Some things need plain stating. The world has spent the last two years bearing witness to one of the great atrocities of our age: a live-streamed, protracted genocide carried out with near-total impunity by its perpetrators, armed and backed by the most powerful states on Earth. We, insofar as humanity can still be indexed with a “we” of any kind, bore witness in real time to a campaign of outright exterminatory violence. It is a stain on the conscience of the world that will never wash off.

None of these are words to be used lightly. But they are unequivocally the words to be used.

By the most conservative estimates, we witnessed the violent killing of at least 100,000 people, and the indirect death of anywhere between two to four times that number. We saw one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities obliterated and intentionally rendered uninhabitable. We witnessed the systematic destruction of an entire territory’s healthcare system in what the United Nations charged as tantamount to the “crime against humanity of extermination.” We sat through the use of mass starvation and the deprivation of water to an entire population in what Human Rights Watch also charged as the “crime against humanity of extermination.” Every human rights organization in the world worth a penny has called this a genocide, as have the vast majority of the world’s scholars of genocide.

And nor has the sham of a ceasefire meant the killing has stopped, but only slowed. Over 300 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli state since the ceasefire was declared, over 150 of them children. On November 30, two young boys gathering firewood for their father, Fadi, eight, and Juma, ten, were incinerated by drone fire. That the drone operator, equipped with the most advanced camera technology on Earth, would have seen they were children is without doubt.

They join an unconscionable number of murdered children. Twenty thousand children at the very least, likely much more, have been systematically slaughtered—nearly a child an hour for almost two years. None of it has been accidental. Around 50 American doctors and nurses testified to the fact that children have been targeted directly, and that they have each treated children in “Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them.” Israel’s own opposition leader Yair Golan, though a staunch supporter of the genocidal war, bemoaned Israel’s reputational loss in the face of what he said was Israeli soldiers killing children “as a hobby.” None of this has come out of thin air. It took shape in a social order that was already primed; a social order that the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention wrote “is deeply imbued with genocidal ideology.” Polling has consistently proven this correct. In one of the latest polls in June 2025, 75 percent of Jewish Israelis polled agreed with the statement: “There are no innocents in Gaza.”

One would think that this open calamity, this headlong charge into genocidal frenzy by the Israeli state and so much of Israeli society, at least the mass killing of children, would spark some self-reflection by those that count themselves among the stalwarts of the Israeli regime. One might’ve hoped that an open genocide carried out in the name of Zionism would do something to those that have invested attachments in the Zionist project, that it might shake those that had somehow contrived to convince themselves that Jewish safety in the world necessitates the ethnic cleansing, dispossession and now extermination of the people of Palestine.

But not at all. Many of those who call themselves Zionists have, on the whole, doubled down on genocide denial. One such example came in the pages of the Orient in an op-ed by one Neal Urwitz, who, among a litany of distortions, saw fit to take umbrage with the charge of genocide. (And decided to come at me and me alone by name in the article, for which I guess I can only thank Urwitz for giving me the chance to interrupt my leave and get back to campus politics.) Urwitz writes: “How can you compromise with someone who claims you’re perpetrating genocide?” I don’t know, maybe stop the genocide and hold its perpetrators accountable? For Urwitz, it’s the calling out of the genocide, not the genocide itself, that seems to be the real crime. That this denialism, this basic refusal to even recognize the scale of injustice unfolding before our eyes, is presented as part of some pragmatics of “peace” and “compromise” is too risible to really warrant commentary. It speaks entirely for itself. But to be clear nonetheless: There can be no redress of historical injustice in Palestine that does not include accountability for genocide and ethnic cleansing and does not entail the very basic restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and land. Any hope of nonracial cohabitation and mutual safety begins here. Everything else is secondary.

The truth is that none of this is really surprising or even remotely original. Denial is, of course, part of every genocide in history; denial is in fact part of genocide’s very machinery. But the deeper truth is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to face this genocide as a Zionist because the genocide is at least one logical end of Zionism as a historical project. Facing it honestly would mean challenging the psychic attachments to the political ideology itself.

As the self-described project to build a majoritarian Jewish state in Palestine, Zionism has always depended on eliminatory colonialism and racial separation. There wasn’t a single Zionist leader of note in the pre-state era, from Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion, who didn’t face up to the necessity of what they euphemized as “transfer.” And that precisely is what they systematically implemented. Israel is a state order only made possible in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, with the expulsion of over three-quarters of a million people. That is, with the removal of nearly two-thirds of Palestine’s native population and the near-total destruction of a life-world.

I was born into the remains of that life-world. A child of the survivors of the Nakba. My maternal grandmother was driven from her home in Jerusalem, a home that still stands now occupied and inhabited by those who seized it. My paternal grandmother fled her village in the Galilee with six young children, only to smuggle herself back across a lethal border that claimed the lives of thousands in the years after the Nakba. I grew up under Zionism’s boot, one checkpoint after another, one ritual humiliation after another. Zionism is written on our bodies, in our family histories; it’s seared in our consciousness, in the homes we lost, in the land that was taken, in the future that was robbed.

That’s my story, and the story of every Palestinian. But the moral calamity of allowing this to go on, year after year, belongs to us all.

Nasser Abourahme is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies.