediately rise up and destroy them without mercy.”

This is the collective thought process – a chronicle of a known response – and this is the reality we see: on one hand, a horrific, ongoing war of annihilation; on the other, the overwhelming majority in Israel fully justify it. And still, it goes on.

So what is the final solution?

It’s important to talk about the “final solution”, the one the current horror government is proposing.

We’ve been bombing, destroying, eliminating, hurting, burning, shooting for almost two years. We uprooted the entire population, two million people, and now we aim to concentrate them in tent camps. Concentration camps. Okay, so what’s the plan? What’s the vision for the day after?

The truth is: there isn’t one. The government doesn’t tell us what it plans for the future. On the ground, we clearly see occupation and preparation for an ongoing occupation, and some talk about settlement, following the West Bank model. Occupation that harms people daily, while erasing culture, history, identity, and ways of life. The Israeli motivation is to erase, to not see Palestinians, period. That’s the plan. There’s no real alternative to it.

Gas chambers, presumably, will not be here in this ongoing extermination, and probably never will. We’re sensitive to gas chambers. If there were such, we couldn’t say “this isn’t a Holocaust.” But practically, what’s the difference between sending people to showers to kill them with gas and starving people, then sending them to “aid centers” only to shoot them to death?

But are gas chambers really the only criterion for a Holocaust?

Even in the Jewish Holocaust, that terrible genocide the Nazis carried out, about 1.5 million Jews (and hundreds of thousands of non-Jews) were murdered before the “final solution” and the use of gas chambers in 1942. And is that not a Holocaust? Is it not a disaster, destruction, devastation? Of course it is.

All the processes before 1942 – exclusion laws, boycotts, street violence, ghettoization, rounding up people into concentration camps, stripping citizenship, defining Jews as a separate race from Germans, banning marriage with Germans, confiscating property, exclusion from education and economy, pogroms, destruction of property, bodily harm without state response, arrests, isolation, and marginalization – aren’t these disasters, destruction, devastation too? A Life that doesn’t allow normalcy, that is constantly under oppression and threat, with no future, no hope, no dream? It absolutely is.

In these terms, the Palestinian Holocaust is happening now.

Because these days, we are exactly there – towards the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

We exclude, boycott, and allow personal violence against Palestinians without state response. We passed the Nation-State Law and repeatedly threaten to revoke citizenship (a fundamental right, not a favor). We separate the two societies – Arab and Jewish – elevating the Jewish and suppressing the Arab. Life in the West Bank and Gaza is far from normal; it’s lived under constant threat, without a future, hope, or dreams.

The stages are the same:

‣ Dehumanization of the Palestinian people.

‣ Denial of Palestinian existence while destroying their history and culture.

‣ Concentration camps – refugee camps, villages, and cities in the West Bank are closed off by fences and checkpoints whenever Israel desires, with no entry or exit possible. In Gaza, public announcements and food distribution are used to uproot and concentrate populations in camps and ghettos.

‣ Soldiers quick to shoot – killing easily and not prosecuted; often even encouraged.

‣ A dual legal system for Palestinians and Jews – even when living in the same area.

‣ Arrests without cause – called “administrative detention,” for even the smallest things, like social media posts.

‣ Denial of work permits – i.e., blocking livelihoods.

‣ Denial of building permits – i.e., damaging community continuity and fabric of life.

‣ Settler violence with state encouragement – harassment, humiliation, theft, destruction, arson. Perpetrators are never stopped; murders happen openly on camera, and killers face house arrest and then quick release. The state grants full impunity for violent crimes against Palestinians.

These are the facts most Israelis have preferred to ignore over the years and especially during the last two years.

These are the things that, when they happen – and they certainly are happening – constitute a Holocaust. Behind this reality we are creating, there brews an extreme right-wing, even messianic politics. After all, the entire regime revolves around the political power struggle between Jewish supremacy and the criminal indictment of the prime minister – but there’s not enough room here to detail that internal logic, and sorry for using the word “logic” for these crimes.

We say it’s time to call this miserable, violent, terrifying behavior by its real name: Holocaust.

The policy of Israel’s government under Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Strouck, and their allies is a policy of annihilation. They don’t want to see Palestinians, neither in the West Bank nor in Gaza. They want only their land, and everything is permitted to reach that goal. They are the power, the government, the policy makers, responsible for the army, the police, the occupation in the West Bank; they run the poison machine, they control the budgets, and in thousands of ways they use this power for annihilation.

Why is it important to call it by its true name?

Because we recognize a Holocaust. We know what it looks like; deep inside, we understand how it feels.

So maybe, just maybe, if we, Jewish Israel – not fascist Israel – really understand and internalize the Holocaust we are inflicting, maybe then we can remember the commandment that has accompanied us since our first day in the State of Israel: Never Again. But instead of thinking “never again for us,” we’ll think “never again for anyone.”

We can end the Palestinian Holocaust, stop Israel’s total collapse of humanistic values, and work toward calming the flames, agreements that bring peace and growth, and enable the establishment of a Palestinian state that brings a respectful future for everyone living here, from the Jordan to the sea.

The Jewish Holocaust was the catalyst for the establishment of Israel. If something good can come from these ongoing horrors, it may be that the Palestinian Holocaust will be recorded in history as the catalyst for recognizing the State of Palestine alongside Israel.

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Iris Gur is a Former school principal, and a human rights activist – active in the northern Jordan Valley in protective presence and accompaniment of shepherds.