What do you do with a genocidal society?

Over the course of the ongoing genocide, perhaps the most bizarre image that has emerged was captured nowhere near Gaza or even in wider Occupied Palestine. The picture, taken in Rwanda on April 7, was of Israeli President Isaac Herzog participating in a ceremony commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. 

In the most recent onslaught in a 76-year-long process of ethnic cleansing, it is estimated that around 186,000 Palestinians have been murdered by Israeli blockades on food, water, and medicine, Israeli drone strikes, American bombs, occupation forces, and terrorist settlers. Tens of thousands of Palestinian children are now orphaned or have life-altering injuries. This has been the most futuristic genocide in the history of humanity, given the unparalleled technology deployed against Palestinians and—despite Zionist control of nearly all major legacy Western media outlets—our ability to witness the carnage around the world, 24-hours-a-day. 

Herzog—the son of a notorious war criminal and Jewish supremacist who belonged to the Haganah paramilitary group—commemorated an African genocide that was far more rudimentary than the one being committed by his regime today. Machetes were the weapon of choice in the massacre of at least 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans in 1994 rather than drones, 2,000-pound bombs, white phosphorus, and sniper rifles. The total amount of footage of the Rwandan genocide is limited to a few grainy minutes. Still, there are disturbing parallels between the society that committed the Rwandan genocide and the society that is carrying out the genocide of the Palestinian people. 

We often hear mild-mannered academics and bureaucrats parrot the talking point that it is not the Israeli people who are committing atrocities, but rather the Israeli government. Liberal Zionist organizations and establishment liberal political parties in the West are quick to place blame on leaders like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or—as the International Criminal Court has done—on Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. On occasion, there is some mention of the illegal settlers in the West Bank, although calls by international judicial bodies to evacuate the settlements hardly receive coverage from corporate media. 

It is a distortion of reality to place all blame for the carpet-bombing of Gaza’s schools, hospitals, animal shelters, and tent camps on a handful of individuals. It is also performative, as the leaders of the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and India continue to flood the apartheid project with cash, weapons, and settlers. It may be soothing to defer to the narrative of citizens being separate from their government, yet this in no way applies to the Israeli settler population today, just as it didn’t apply to Hutu society in Rwanda in 1994. 

When discussing violence, writers, lawyers, novelists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and journalists are generally very careful when it comes to impugning an entire society, opting to only direct condemnation at those who lead the population, own most of the society’s wealth, or command the most power. In most cases, there is no bad intention behind this cautious approach. It is quite the opposite. Vast segments of the right have long used whole countries as scapegoats, tapping into racial prejudice. This occurs, for instance, when American senators call Palestinian society “radicalized,” or when a British prime minister sneers at Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan. 

But we simply cannot reduce language to the level of every middling functionary who uses it. Language requires thought, not fear. 

Palestinian society is incredibly diverse, yet for generations, the entire society has been brutalized by an occupation. At one point, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union backed the Israeli settler project. The entire force of global power was hurled against a small, ancient civilization of people who were unfathomably punished for the Holocaust—a European creation. 

Millions of Palestinians live in exile. Many are imprisoned. Some run their businesses and farms, supporting their families as best as they can under an apartheid regime. Others have participated in resistance, either by treating the wounded, teaching children how to read, writing articles, or defending their people in an apartheid court system. And certainly, some have picked up arms or have turned to political or religious ideologies, with all the complications this brings in a global system petrified of liberation struggles. But regardless of how any member of an occupied, oppressed, and besieged population attempts to salvage life, their method is valid. A society that lives under the thumb of a settler population that controls its water and electricity—a regime that erects arbitrary borders, separates families, and prevents children from accessing cancer treatment in nearby hospitals—must, logically, react. A people would have to be sociopathic to simply accept their fate and quietly remain subservient. 

Societies are imperfect. People are imperfect. There are no perfect victims. But there are societies that resist, and then there are the societies that destroy, inflict harm, invade. It is essential to make this distinction if we wish to live in a world that maintains some basic sense of reality. 

Let us examine some modern cases of social majorities wiping out social minorities. During the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda, did all the Hutus participate in massacres of the Tutsi minority? Certainly not. In fact, many Hutu Rwandans were killed by the génocidaires. Many died alongside their Tutsi family members. But did the Hutu-majority political parties, the Hutu-owned radio stations, the Hutu-led militias, and the Hutu neighborhood councils carry out the genocide, oftentimes with farming tools as their only offensive weapon? The answer—no matter the calculated silence from the global community at the time—is an emphatic yes. 

