Yuli Novak, executive director of B’Tselem, the Israeli non-governmental organization recently cited by many newspapers for the publication of the report “Our Genocide,” wrote: “Genocide does not happen without mass participation, a population that supports it, allows it, or looks the other way. This is part of its tragedy. Almost no nation that has committed genocide understood, in real time, what it was doing. The story is always the same: self-defense, inevitability, the victims had it coming.”
B’Tselem was founded in 1989 with the mission of documenting and denouncing human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem). It publishes reports, video testimonies, legal investigations, and awareness campaigns aimed at both Israeli society and the international community. In its July 2025 report, “Our Genocide,” B’Tselem argues that, since October 2023, the Israeli state has implemented a systematic policy of annihilation against the Gaza Strip that amounts to genocide.
The phrase “Almost no nation that has committed genocide understood, in real time, what it was doing” is not yet another justification or mitigation for Israel. I see in this reflection by Yuli Novak the courage to look in the mirror, as a society and as humanity in general.
“Genocide is usually the result of a gradual development, over years, of conditions in which a repressive and discriminatory regime becomes genocidal. Decades of occupation, oppression, and apartheid have produced a profound dehumanization of Palestinians, who have come to be seen by Israelis as a threat and as a problem to be ‘solved.’ Conditions of this kind can persist for a long time without leading to genocide. Often, a violent event that generates a sense of existential threat acts as a trigger leading to the actual commission of genocide. In the case of our genocide, the horrors of October 7, 2023, and the trauma experienced by Israeli society were, in fact, the trigger for a full-scale assault on the Gaza Strip, presented as an act of self-defense. The immense trauma of the Israelis was exploited by the current far-right government to pursue a policy that key figures were already trying to promote. https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide
In Turkey, the Armenian genocide is still officially taboo.
In Canada, it is only in recent decades that the genocide of indigenous peoples has come to the forefront of collective consciousness. For over a century (from the 19th century until the 1990s!), indigenous children were taken from their families and forced to live in residential schools, where they suffered mistreatment, physical and psychological abuse, and were prevented from speaking their own languages and maintaining their own culture. Did white Canadian society know about this?
In Italy, the collective consciousness still tends to repress or minimize Italian colonialism and the violence perpetrated (use of gas in Ethiopia, concentration camps in Libya, brutal repression in Somalia). The Italian popular and media imagination tends to represent colonialism as ‘mild’ or ‘humanitarian’, through the myth of ‘Italians are good people’. Did Italian society know?
In Europe, migrants “have come to be seen as a threat and as a problem to be ‘solved.’ The same words used by B’Tselem for Palestinians can be used to describe the process of dehumanization of migrants in Europe. Recently, 13 people landed on Sotillo Beach in Castell de Ferro, in the province of Granada (Andalusia). Bathers reacted aggressively: they chased them, grabbed them, and immobilized them. In one scene, a man in an orange swimsuit is seen kneeling on the back of one of the migrants, waiting for the police to arrive. No one acted compassionately or humanely… How is this possible? It’s… monstrous…
Monsters are not somewhere out there. They are inside each and every one of us. It is possible that we are not among those who dehumanize migrants, refugees, Roma… Yet, it is possible that we are among those who dehumanize fascists, Trump supporters… Or if they do not go as far as dehumanization, they still play on the territory of polarization.
“Polarizing tactics, culture wars, and moral purism,” writes Evans, “are used to stir consciences and mobilize, but the result can still be more oppression, less empathy, more aggression, less critical thinking, more groupthink.” They risk dividing social justice activists “into factions more obsessed with each other than with ending the injustice that is their common cause.” The result is that “instead of addressing real-world problems, we are wasting precious political energy managing the polarization itself.” (Diego Galli, https://www.rigenerazionale.it/p/polarizzazione)
Speaking of ‘moral purism’… Standing Together is on the list of organizations to boycott drawn up by “The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI),” a founding member of the BDS movement. The organization is accused of “normalization,” that is, of normalizing the status quo and focusing only on hatred and empathy, without pointing the finger at the structural causes of the conflict, oppression, occupation, and apartheid. The accusation of normalization is often levelled at joint Israeli-Palestinian movements. Of course, the normalization of the status quo and the fairy tale of Jews and Palestinians playing and singing together is insidious, but the accusation of normalization levelled at Standing Together is equally insidious. The BDS movement’s website (https://www.bdsmovement.net/standing-together-normalization) states that Standing Together promotes the idea that Palestinians and Israelis can coexist if they choose empathy over hatred, but does not recognize the Israeli regime of apartheid and colonization as the main cause of the conflict. In reality, Standing Together recognizes the regime of inequality and denounces the occupation regime. So why boycott them?
During an interview with CNN, journalist Christiane Amanpour said to Rula Daood, co-director of Standing Together: “Some Palestinians have criticized you. They accuse you of somehow normalizing the occupation. The BDS movement has said that this is normalization…”
Rula Daood replied: “…When you’re sitting comfortably at home in the US or Europe, it’s much easier to look at us without understanding the realities we live in… Sometimes it can be out of ignorance… I am a Palestinian citizen of Israel and life is not easy. We are second-class citizens… So to come here and boycott the only activists—whether Palestinian or Jewish—who dare to oppose this government, to speak a different language, to say that this occupation must end, that this war must end, that there must be an agreement on the table so that prisoners can return home… simply means going against the will of the people. If you are truly revolutionary, you understand that there are people who suffer and there are governments.”
You can watch the entire interview at this link (https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/14/Tv/video/amanpour-green-daood), and I watched it again. Something in me perhaps wanted Rula and Alon-Lee to be more incisive in denouncing the military occupation and the conditions of apartheid. Perhaps something in me was even annoyed by the title “Pain is mutual pain,” because how can one compare the pain of the oppressed group and the pain of the oppressors?
Yet, as Combatants for Peace (CfP) remind us in their invitations to the Joint Memorial Ceremony: “In mourning side by side, we do not seek to equate narratives, but to transform despair into hope and build bridges of deep compassion capable of changing reality…” The Joint Memorial Ceremony is organized by CfP and the Parents Circle Families Forum. It takes place every year on the eve of Yom Hazikaron (Israeli Memorial Day), which, in mainstream Israeli culture, tends to reinforce cultural narratives of pain, victimhood, and despair. The Ceremony transforms this narrative by bringing Palestinians and Israelis together to “mourn together and shape another possible way.”
So, yes, the pain is the same, even if the condition for this recognition requires first recognizing power asymmetries, oppressive structures, and responsibilities. “We recognize the difference in power dynamics between Israelis and Palestinians and use our privileges by working together to resist injustice.” (From the CfP website https://www.cfpeace.org/combatants-for-peace)
Joint movements of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians come under fire from both sides: on the one hand, from Palestinians or pro-Palestinians, who accuse them of normalization or do not accept that there can be Israelis in the struggle for a free Palestine (to simplify); on the other hand, from Israelis or pro-Israelis, who accuse them of being anti-Semitic and/or traitors to Israel.
Israelis who call for an end to the occupation are referred to in Hebrew as “yafeh nefesh,” meaning “beautiful souls,” with a derogatory connotation of being naïve, ingenuous, and deluded. Especially after October 7, the question for them has been: “Have you sobered up? Have you become more realistic now?” Perhaps the same is true for Palestinians who believe in co-resistance with Israelis: “How can you trust what is happening?”
Martin Luther King, in his speech in Montgomery, Alabama (1957), said:
“We are particularly interested in the role of white people of good will. We are therefore grateful when we find members of the white population who make a serious effort to change… We try to encourage them to act firmly in accordance with their deepest convictions.”
Encouraging Israelis to participate in the resistance against genocide, occupation, and ethnic cleansing does not dilute the demand for justice; on the contrary, it reinforces it. Is there perhaps a risk, as I have read in some comments, of creating Israeli heroes (heroes within the oppressor group) and leaving those who resist (the oppressed group) in the shadows?
So, returning to the question about August 17, yes, there were more images and photos of Israeli hostages than of Gazan children, and there were certainly more Israeli flags than signs reading ‘Stop Genocide’, yet we can look at both the blind spots of Israeli society and the possibilities on the margins at the same time. And that is what I want to look at, without obscuring the rest (and not obscuring it means feeling the full weight of this reality), as I am guided by hope. Hope is not a feeling but an attitude; it is not something you either have or don’t have, but something you cultivate, or as activist Maoz Inon would say, ‘you create hope together’.
“Active Hope is not wishful thinking… The web of life calls us to act now. We have come a long way and we are here to do our part… Active Hope is the willingness to discover the strengths within ourselves and others; the willingness to discover the greatness and strength of our hearts…” (Joanna Macy)
And so, for me, ‘creating hope’ and placing myself inside rather than outside the picture I am looking at means, at this moment, raising awareness and amplifying that part (yes, of course, a minority) of Israeli society that on August 17 was not calling for an end to the war to save ‘its own’, but was embodying a future of collective liberation for all people from the river to the sea.