The Arrows Ending in Genocide

Cognitive Dissonance, the Charge of Genocide, and What it Means to be an American Now

My introduction to politics was Naomi Klein's 2007 The Shock Doctrine, and in Chapter 20 she describes "Disaster Apartheid: A World of Green Zones and Red Zones."  This chapter stayed with me because it's one of the few forward-looking chapters in an otherwise history of the "free market's" global expansion. Her examples of disaster apartheid include the literal Green Zone in Iraq where American soldiers and diplomats lived—while the US bombed and occupied the rest of the country, stratified New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and of course — Palestine, the green zone being the US-backed state of Israel, and the red zone being the rest of the region: blockaded, bombarded, sniped, surveilled, occupied.

Last week Klein's new book was released, End Times Fascism, which expounds on this same vision where the wealthy and powerful allow and even hasten an uninhabitable earth for most of the population, retreating to their climate-controlled bunkers or even other planets. In Palestine today, 19 years after the Shock Doctrine's release, the red zone is the rubble across much of Gaza —90% of housing— the thousands of bodies of kids and families trapped beneath, the encampments where 1.8 million people live, and the daily murders and thefts happening across the West Bank.

The US is attacking Iran and there's a looming AI apocalypse, but Gaza is back in headlines this week because of two rock stars / rappers, and the fallout when a billionaire Zionist kicked the latter off a major US tour. If it were victims in Ukraine or Yemen or Sudan, it's unlikely this would have raised an eyebrow. But Macklemore accused a US ally of genocide — an ally that just got cleared (by Trump) for another 2.8 billion in weapons (because America first). He had to go.

As I said, my intro to this conflict was in Klein's book, a view later cemented by similar leftist voices: Chomsky, Finkelstein, Fisk, Hedges, etc. Because I’m against ethnic cleansing, when I read about the Nakba it was easy to see Israel as blameworthy. Because I think proportionality matters, when I learned that in Israel's 2014 Protective Edge they slaughtered 1,462 Palestinians (to Israel's 6)— it was easy to see Israel as blameworthy. Because I think international law matters, when learned how Israel was violating the UN's Green Line with their West Bank Settlements, it was easy to see Israel as blameworthy. And because I think settler colonialism is bad, when I started Rashid Khalid's 100 Year War on Palestine in 2021, it was, once again, easy to see Israel as in the wrong.

Point being, from the start, I did not perceive the current conflict impartially. But even I have struggled to call what Israel is doing a genocide, even as many of these writers who have inspired me and shaped my world view have. Something held me back.

Like every American kid, I grew up having been educated on the Holocaust as the worst, or as bad as, anything that has ever happened—which it is. I watched Schindler's List in high school, we read Eli Vizel's Night, we studied Anne Frank. As an adult, I continued reading about it, walking the Holocaust Memorial in Boston, going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. The horror of the death camps is just mind boggling. It is impossibly cruel, organized, and vast in scope. It's crazy to be part of the same species that does that, as it’s crazy to share species-hood with Jeffery Dahmer. Looking at it is like looking into some kind of void, where light cannot escape because of the density of the pain at its center.

The Nazi's murdered 12 million people, half of whom were Jews, and we understand that a psychology of antisemitism was largely required for this: there is an arrow in my mind between a person who is anti-Semitic, who is defined by feeling or showing hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a cultural, racial, or ethnic group — and genocide (combined, of course, with of other conditions—Germany’s economy after the Treaty of Versailles, the persuasive power and abnormal psychology of Hitler). Put differently, it is unlikely that anyone could have carried out those atrocities had they seen their victims as moral equals, had they experienced a shared and equal humanity through empathy.

Thus, no morally decent person wants to be labelled an anti-Semite, and here's an instinct to take the accusation extremely seriously when a Jewish person or organization makes it, likewise if one were called a racist by the NAACP. No morally decent person wants to be positioned on that arrow that in the past has led to the Holocaust. And if you criticize Israel, if you charge them with genocide, you will be thought of as anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism, of course, is repugnant (as is racism, as is misogyny, as is ableism) and is on the rise. It should be rooted out of society along with all forms of bigotry: through education, through penalization, and indeed through creating safe havens for the most vulnerable. And beyond an obvious aversion to being lumped with actual anti-Semites, to call the Jewish State — settled largely by refugees of genocide— a committer of genocide, feels wrong. It's the ugliest word in the human language.

As discussed in this interview with Phillip Sands, in the eyes of the World Court, the charge has comparable gravity to war crimes, e.g. targeting civilians and their infrastructure—for which the UN has an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. Similarly grave but still legally distinct are crimes against humanity, e.g. blocking access to aid for civilians—also among the UN's charges against Israeli leadership.(1) In the popular moral imagination, however, intending to annihilate an entire people seems exceptional. It is exceptional.

