The question keeps gnawing at me: Could this really be it? Could we be living through a genocide?
Outside Israel, millions already know the answer. But many of us here can’t – or won’t – say it aloud. Perhaps because the truth threatens to unmake everything we believed about who we are, and who we wanted to be. To name it is to admit that the future will require reckoning – not just with our leaders, but with ourselves. But the cost of refusing to see is even higher.
For Israelis of my generation, the word “genocide” was supposed to remain a nightmare from another planet. A word tethered to our grandparents’ photographs and the ghosts of European ghettoes, not to our own neighborhoods. We were the ones who asked, from a distance, about others: how could ordinary people go on with their lives while something like this happened? How could they let it happen? What would I have done in their place?
In a grotesque twist of history, that question now circles back to us.
For nearly two years, we’ve heard Israeli officials – politicians and generals alike – say out loud what they intend to do: to starve, flatten and erase Gaza. “We will eliminate them.” “We will make it uninhabitable.” “We will cut off food, water, electricity.” These weren’t slips of the tongue; they were the plan. And then, the Israeli military carried it out. By the textbook definition, this is genocide: the deliberate targeting of a population not for who they are as individuals, but because they belong to a group – an attack designed to destroy the group itself.
We told ourselves other stories to survive the horror, stories that kept guilt and grief at bay. We convinced ourselves that every child in Gaza was Hamas, every apartment a terrorist cell. We became, without noticing, those “ordinary people” who keep living their lives while “it” is happening.
I can still recall the first time reality cracked open for me. Two months into what I was still calling a “war”, three of my B’Tselem colleagues – Palestinian human rights workers we’d worked alongside for years – were trapped in Gaza with their families. They told me about relatives buried under rubble, about not being able to shield their children, about the paralyzing fear.
In the frantic efforts to extract them from Gaza, I learned something that has seared itself into my mind: at that moment, a living Palestinian in Gaza could be “ransomed” for roughly 20,000 shekels. Children cost less. Life priced in cash, per head. These were not abstract statistics; these were people I knew. And that was when I understood: the rules had changed.
Since then, the surreal has become routine. Cities reduced to ash. Entire neighborhoods flattened. Families displaced, then displaced again. Tens of thousands killed. Mass starvation engineered, with aid trucks turned away or bombed. Parents feeding animal fodder to their children, some of whom die waiting for flour. Others are shot – unarmed civilians, gunned down for approaching food convoys.
Genocide does not happen without mass participation: a population that supports it, enables it or looks away. That 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 targets brought it on themselves.
In Israel, the prevailing narrative insists this all began on 7 October, with Hamas’s massacre of civilians in southern Israel. That day was a true horror, a grotesque burst of human cruelty: civilians slaughtered, raped, taken hostage. A concentrated national trauma that summoned, for many Israelis, a profound sense of existential threat.
But 7 October, while catalytic, was not enough on its own. Genocide requires conditions – decades of apartheid and occupation, of separation and dehumanization, of policies designed to sever our capacity for empathy. Gaza, sealed off from the world, became the apex of this architecture. Its people became abstractions, perpetual hostages in our imagination, subjects to bomb every few years, to kill by the hundreds or thousands, with no accountability. We knew more than 2 million people were living under siege. We knew about Hamas. We knew about the tunnels. In hindsight, we knew everything. Yet somehow we were incapable of understanding that some of them might find a way to break out.
What happened on 7 October was not only a military failure. It was a collapse of our social imagination: the delusion that we could corral all the violence and despair behind a fence and live peacefully on our side. That rupture arrived under the most extreme rightwing government in Israel’s history, a coalition whose ministers openly fantasize about Gaza’s erasure. And so, in October 2023, every star in our darkest nightmare aligned.
This week, B’Tselem released a report, Our Genocide, compiled by Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli researchers together. It is divided into two parts. The first documents how this genocide is being carried out: mass killings, destruction of living conditions, social collapse and engineered starvation, all fueled by incitement from Israeli leaders and amplified through media. The second part of the report traces the path that led here: decades of systemic inequality, military rule and policies of separation that normalized Palestinian disposability.
To confront genocide, we must first understand it. And in order to do so, we – Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians – had to look at reality together, through the perspective of the human beings living on this land. Our moral and human obligation is to amplify the voices of the victims. Our political and historical responsibility is also to turn our gaze to the perpetrators, and to testify, in real time, to how a society transforms into one capable of committing genocide.
Recognizing this truth is not easy. Even for us, people who have spent years documenting state violence against Palestinians, the mind resists it. It rejects the facts like poison, tries to spit them out. But the poison is here. It floods the bodies of those who live between the river and the sea – Palestinians and Israelis alike – with fear and unfathomable loss.
The Israeli state is committing genocide.
And once you accept that, the question we have asked ourselves all our lives rematerializes with urgency: what would I have done, back then, on that other planet?
Except the answer is not rhetorical. It is now. It is us. And there is only one right answer:
We must do everything in our power to stop it.
Yuli Novak is the executive director of B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