During World War II, in the Bloodlands of Eastern Europe, peasants and townspeople—armed and overseen by Nazi officers—carried out mass executions of the Roma, Sinti, and Jewish inhabitants, along with large swaths of the intellectual Slavic population, clubbing, shooting, and burying them in public. This was the most sizable and the most disorganized portion of the Holocaust. Millions were killed in mass shootings, their bodies burned or dumped in mass graves, dug by the victims themselves. In the territories that the Germans seized from the Soviet forces, one can find a resemblance to the kind of ethnic cleansing that took place during the Partition of India, the American-backed Guatemalan genocide, or the Rwandan genocide. 

But this is not the part of the Holocaust that most contemporary readers and viewers are familiar with. What has been most studied and depicted in Europe from the 1930s and 1940s was the subtlety of the Holocaust—not its public nature. The labor camps and death camps, tucked away from population centers, many of them outside of Germany. The kidnapping of special needs children and the euthanasia of those exhibiting signs of “feeblemindedness.” The industrial system of trains and gas chambers. This was the grim, modern triumph of the European genocide. Little was known of the events, though the killing was systematic. When the Soviet and allied troops discovered the camps in the aftermath of the war, it was a surprise. A kind of sanitized barbarism, foreshadowing the careful euphemisms, precise drone strikes, and collateral damage of the present. 

In his book, “When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and Genocide in Rwanda,” the Indo-Ugandan author Mahmood Mamdani notes that Nazi agents often “did no more than drop Zyklon B crystals into gas chambers from above. (Whereas) the Rwandan genocide was executed with the slash of machetes, rather than the drop of crystals, with all the gruesome detail of a street murder, rather than the bureaucratic efficiency of a mass extermination. The difference in technology is indicative of a more significant social difference. The technology of the Holocaust allowed a few to kill many, but the machete had to be wielded by a single pair of hands.” 

Mamdani goes on to quote the words of a Rwandan minister in the Patriotic Front-led government, who agreed to an interview three years after the genocide ended. He made the distinction that “in Germany, the Jews were taken out of their residences, moved to distant, far-away locations, and killed there, almost anonymously. In Rwanda, the government did not kill you. It prepared the population, enraged it and enticed it. Your neighbors killed you.” 

Obviously, the entirety of the Holocaust wasn’t done in such a clear-cut manner. History is so rarely neat and orderly. But the point stands that the vast majority of the Germans did not participate in the Holocaust. However, such a declaration cannot be made in the case of Rwanda. Nor can it be made in the present day when we discuss the Israeli apartheid project. 

At least 750,000 illegal settlers are currently squatting in the West Bank and Jerusalem, representing around 15% of the total Israeli population. They operate with the protection of the Israeli military and police, terrorizing Palestinians families with machetes and guns, eating away at farmland, poisoning the water, and building their blindingly white beehive structures, which have no relation to the esthetically stunning Palestinians towns, villages, and vistas that are disrupted by their presence. The settlers receive scraps from prosperous Zionist families, who make transfers from Europe and North America, in blatant violation of the law surrounding charitable donations. At least 160,000 settlers are American citizens. 

While the Jewish settlers are certainly armed with the most expensive, bone-melting technology that American and European firms can produce—and while the Israeli Occupation Forces rarely get their hands dirty, preferring to rely on drones, planes, and bulldozers to clear whole neighborhoods of Palestinians—the attitude and actions of the colonial society closely resemble the génocidaires who roamed the Great Rift Valley of Central Africa. The Hutu militias—the Interahamwe—once moved about freely as well, on a killing spree in Rwanda, sometimes financed by diaspora groups in Belgium and France. 

This was by no means restricted to 1994. For decades before the Rwandan genocide erupted, there were extended episodes of violence—creeping ethnic cleansing—that set the stage for what was ultimately carried out. Similarly, since the Nakba of 1948—the destruction of historic Palestine and the creation of the Israeli regime—the settlers, too, have been spreading out into the rugged mountain terrain. 

In her painful body of literary work, Rwandan novelist Scholastique Mukasonga excavates the years of her childhood, youth, and early adulthood as a Tutsi living under the constant fear imposed by successive Hutu nationalist governments. In 1994, while outside the country, she lost 37 members of her family to the genocide, including her mother, father, and all but one of her siblings—the exact kind of annihilation of bloodlines taking place in Gaza today. But her return to Rwanda was tinged by the traumas of the decades that led up the genocide rather than just the ultimate horrors of a single year. 

“Cockroaches,” one of her devastating short novels, reflects on how after the Belgians relinquished control of Rwanda in 1962, her family was constantly displaced along the lines of the artificially created ethnic divisions between the Hutus (85% of the population) and the Tutsis (15%), which saw the former take control of the newly independent nation. 