From the UN: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (1) Killing members of the group; (2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (3) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The charges of genocide that South Africa brought against Israel to the World Court are still under investigation, but in 2025, a UN commission found Israel guilty of genocide. So has the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. So has Israeli-born historian and expert on genocide Omer Bartov. So have Israeli human rights groups B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights. These people, these organizations, believe that Israel is intending to destroy in whole or in part, the Palestinian people—using drones, bombs, starvation.

(Bartov article)

As of July 2026, 3 in 10 adults in the US think Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinians. What is involved cognitively, emotionally, in joining that consensus? What is involved in resisting? I mentioned anti-Semitism, and another factor must be the impulse to believe your country is fundamentally good, to believe that it is at least redeemable if the right people got in power. After all, for every atrocity, for every systemic injustice, there are people (who also constitute the US) who are willing to get killed to stop it from happening, and who devote their brief mortal lives working to change it. And despite all the corruption, all the ways oppression mutates and disguises itself over time, change is possible here in a way that it is not in other major powers: Russia and China for instance. This desire is similar to wanting to believe oneself is good, that one's family is good — despite their flaws and mistakes. I share this impulse, despite everything I know about the US and what we've done. No matter how bleak our past is, and it's undeniably, often unspeakably bleak—there's a strong urge to want to think that as long as nations are politically relevant, we can direct our immense power towards promoting human welfare and liberation rather than degradation and oppression.

But then you watch the party you voted for (Democrat) bankroll a genocide. As Omar El Akkad wrote in One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, for many, this was a line of no return. The vision espoused above that our country is redeemable and redirectable towards a greater good seems incompatible with the idea that today, in real time, we fund a genocidal machine. I campaigned for Kamala Harris, because I believed that if Trump won he'd do what he is doing: taking the US down a road it can't come back from, at least not for generations, into authoritarianism. And I believed he'd be immune to any democratic pressure from below to protect and help Gazans—which of course he is. And yet, I'm not sure I'd vote for her again. She supported Biden, along with most of the party, in funding Israel through every war crime, as the Palestinian casualties hit 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, as warnings of genocide were sounded.

As El Akkad suggests, a genocide is a thing that shows the lesser of two evils is still evil, too evil for voters to be complicit in electing, even if it's a vote against a worse villain. What does it mean to be an American, then, when you're faced with an impossible choice: the genocide-supporting party on the right, or the genocide-supporting party on the left? The answer, I think, for many, is to succumb to nihilistic gloom, or perhaps a bright awakening, when they determine that this company is bankrupt and ready to be shuttered, and to start imagining what comes next. For others, it's to deny this wedge and not call it what it is.

For a while I didn't say genocide because, punting, I held this is a legal designation up to courts to decide, and regardless, what Israel / the US is doing is indefensible—the semantics could even be a distraction. But ultimately that's cowardice. We make judgements all the time: theft, fraud, domestic violence—without being lawyers, and while risking being proven wrong. And using the right words does matter (as El Akkad and Hedges discuss in the beginning of this interview). Genocide is an important concept to deploy for the same reason that it's a difficult one to deploy: because of the gravity* it has culturally—the memories it recalls, because of it's capacity to shut down any other conversation, any other justification, because of the way it organizes the mind towards something as unacceptable—full stop.

Three years after Oct 7th, with Gaza ruined and over 75,000 people dead, what else would this be? Why else would Israel destroy almost all of Gaza?

Consider three competing explanations:

1. Israeli leadership wants to destroy Hamas so bad that they are willing to kill limitless numbers of Palestinians incidentally in the process.

2. Israeli leadership wants to destroy Hamas so bad, they are willing to kill limitless numbers of Palestinians instrumentally to accomplish this (as in, to pressure Hamas into unconditional surrender or to break any public support of Hamas).

3. Israeli leadership wants to destroy Palestinians as a group, in whole or in part.

The first two explanations assumes that Hamas is, or ever was (the crimes of Oct 7th notwithstanding), a genuine material threat to the existence of Israel. That's not to say they don't threaten Israel, that it's not terrifying to live near them. But 1 & 2 require that it's both necessary to destroy Hamas for Israel to be safe, and that widespread destruction (1) or targeting civilians (2) is strategically advantageous to do this (unless it was purely a question of vengeance, which would only apply to 1). As I'll touch on throughout this article, I think the security aspect of both 1 and 2 are dubious, and both violate international law regardless.

(1 also risks blurring into 3 in a way, as discussed below, where the genocide of Palestinians is guided by the desire for security).

