Leaders Do Nothing. Gaza Dies. Are We Next?

The Gaza Genocide: Israel Has Become Worse Than Nazi Germany — And the World Is Complicit

Awaking this morning for my daily 10km run, I reflected on my next piece. Running at 4:00am inspires enormous creativity — especially when consumed by the solitude of existence, the darkness of early morning, and the absence of humanity.

Being able to run free without fear is a liberty we take for granted — but for 80 years Palestinians have been robbed of that freedom. Instead, they’ve faced horrors unimaginable. The luxury to wake and run free of terror and not be murdered by a sniper’s bullet piercing whichever part of their body an IDF murderer chose to target is a privilege Palestinians have never known. Instead, they wake to drones hovering, tanks advancing, bombs falling, and soldiers ready to extinguish their lives — while the world watches and does nothing.

Which is why my thoughts returned to the 20 months of slaughter. Twenty months of watching a trapped, defenceless population starved, bombed, and systematically erased — while global leaders sit idle. Gaza today isn’t merely the scene of war crimes. It is the site of one of humanity’s most grotesque and openly broadcast genocides, carried out by Israel, executed by its military, celebrated by much of its society, and protected at every step by the United States and United Kingdom.

What distinguishes Israel’s genocide from even the worst atrocities of the past century isn’t just the scale of destruction, but the full visibility with which it is being conducted — and the depraved public enthusiasm that fuels it.

Unlike Nazi Germany, where much of the population was kept in deliberate ignorance about the full scale of the Holocaust, Israeli society watches this genocide in real-time. Starving infants, rows of corpses, bombed UN shelters, dead mothers clutching their children — these images flood Israeli news, social media, and public discourse daily. The knowledge isn’t hidden. It’s total. And far from shame or horror, Israeli society embraces it with enthusiasm.

Poll after poll shows overwhelming support among Israeli Jews for the total annihilation of Gaza. Crowds gather on hilltops to watch and cheer as bombs obliterate apartment blocks. IDF soldiers post smiling selfies before and after airstrikes. Settlers gleefully film themselves torching Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Ministers casually discuss turning Gaza into a wasteland or driving its population into Egypt. Israeli social media is flooded with memes mocking the starvation and deaths of Palestinian children.

This isn’t the behaviour of an uninformed or oppressed public. It’s a society so poisoned by racial supremacism, religious nationalism, and dehumanisation that genocide has become normalized public policy.

When former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians “human animals,” he wasn’t issuing fringe rhetoric. He was voicing what much of Israel’s political, media, and civilian discourse openly believes: that Palestinians are subhuman and undeserving of life. This has gone far beyond occupation and apartheid — it is full-scale ethnic cleansing, fully endorsed across Israeli society.

But the world remains frozen. The same international institutions that declared after World War II genocide would “never again” be tolerated now watch passively. The UN — created in part to prevent such atrocities — has been reduced to irrelevance by American vetoes. The US not only blocks every meaningful Security Council action but continues to arm and fund Israel’s military machine. The UK, Germany, and much of Europe issue empty statements of “concern” while continuing arms sales and intelligence sharing. Other so-called defenders of human rights remain complicit through their silence and double standards.

Israel’s defenders often invoke the Holocaust as a shield to deflect criticism. But this grotesque misuse of history can’t conceal the reality: Israel has now embraced the very logic of racial elimination that once threatened Jews themselves. The state born from genocide has now become a perpetrator of genocide.

The difference is stark. Under Nazi Germany, the German public either didn’t know or could plausibly claim ignorance about the full scale of the Holocaust while living under the fear of a totalitarian regime. In Israel today, there’s no excuse. It’s a democracy where the public votes for the architects of genocide, cheers their actions, and demands more bloodshed. Israel is a nation that not only accepts its government’s atrocities — it celebrates them.

If international law and human rights still mean anything, then the response must be uncompromising: Israel must be expelled from the UN; a total global arms embargo must be imposed; Israeli leaders, military officials, and all complicit institutions must be sanctioned; Netanyahu, Gallant, Ben Gvir, Smotrich and others must be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in The Hague; and a global boycott and divestment campaign must be launched.

These aren’t radical demands. They are the very standards the world claimed to uphold after Nuremberg. The only question is whether they apply universally, or only when politically convenient.

The people of Gaza are being exterminated. Their hospitals have become morgues. Their schools are now ruins. Entire families have been erased. And unless the world acts now, this genocide will succeed — not because it was hidden, but because it was live-streamed while governments chose to stand by.

Israel’s barbarity is already judged. But history will judge the silence of its enablers even more harshly.