Several hundred young Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto on April 19, 1943, took up whatever weapons they could find and stood up to their Nazi persecutors. Most of the Jews in the ghetto had already been deported to extermination camps. The fighters, as one of their leaders, Marek Edelman, later wrote, tried to preserve at least a little dignity: "In the end, it all came down to not letting them slaughter us when our turn came. It was just a matter of deciding how to die."
After several weeks of desperate resistance, the insurgents were defeated. Most of them were killed. Some of those who survived until the last day of the uprising committed suicide in the command bunker as the Nazis pumped gas into it, only a few managed to escape through the sewer pipes. German soldiers then burned the ghetto, block by block, using flamethrowers to drive out the remaining survivors.
Polish poet Czesław Milosz later recalled hearing screams from the ghetto "during a beautiful, peaceful night, a village night on the outskirts of Warsaw":
"Those screams made us shiver. They were the screams of thousands of people being killed. They traveled through the silence of the city, among the red glare of the fire, under the indifferent stars, into the benign silence of the gardens where the plants laboriously released oxygen, into the air soaked with fragrances, where one felt that it was good to be alive. In that stillness of the night, whose beauty and human crime were simultaneously etched in the heart, there was something particularly cruel. We did not dare to look each other in the eyes."
In the poem "Campo dei Fiori", which he wrote in occupied Warsaw, Miloš conjures up a carousel by the walls of the ghetto, on which people rise towards the sky through the smoke of burnt bodies, while a cheerful melody drowns out the cries of agony and despair.
While living in Berkeley, California, at a time when the U.S. military was bombing and killing hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, a crime he compared to the acts of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, Miloš experienced again the shameful powerlessness of complicity in the face of extreme cruelty.
"If we are capable of compassion and at the same time powerless," he wrote, "then we live in a state of desperate resentment."
Israel's destruction of Gaza, enabled by Western democracies, inflicted months of psychological agony on millions of people, unwilling witnesses to an act of political evil, who occasionally allowed themselves to think how good it was to be alive, and then heard the screams of a mother watching her daughter burn in yet another school bombed by Israel.
The Shoah (Holocaust) has left its mark on generations of Jews; Israeli Jews saw the creation of their nation-state as a matter of life and death in 1948, and again in 1967 and 1973, facing the rhetoric of extermination from their Arab enemies. For many Jews, who grew up knowing that the Jewish population of Europe was almost completely wiped out simply because they were Jewish, the world cannot seem anything but fragile. Among them, the massacres and kidnappings in Israel on October 7, 2023, by Hamas and other Palestinian groups, have rekindled fears of another Holocaust.
However, it was clear from the outset that the most fanatical Israeli leadership in history would not hesitate to exploit the widespread sense of hurt, loss, and horror. Israeli leaders claimed the right to self-defense against Hamas, but, as Omer Bartov, a prominent Holocaust historian, noted in August 2024, they sought from the outset to “render the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable and incapacitate its population to the point where they would either die or seek every possible option to escape the territory.”
Thus, for months after October 7, billions of people witnessed the extraordinary attack on Gaza, whose victims, as Bline Ní Grálaig, an Irish lawyer representing South Africa before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, put it, "broadcast their own destruction in real time in a desperate, so far futile, hope that the world would do something."
The world, or rather the West, did nothing. Behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, Marek Edelman was "terribly afraid" that "nobody in the world would notice anything" and that "nothing, no message about us would ever get out."
This was not the case in Gaza, where victims predicted their own deaths on digital platforms hours before they were killed, while their killers casually broadcast their actions on TikTok. Yet the live broadcast of the liquidation of Gaza was daily covered up by the tools of Western military and cultural hegemony: from the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom, who attacked the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, to the editors of the New York Times, who in an internal memo instructed their staff to avoid the terms “refugee camps,” “occupied territory,” and “ethnic cleansing.”
Every day was poisoned by the knowledge that, as we went about our lives, hundreds of ordinary people were being killed or forced to witness the killing of their children. The cries of the people of Gaza, often well-known writers and journalists, warning that they and their loved ones would soon be killed, followed by news of their deaths, further intensified the humiliation of physical and political powerlessness.
The live broadcast of the liquidation of Gaza was daily covered up by the tools of Western military and cultural hegemony: from the leaders of the US and the UK, who attacked the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, to the editors of the New York Times, who in an internal memo instructed their staff to avoid the terms "refugee camps," "occupied territory," and "ethnic cleansing."
Those who, out of guilt over their own powerlessness, looked for some sign of mercy, some hint of an end to the bloodshed, on the face of US President Joe Biden, found an eerie coldness, interrupted only by a nervous grin when he blurted out the Israeli lie that Palestinians had beheaded Israeli babies.
The just hopes raised by this or that United Nations resolution, the panicked appeals of humanitarian organizations, the warnings of judges in The Hague, and the consequent dismissal of Biden as a presidential candidate were brutally dashed.
By the end of 2024, many people, though physically distant from the killing fields of Gaza, felt, at a distance, that they were being drawn into an epic landscape of misery and failure, pain and exhaustion. This might be considered an excessive emotional toll for ordinary observers. But then came the shock and outrage provoked by a single image from Gaza, of a father holding the decapitated body of his child, the same feeling that Picasso evoked when he presented Guernica, with horses and people screaming as they were shot from the air.
