On Gaza

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 Israel itself, 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 other planets. In Palestine today, the red zone is the rubble across much of Gaza —90% of housing, the encampments where 1.8 million people live, and the waves of murders and thefts across the West Bank.

The US is at war with Iran and there's a looming AI apocalypse, but Gaza was back in headlines last 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 Klein's book, a view cemented by other leftist voices: Chomsky, Finkelstein, Fisk, Hedges, Davis, etc. So from the start I did not perceive the current conflict impartially. Because I’m against ethnic cleansing, when I read about the Nakba it was easy to see Israel as blameworthy. I think proportionality matters. So, when I learned that in 2014's Operation Protective Edge Isreal slaughtered 1,462 Palestinian civilians (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 them 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.

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.

The Charge of Anti-Semitism

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 learning 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 anti-Semitic psychology 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 ethnic cleansing and genocide. 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 there's an instinct to take the accusation extremely seriously when a Jewish person or organization makes it. 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 and on the rise. It should be rooted out of society along with all forms of bigotry. 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.

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 issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. Similarly grave but still legally distinct are crimes against humanity, e.g. blocking aid for civilians—also among the UN's charges against Israeli leadership.* 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 have Israeli human rights groups B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights. These organizations, among others, believe that Israel is intending to destroy in whole or in part, the Palestinian people—using drones, bombs, starvation.

(Israeli-born historian and expert on genocide Omer Bartov: article)

The State of American Identity

As of July 2026, 3 in 10 adults in the US think Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinians. What is involved in joining that consensus? What is involved in resisting? I mentioned anti-Semitism. 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 there are citizens who are willing to get killed to stop it from happening, and who devote their lives to changing it. And 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, there's a strong urge to want to think that we can redirect 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 that our country is redeemable and redirectable towards a greater good seems incompatible with the idea that we are funding 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 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?

Considering two explanations:

1. Israeli leadership wants to destroy Hamas so bad that they are willing to kill limitless numbers of Palestinians either incidentally (e.g. indiscriminate bombing) or instrumentally (e.g. to pressure Hamas into unconditional surrender) to accomplish this.

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

The motivations for (1) would most likely, at core, be security or revenge. Security assumes that it's necessary to destroy Hamas for Israel to be safe. This would be held to such an extent that indiscriminate violence is tolerable, and/or targeting civilians is both strategic and justifiable (note that both violate international law).

Is the Security thesis true? Such a view is advanced, for instance, by Michael Berenbaum and Menachem Z. Rosensaft, who hold that Hamas is an existential threat and that alone drives Israel's violence. To this point, 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. So is the response to a security failure better security, or carpet bombing where an adversFary came from? On a smaller scale, we can imagine a home invasion that ends in heinous violence against the residents. The response would be better security for the block, as well as a punishment for the assailants and those who orchestrated the crime. It would not be leveling and starving the neighborhood where the intruders came from.

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 did not require killing tens of thousands of Gazan residents. It requires not having a security failure (including by responding to warnings given of an impending attack, as Israel had recieved). It also requires addressing the decades-long grievances that undergird a campaign such as Al-Aqsa Flood—back to the original ethnic cleansing and occupation in 1948.

A defense of (1) could argue that this merely means Israel's response is disproportionate to the threat. But the disproportionality explanation has limits. When we see the scale of the devastation (coupled with the deliberateness in targeting civilians), you have to ask if it's "over the top" as Biden said, or if the objective is to infact destroy Palestinians, not Hamas. The latter is what many groups discussed here have concluded.

An aside - distortions and deflections:

There is a cognitive dissonance in accepting (2) as the most plausible explanation. This is fueled by a media environment that focuses on what Israel does to "prevent" atrocities (e.g. sending text warnings before a bombing), and 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. Fake liberals like Sam Harris and Bill Maher promulgate these distortions — Maher last week pointing to Israel's (militarized, often deadly) food distribution system as counter evidence against genocide, claiming that famine in Gaza is the fault of Hamas looting. A patent lie, a repugnant deflection. Such claims draw attention from Israel's preceding 11-week siege (discussed in the very article he screenshot), the blockade the following summer, and the pulverizing of the Palestinian food system following Oct 7th.

Per the Shock Doctrine thesis, these distortions took root more easily in the wake of the Oct 7th atrocities. As the shock faded for much of the world, and was replaced by the horror of Israel's campaign against Gaza, common sense enters the picture. For instance, even if every hospital, mosque, apartment complex, and school was harboring a Hamas weapons cache: was it necessary or justifiable to flatten it? Necessary to what—keep Israel safe? Justifiable, why—for retribution? Likewise, if Israel had warned and even given an escape pod to every Gazan before they bombed their apartment, is it still justifiable to kill them in their homes (assuming they refuse to leave)? 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 “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.  

