Prologue

Think of the vast amount of brutality, cruelty and
lies which are able to spread over the civilized world.
Do you really believe that a handful of ambitious
and deluding men without conscience could have
succeeded in unleashing all these evil spirits if their
millions of followers did not share their guilt?
Sigmund Freud

On 19 April 1943, a few hundred young Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto took up whatever arms they could find and struck back at their Nazi persecutors. Most Jews in the ghetto had already been deported to extermination camps. The fighters were, as one of their leaders Marek Edelman recalled, seeking to salvage some dignity: ‘All it was about, finally, was our not letting them slaughter us when our turn came. It was only a choice as to the manner of dying.’
After a few desperate weeks, the resisters were overwhelmed. Most of them were killed. Some of those still alive on 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 sewer pipes. German soldiers then burned the ghetto, block by block, using flamethrowers to smoke out the survivors. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz later recalled hearing screams from the ghetto ‘on a beautiful quiet night, a country night in the outskirts of Warsaw’:

This screaming gave us goose pimples. They were the screams of thousands of people being murdered. It travelled through the silent spaces of the city from among a red glow of fires, under indifferent stars, into the benevolent silence of gardens in which plants laboriously emitted oxygen, the air was fragrant, and a man felt that it was good to be alive. There was something particularly cruel in this peace of the night, whose beauty and human crime struck the heart simultaneously. We did not look each other in the eye.

In a poem Milosz wrote in occupied Warsaw, ‘Campo dei Fiori’, he evokes the merry-go-round next to the ghetto’s wall, on which riders move skyward through the smoke of corpses, and whose jaunty tune drowns out the cries of agony and despair. Living in Berkeley, California, while the US military bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, an atrocity he compared to the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, Milosz again knew shameful complicity in extreme barbarity. ‘If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless,’ he wrote, ‘then we live in a state of desperate exasperation.’

Israel’s annihilation of Gaza, provisioned by Western democracies, inflicted this psychic ordeal for months on millions of people–involuntary witnesses to an act of political evil, who allowed themselves to occasionally think that it was good to be alive, and then heard the screams of a mother watching her daughter burn to death in yet another school bombed by Israel.

The Shoah scarred several Jewish generations; Jewish Israelis in 1948 experienced the birth of their nation state as a matter of life and death, and then again in 1967 and 1973 amid annihilationist rhetoric from their Arab enemies. For many Jews who have grown up with the knowledge that the Jewish population of Europe was almost entirely wiped out, for no reason other than it was Jewish, the world cannot but appear fragile. Among them, the massacres and hostage-taking in Israel on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other Palestinian groups rekindled a fear of another Holocaust.

But it was clear from the start that the most fanatical Israeli leadership in history would not shrink from exploiting an omnipresent sense of violation, bereavement and horror. Israel’s leaders claimed the right to self-defence against Hamas, but as Omer Bartov, a major historian of the Holocaust, recognised in August 2024, they sought from the very beginning ‘to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory’. Thus, for months after 7 October, billions of people beheld an extraordinary onslaught on Gaza whose victims, as Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, an Irish lawyer and South Africa’s representative at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, put it, were ‘broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something’.

The world, or more specifically the West, didn’t do anything. Behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, Marek Edelman was ‘terribly afraid’ that ‘nobody in the world would notice a thing’, and ‘nothing, no message about us, would ever make it out’. This wasn’t the case in Gaza, where victims foretold their death on digital media hours before they were executed, and their murderers breezily broadcast their deeds on TikTok. Yet the livestreamed liquidation of Gaza was daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military and cultural hegemony: from the leaders of the United States and United Kingdom attacking the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice to the New York Times editors instructing their staff, in an internal memo, to avoid the terms ‘refugee camps’, ‘occupied territory’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Every day came to be poisoned by the awareness that while we went about our lives hundreds of ordinary people were being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children. Pleas from people in Gaza, often well-known writers and journalists, warning that they and their loved ones were about to be killed, followed by news of their killing, compounded the humiliation of physical and political incapacity. Those driven by the guilt of helpless implication to scan Joe Biden’s face for some sign of mercy, some sign of an end to bloodletting, found an eerily smooth hardness, broken only by a nervous smirk when he blurted out Israeli lies that Palestinians had beheaded Jewish babies. Righteous hopes aroused by this or that United Nations resolution, frantic appeals from humanitarian NGOs, strictures from jurors at The Hague, and the last-minute replacement of Biden as presidential candidate, were brutally dashed. By late 2024, many people living very far from Gaza’s killing fields were feeling – at a remove, but feeling – that they had been dragged through an epic landscape of misery and failure, anguish and exhaustion. This might seem an exaggerated emotional toll among mere onlookers. But then the shock and outrage provoked when Picasso unveiled Guernica, with its horses and humans screaming while being murdered from the sky, was the effect of a single image from Gaza of a father holding the headless corpse of his child.

The war will eventually recede into the past, and time may flatten its towering pile of horrors. But signs of the calamity will remain in Gaza for decades: in the injured bodies, the orphaned children, the rubble of its cities, the homeless peoples, and in the pervasive presence and consciousness of mass bereavement. And those who watched helplessly from afar the killing and maiming of tens of thousands on a narrow coastal strip, and witnessed, too, the applause or indifference of the powerful, will live with an inner wound, and a trauma that will not pass away for years.