The war will eventually become a thing of the past, and time may iron out its staggering array of horrors. But the signs of the catastrophe will remain in Gaza for decades: in the mutilated bodies, in the orphans, in the ruins of cities, in the displaced peoples, in the omnipresent consciousness of mass grief. Those who watched helplessly from afar as tens of thousands of people were killed and wounded on a narrow strip of coastline, while witnessing the applause or indifference of the powerful, will carry an inner wound and trauma that will not fade for years.
The dispute over how to interpret Israeli violence, as legitimate self-defense, as a just war in difficult urban conditions, or as ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, will never be resolved.
However, it is not difficult to recognize in the sum of Israel’s moral and legal violations the signs of the ultimate crime: the open and routine determination of Israeli leaders to wipe out Gaza; the public approval of these actions by a society that laments the IDF’s “insufficient revenge” in Gaza; the identification of the victims with irreparable evil; the fact that most of the victims were completely innocent people, among them many women and children; the scale of the destruction, proportionally greater than that of the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II; the speed of the killings, which filled mass graves throughout Gaza; the manner of execution, at once impersonal (with reliance on artificial intelligence algorithms) and personal (reports of snipers shooting Palestinian children twice in the head); the denial of access to food and medicine; the hot metal rods inserted into the rectums of naked prisoners; the destruction of schools, universities, museums, churches, mosques, and even cemeteries; the infantilism of evil, embodied in Israeli soldiers dancing in the underwear of murdered or fleeing Palestinian women; the popularity of this "TikTok entertainment program" in Israel; the systematic killing of journalists in Gaza who documented the destruction of their own people.
Of course, this kind of callousness that accompanies mass killing on an industrial scale is not unprecedented. For decades, the Shoah has set the standard of human evil. The extent to which people recognize it as such and pledge to do everything in their power to combat anti-Semitism serves as a measure of their civilisation in the West.
But many consciences had been distorted or numbed during the years in which European Jewry was being destroyed. Much of non-Jewish Europe, often with enthusiasm, joined the Nazi attack on the Jews, and news even of their mass murder in the West, especially in the United States, was met with skepticism and indifference. George Orwell noted as early as February 1944 that reports of atrocities against Jews bounced off the conscience "like peas off a steel helmet."
Western leaders refused to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees for years after the Nazi crimes were revealed. After that, Jewish suffering was ignored and suppressed. Meanwhile, West Germany, far from denazification, received a cheap reprieve from the Western powers while it was engaged in the Cold War against Soviet communism.
These events, which took place within living memory, have undermined a fundamental assumption of both religious traditions and the secular Enlightenment: that human beings have an essentially "moral" nature. There is now a widespread and devastating suspicion that this is not true. Many people have witnessed death and mutilation at close range under regimes of callousness, fear, and censorship; they recognize with shock that anything is possible, that the memory of past atrocities cannot be taken as a guarantee against their repetition in the present, and that the foundations of international law and morality are not at all secure.
Much has happened in the world in recent years: natural disasters, financial collapses, political upheavals, a global pandemic, and wars of conquest and revenge. Yet no catastrophe compares to Gaza—none has left us with such an unbearable burden of grief, confusion, and a guilty conscience. Nothing has produced so shameful evidence of our lack of passion and resentment, our narrow-mindedness and weakness of thought. An entire generation of young people in the West has been forced to grow up morally by the words and actions (and inactions) of their elders in politics and journalism, and forced to confront almost single-handedly acts of brutality aided by the world’s richest and most powerful democracies.
Biden's stubborn malice and cruelty towards the Palestinians was just one of many chilling puzzles presented by Western politicians and journalists. It would be easy for Western leaders to withhold unconditional support for the extremist regime in Israel, while at the same time acknowledging the need to bring to justice those responsible for the war crimes committed on October 7th.
Why, then, has Biden repeatedly claimed to have watched videos of crimes that do not exist? Why has British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, declared that Israel “has the right” to deny Palestinians electricity and water, and chastised those in the Labour Party who called for a ceasefire? Why has Jürgen Habermas, an eloquent defender of the Western Enlightenment, rushed to defend outspoken advocates of ethnic cleansing?
Why did The Atlantic, one of the oldest magazines in the United States, publish an article claiming, after the killing of nearly 8.000 children in Gaza, that "it is possible to kill children legally"?
What explains the use of the passive voice in mainstream Western media reporting on Israeli crimes, making it difficult to see who was doing what to whom and under what circumstances ("Lonely death of Gaza man with Down syndrome," was the headline of a BBC report on Israeli soldiers letting a dog attack a disabled Palestinian)?
Why have American billionaires helped fuel the ruthless crackdowns on university campuses? Why have academics and journalists been fired, artists and thinkers removed from platforms, and young people denied jobs for appearing to challenge the pro-Israel consensus? Why has the West, while defending and sheltering Ukrainians from a toxic attack, so blatantly excluded Palestinians from the community of human obligation and responsibility?
Regardless of how we approach these questions, they force us to confront the phenomenon before us: a catastrophe jointly caused by Western democracies, thereby destroying the illusion, created after the defeat of fascism in 1945, of a universal humanity based on respect for rights and a minimum of legal and political norms.
The author is an Indian essayist and novelist.
The article is taken from "Forin Polisija" and is an excerpt from the book "The World After Gaza"
Translation: NB
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