Explanations, continued:

Let's return to the central question: Does Israel starve and bomb the people Gaza to break their military enemy—to break support for Hamas (the Dahiya Doctrine), ensure no Hamas cache goes untorched, to take revenge (all of which fall under 1)? Or are they doing it to simply kill as many Gazans as possible (genocide, 2)?

Consider this excerpt from Berenbaum and Rosensaft, critiquing Bartov:

A discussed in the Sands interview, 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 a piece of every paycheck we earn goes to the IDF, we don't have to prove it. But we can suspect it and come to an informal consensus. That is where the cognitive dissonance is most salient.

Returning briefly to the lure of (1), to the Security thesis, 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.” When returning the hostages was still the central focus of global discourse, Yoav Gollant reportedly argued that Hamas had been decimated and the military had done all it could. And as early as January 2024, the strategic value of a bombing campaign was questioned by Biden's Secretary of Defense. And it makes sense, for the same reason the Bush administration was warned that invading Iraq would increase terrorism in the region. When you bomb a people, render thousands of kids orphans—you are running a recruitment program for extremist groups. You are guaranteeing future Oct 7ths, future 9/11s. If Israel's goal was defeating Hamas (or similar groups), operation Iron Swords was never the answer.

Taking all this with the comparisons made 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, US-backed nuclear power) and apply simple intuitive reasoning. Ask what is the existential threat that justifies flattening Gaza and killing 20,000 kids?

We can derive the following possibilities from the collapse of the Security thesis and Israel's continued assault on Gaza:

• i. Israel does not believe (or know about) the Mossad Agents' warnings, or the lessons of history (unlikely), i.e. they still believe Security. (1-compatible)

• ii. Security is not the point, revenge is. They care as little about Palestinian life as they do about blow-back when perusing revenge against Hamas (discussed below). (1-compatible)

• iii. They equate Palestinians to Hamas and see their destruction as serving both security and retributive interests, among perhaps others (discussed below). (2-compatible)

• iv. The distinction isn't relevant, Hamas is an excuse to destroy Palestinians. (2-compatible)

I would suspect both iii. and iv. count as genocide (1). Let's look at iii first.

There's an important history of conflating the Hamas and Palestinians, which is where we see the possibility of (1) collapsing into (2): that Israel's far-right faction considers it necessary for security to destroy Palestinians in whole or in part. Consider the following quote by former Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman:

Likewise this article from the Intercept in the days after Oct 7th:

So we can accept iii. as plausible, and note that it is compatible with a modified version of ii and iv— bringing both under the scope of genocide (raising the likelihood that it is such). Examining ii., if revenge against Hamas was the motivation (and iii was false, i.e. they did draw a distinction between Palestinians and Hamas)—then why make both indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against civilians? Why not make more targeted attacks against Hamas, even if it took longer? Indiscriminate bombing to ensure you hit your revenge target could be an answer. Collective punishment could be an answer, or attacking "Hamas' people" as another form of revenge against them. But any of these would have to be weighed against the cost of (A) alienating the rest of the world and (B) sowing the seeds for blow-back.(**)

Revenge is almost certainly part of the motivational structure of Israeli leadership and their population, as it was for the USA after 9/11, as it was for Hamas during Oct 7th. But as an explainer of what Israel has actually done, like the question of security, it loses traction when we again look at the scale of the destruction and the costs to their future security, to their own humanity, and to Israel's international standing (including with rising progressive democrats who accuse them of genocide: Abdul El-Sayed, AOC, Zohran Mamdani, etc.). It's also important to reiterate that revenge is not incompatible with genocide when its scope is all Palestinian people (either because they are conflated with Hamas, or because of the international equivalent of a blood feud).

Conclusion 

Intent to destroy a group can be guided by the desire for revenge, the desire to secure, the desire to expand (as Israel has done—most notably in 1948 and 1967, and continuously in the West Bank). It can be guided by sadism. All of these motivations can, and I think likely are, at play in guiding the Israeli leadership's 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 Israel wants every Palestinian dead, for what they're doing to count as genocide. As genocide scholar and Israeli 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 this would have been likely seen as infeasible. 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, a state, and 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 its own, or a second Nakba, would not have been seen as an option.

Genocide* 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, their conflation of Hamas with Palestinians, the dehumanization of Palestinians(*), the lack of any serious other military purpose in Gaza, and the fact that Israel has killed more than 50x as many

people died a on Oct 7th—we see these arrows point 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, many now orphans and amputees. 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, to sit with their pain, and believe in their reality of living through genocide.

As Americans, especially with an election next month, we need to as a start elect and pressure representatives who will (A) stop all funding to the state of Israel, (B) bolster the pursuit of justice at the international level for those complicit in genocide, (C) and support reparations, including land-return, and statehood for Palestinians.

(*) Not of necessity, but likelihood

(*)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.   (*) To the extent that revenge is relevant force, consider that vengefulness can also organize the mind to an identical ends: to generalize the target of retribution, to want to destroy a people as such, because some of its members committed a heinous act (fitting 3).

(*) 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.

(*) 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"?

(*)   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.