For years, Mukasonga and her family lived in close proximity to those who invaded her family’s land, raped girls and women in her community, and caught Tutsi men after dark and lynched them. When she returns to her village a decade after the genocide, while standing on the homestead where her family was butchered, she can clearly see her Hutu neighbors. 

“What did they see?” she asks herself.  “What did they do?”

These countryside massacres in former colonies never tend to generate much empathy from the regimes that supply the perpetrators. In the case of Rwanda, Belgian Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene and French President François Mitterrand supplied the Rwandan Army, dispatched officers on missions to train the Hutu militia members, and ultimately withdrew their soldiers shortly after the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana—a Hutu supremacist—whose death ignited the already-stewing tensions and resulted in the genocide of 75% of the Tutsi population. A few years before this, when asked about ethnic violence in a handful of African countries, Mitterrand shrugged and responded casually, “In countries like that, genocide isn’t too important.” 

All these years later, the American president, the German chancellor, and the prime ministers of France, Britain, and Canada—along with India, a new, colored addition—similarly throw up their hands at the violence in the Middle East. It is as if they haven’t propped up the Zionist state, armed the soldiers and settlers, and offered a cloak of impunity to some of the greatest crimes of the unending colonial era. 

You can find this nonchalant tone among the vanquished as well. When asked questions in an interview about marauding gangs of teenage soldiers on the road between his studio and Jerusalem, or about the bombings that make Picasso’s “Guernica” appear muted, the Palestinian painter Sliman Mansour responds, “Well, you see everything in Gaza … it doesn’t matter if it’s a child, or an elderly man, they don’t care.”

The most striking difference between the Rwandan genocide and the Gaza genocide is that, in the former, the victims and the perpetrators all belonged to the Indigenous population. In Occupied Palestine, the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population has no roots in the country and has expropriated the property within the lifetime of most Palestinian grandparents. Throughout such a long process of ethnic cleansing, it is clear that an Israeli society has formed. While it’s not a solid society—and while it couldn’t survive without American subsidies—it has firm systems of oppression in place. 

Israel has radio stations and TV stations that, like Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM)—the notorious station that played a central role in the incitement of the Rwandan genocide—stream a nonstop soundtrack of songs and commentaries that celebrate the genocide in Gaza. It has chief rabbis who call for the rape of Palestinian women and girls—a practice that, according to all credible reports, is employed against not only the female occupied population but also against men and small boys. It has a vast militia: 750,000 armed settlers, 635,000 soldiers, 35,000 police officers, and 70,000 Civil Guard volunteers who man checkpoints. This is out of a Jewish population of only seven million, one million of whom live most of the year in the countries that they originally came from. There are also thousands of Israelis working within the Prison Service as guards, torturers, and interrogators. Beyond the propaganda apparatus and militarized state, there is a world-renowned university system that churns out chemical weapons, texts that engage in historical erasure, and the results of human experiments in which Palestinian bodies are the unwilling test subjects. 

While this may seem like a totally modernized world compared with the rural one inhabited by the millions of followers of Hutu Power in 1994, the fact remains that we are dealing with a genocidal Israeli society, where the full citizens are eager to partake in violence. Many Jewish supremacists fly to Ben Gurion Airport each month hoping to participate, in exchange for some shekels and plots of Palestinian land. 

There are outliers, of course: the blameless children, those with special needs, the anti-Zionist activists who try to protect Palestinian farms, a handful of exiled Israeli journalists and historians, a couple of legislators, a few hundred youngsters who bravely refused to serve in the Occupation Forces and were jailed as a result. But, according to repeated surveys conducted throughout the genocide, more than 90% of Jewish Israeli adults consistently opine that adequate or too little force has been used in Gaza. Such figures reveal a level of psychosis that is the culmination of a 76-year-long project of annihilation. 

Whether it be the Serbs in Bosnia, the Afrikaner population in South Africa throughout apartheid, white American southerners during Jim Crow, or Canadian teachers, priests, nuns, parliamentarians, and police during the operation of residential schools, history teaches us that any society has the potential to become radicalized and carry out genocide. Today, sizable portions of North American and European voters harbor visceral anti-immigrant sentiments that reveal an inclination for policies such as forced deportations, family separations, and concentration camps. India’s Narendra Modi stood by during anti-Muslim riots in 2002, when he was chief minister of Gujarat. Now in the Parliament, he laughs when questioned about police in Manipur handing women and girls over to mobs to be raped, and he appears very comfortable with sectarian rhetoric in a Hindu-majority country that is no stranger to pogroms. 

In Argentina, the far-right president Javier Milei appointed a vice president who denies the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous groups as well as the murder of tens of thousands of young Argentine women and the theft of their babies during the last military junta. Even in humble Peru—no stranger to being downtrodden—leading presidential candidate Antauro Humala promises to build internment camps in the desert for Venezuelan refugees, knowing that such statements can only bolster his chances of victory. 