Regarding Hamas as an existential threat, which is the argument given by Michael Berenbaum and

Menachem Z. Rosensaft, (and relevant to 1 & 2), consider that Israel has the most advanced military in the Middle East, backed by the most powerful army in history. Oct 7th was a war crime committed against Israel by Hamas, and it was also dubbed a security failure by Israel. If you leave your car unlocked in a high-crime neighborhood, and it gets robbed, or stolen, or vandalized—that does not imply it’s your fault. But is it then logical to go back and destroy that neighborhood, to prevent further theft? No. Hamas attacked Israel on motorcycles—not from the air, not with drones, not with jets, not with tanks. They have no Iron Dome, as Israel does. They have no nuclear weapons. Preventing another attack does not require killing all Gazan residents. It requires not having a security failure. It requires an international effort towards Palestinian Statehood and reparations.  

A defense of 1 and 2 could argue that this merely means Israel's response (indiscriminate or deliberate bombing with the goal of destroying Hamas alone) is disproportionate to the threat. But disproportionality comes apart when we see the scale of the devastation coupled with the deliberateness in targeting civilians (see the IAGS and Amnesty International excerpts), both of which are present.

There is a cognitive dissonance in accepting (3) as the most plausible explanation. This is fueled by a media environment that focuses on (A) what Israel does to "prevent" atrocities (e.g. sending text warnings before a bombing), or (B) why they "had" to commit a particular atrocity (e.g. Hamas had a tunnel under a school). These are distortions and deflections, if not outright lies. As the shock of Oct 7th faded and was replaced by the horror of Israel's campaign of violence against Gaza, they became harder to take root. Fake liberals like Sam Harris and Bill Maher promulgate these distortions — Maher this week pointing to Israel's militarized food distribution as counter evidence against genocide, claiming that famine in Gaza is the fault of Hamas looting. A patent lie, a repugnant deflection. It draws attention from Israel's spring 2025 siege (discussed in the very article he screenshot by an Israeli paper), the blockade in the months that followed, the pulverizing of Palestinian infrastructure and the restrictions of food in 2023 and 2024, and of course, the blockade that was already in place since 2008. Starvation as a weapon of war, again, is one of the reasons why the UN has issued an arrest warrant for Israeli leadership.

As the distortions fade, common sense (simple, intuitive reasoning) enters. Even if every hospital, mosque, apartment complex, and school that has been hit by an Israeli missile had a Hamas weapons cache under it: was it necessary or justifiable to flatten it? Necessary to what—keep Israel safe? Justifiable, why—for retribution? If Israel had warned and even given a jetpack to escape to every Gazan before they bombed their apartment, and they decided to stay, is it still justifiable to kill them? Even if Hamas would steal copious amounts of aid (which is dubious), does that justify a blockade that is proven to starve kids? Hamas is an organization of genocidal intent—does that justify bombing all of Gaza? Would we have been justified in killing every German in WW2, or every Turk during the Armenian genocide? We can easily imagine reversing roles, or toy hostage scenarios with domestic terrorists: would we accept these justifications if the roles were reversed? The answer is of course “no” in every case. We don’t need to accept dubious pro-war premises that ultimately function to obfuscate actual war crimes, and undeniable moral crimes.  

Does Israel starve and bomb the people Gaza to break their military enemy (a war crime)—to break support for Hamas and ensure no Hamas cache goes untorched (as espoused in the Dahiya Doctrine), to take revenge on Hamas at all costs—or are they doing it to simply kill as many Gazans as possible (genocide). Put differently, is there an instrumental military value—however illegal, however repugnant—in the large scale murder of Palestinians, or is the death and removal of Palestinians the military value for Israel?

From Berenbaum and Rosensaft article critiquing Bartov:

A discussed below, the bar is incredibly high to prove genocide. Will the ICJ find emails between Israeli leadership where they lay out "a general plan to that end"? Is it ever the case that a "pattern of conduct could only point to the existence" of one intent? As members of the public, especially in the US where every for every paycheck we earn, a piece of it goes into missiles and bullets for Israelis, we don't have to prove it. But we can suspect it. That is where the cognitive dissonance, and the desire to believe 1 or 2 is most salient.

Returning briefly to the lure of 1 & 2, and the "security" argument, note that in the spring of 2025, over 100 former Mossad agents said there was no security purpose to continuing the war., but rather to “appease the far-right parties in [Netanyahu’s] coalition, who have threatened to bring down his government if he does not completely crush Hamas.” There's an important history as well, of conflating the two. Consider the following quote by former Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman:

But even in November (2024), before the 2025 escalation (justified as needed to "crush Hamas" rather than bring the hostages home), “Israel's ousted defense minister says the military has done all it can in Gaza.” As early as January 2024, the strategic value of a bombing campaign was called into question, including by Biden's Secretary of Defense. Taking all this, and reiterating the simple intuitive reasoning above: Hamas does not have 2,000 lb. bombs to drop on Israel. They do not have an Iron Dome to knock missiles out of the sky. They are not a rich, nuclear power backed by the most powerful armies on earth. What is the actual, persistent Hamas threat that justifies flattening Gaza and killing 20,000 kids?