Still, the reason that the genocide in Gaza draws so much attention is that it is not happening everywhere. We are not noting this level of violence anywhere else in the world at the moment. Statistics tell us this. More children have been killed in Gaza than in nearly five years of global conflict. And according to anecdotal evidence from battle-hardened surgeons operating in Gaza, there have rarely been situations so nightmarish. 

This leads us to the conclusion that most contemporary societies, while not free of genocidal inclinations, are also not actively genocidal in the same way that the Israeli population is. This apartheid project is an anomaly among anomalies. Typically, despite private hatreds and public rhetoric, human beings seem to be more comfortable with state and societal violence committed along the border, at black sites, in prison camps, or on military bases—places where screams cannot be heard by the middle and upper classes. 

While attending pre-trial proceedings at the best-known prison in the world, writer and researcher Ayah Kutmah described a midlevel functionary of this quiet system, someone who personifies the comfortable distance between violence and perpetrator:

“In Guantánamo’s military tribunal, it is the torturer who gives torture testimony. Psychologist Dr. Bruce Jessen, one of the two contract architects of the CIA torture program, was called on by defense lawyers to testify to Al-Nashiri’s years-long torture. The torture victim himself is silent, his lived experience presumed classified, and, on each of those days, absent from the courtroom …

For three days, Dr. Jessen gave his torture testimony remotely, refusing to return to Guantánamo, before retreating to his personal life, insulated from criminal accountability and indemnified by a multimillion-dollar contract with the U.S. government. By contrast, (the prisoner) returned to indefinite detention in Guantánamo, where, as defense lawyers argue and United Nations Special Rapporteur Fionnuala Ní Aoláin reinforced in a recent report, there is no ‘post-torture’ reality for the remaining detainees.”

This is the kind of violence that large majorities of post-first-world societies of the 21st century are comfortable with. And this is the kind of violence that hardly exists in Occupied Palestine, where time and history have stood still. There is barely any distance between the colonizers and their victims. 

There are too many examples of societies that have successfully dug the gap that the Israelis are trying desperately to widen. But I would argue that Canada is a powerful case study, given how the public discourse is particularly efficient at painting the rest of the world as a vast area of darkness. Like in Washington, America’s northern vassal state also has Israeli nationals occupying cabinet-level posts in Ottawa. In Toronto and Montreal—mimicking New York City—the municipal authorities openly tolerate the presence of synagogues that “sell” land in Palestine to congregants. Attorney General Arif Virani, a lawyer of refugee descent, attends all conferences hosted by the Israeli lobby, where American speakers—seemingly exempt from the hate speech laws that Virani is charged with enforcing—refer to Palestinian children as “cockroaches.” 

A word like that, when used in a country like Canada, may mean nothing. But beyond the territory, which sells arms and preaches tolerance, it is a very real word. “Cockroaches” is the word that was used to describe Rwandans like Scholastique Mukasonga when she was a little girl. 

Rwanda. We return to Rwanda where, in the end, there was finality. Perhaps not justice, or closure, or joy. But finality, yes. The disciplined military wing of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which fought for the exiled Tutsis’ right to return since the 1980s, waited for the hateful energy to be exhausted, before entering Kigali and seizing control, swiftly taking over the entire country. After 100 days of hell on Earth, the killing stopped. The gang rapes stopped. The leading perpetrators were killed, jailed, or chased into exile. The genocidal society was pacified, placed under a one-man police state, trotted out as a symbol of reconciliation, and cleared of litter and slums to make way for notable visitors such as the Israeli president. Survivors often live near those who took everything from them, for the sake of preserving social harmony.  

I think, if we read between the lines of the success story that Rwanda’s authorities tell the world, there is a lot of unhappiness and an incomprehensible amount of pain. But there has been, at least—and mercifully—an end. 

There is no such army coming to rescue Gaza. Despite the limited sanctions recently imposed against the Israeli regime by South Africa, Spain, Norway, Ireland, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, and Colombia, there has been no way to stop the flow of weapons and technology that pours out of Germany, France, the U.K., Canada, India, and the U.S. And, unlike the Interahamwe—the Hutu paramilitary organization—the Israelis have passports and currencies issued from other countries, giving them the security to continue their bloody work. 

The lack of finality in Palestine is terrifying. With a genocidal society erecting walls around you, flying jets above you, there is little space to breathe, to even process your pain. And beyond the unfathomable solidarity, love, and faith that the Palestinian people have managed to keep alive in that little space, there is also a suffering that lives on. 

And wherever there is suffering, history is incomplete.

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