And if revenge was the motivation—then why make both indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against civilians? Why not make more targeted attacks against Hamas, even if it took longer, without risking losing your allies? Indiscriminate bombing to ensure you hit your revenge target could be an answer (a variation of 1). Collective punishment could be an answer, or attacking "Hamas' people" as another form of revenge against them (a variation of 2). But vengefulness can also organize the mind to an identical end, to generalize the target of retribution, to want to destroy a people as such, because some of its members committed a heinous act (3). Like the question of security, revenge (as a basis for 1 and 2) comes apart when we look at the scale of the destruction, the cost in Israel's international standing (including with a future progressive democratic candidate), and to their own humanity. What could override these concerns is a deeper drive to "destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip."

Intent to destroy can be guided by the desire for revenge. It can be guided by the desire to expand your territory, as Israel has done repeatedly—immediately after their founding (increasing the share of Mandatory Palestine offered by Britain from roughly 50% to 70%), then again in the ’67 war. It could be guided by the desire to secure, if it formed in the minds of some Israeli's that Palestinians as a whole were two dangerous a group to be left intact.(2) It can finally be guided by sadism. All of these motivations can, and I think likely are, at play in guiding Israeli leaderships intent to destroy Palestinians as a group. Taken together, they could be sufficiently powerful to override the concerns in the previous paragraph.

It’s not necessary the Israeli population or the Israeli leadership wants every Palestinian dead. As Omer Bartov critically points out, it is sufficient for genocide that a group would be so damaged that they cannot reconstitute themselves. An observer clear of cognitive dissonance, without bias: professional, national, monetary, etc., witnessing what has been done to Gaza across the last three years, could come to no other conclusion.

(link)

After Oct 7th, Israeli leadership may have been content with a complete ethnic cleansing of the region. But by some combination of Palestinian intransigence, international pressure, and the refusal by neighboring Arab states to accept Palestinian refugees—Palestinians have always remained in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, in Israel—demanding rights, demanding a state, demanding to return. This is unacceptable to Israeli leadership, as expressed in Bezel Smotrich's 2017 “Decisive Plan.” So unacceptable, Netanyahu has been accused of having strengthened Hamas historically to undermine a Two-State Solution. Ethnic cleansing on it's own, or a second Nakba, would not have been feasible or sufficient.

Genocide, option 3, is difficult to prove definitively because of the burden of intent to destroy. The ICJ has never actually charged a state (as opposed to non-state actors) with having committed genocide. But we have to make inferences. We have to choose words, because others deflect, distort, deny, and lie—and the atrocities continue. Taking together the following premises: Israel’s demonstrated targeting of civilian life and infrastructure, their historical desire to expand, their desire for revenge (e.g. collective punishment), the dehumanization of Palestinians (3), the lack of any serious other military purpose in Gaza, and the fact that Israel has killed more than 35x as many

people died a on Oct 7th—we see these arrows point once again to genocide.

To close, I'll note that, I think along with the rest of the world, the most heartbreaking part of this is seeing the death-toll of kids, and the impact on child survivors. By the end of 2024, "96% of them [felt] that their death is imminent and almost half [wanted] to die as a result of the trauma they have been through." When it comes to the question of genocide, amidst the voices of pundits, historians, experts, celebrities—what is lost is the voice of the kids, but a 2026 study from Cambridge found that more than two years of war in Gaza have left many Palestinian children too weak to learn or play and convinced they will be “killed for being Gazans." Destroyed, in whole or in part, as a group. We need to listen to them. We need to end the genocide. al this one has such a gravity to it, as again, it implies the country founded largely as a place to protect a group of people from annihilation, are annihilating another group of people. 

(*) The gravity for this one is again, immense, as it implies the country founded largely as a place to protect a group of people from annihilation, are annihilating another group of people.  

(1) There are a lot of awful things that look like genocide, but aren't. (You can imagine a case of war crimes that result in hundreds of thousands of deaths, being worse from a consequentialist perspective than a genocide of much smaller numbers.

(2) Is it not genocide if Netanyahu determined killing all Palestinians was instrumentally required to destroy Hamas, as in "to ensure no Palestinian becomes a member of Hamas, we must kill all Palestinians"?

(3)   This rhetoric runs both ways, but what matters for this purpose is the actual genocide being committed by, as this study discusses, the more powerful military force.