We are told that Israel is “defending itself.” A lie. Israel is killing. Israel is crushing. Israel is destroying.
Enough hypocrisy. Enough façades. What is happening in Gaza is not a war—it is collective punishment, an organized massacre, the methodical destruction of a people already shattered by seventeen years of siege. One can invoke “self-defense,” one can invoke “the fight against terrorism,” but the facts remain: Hamas has not been eliminated. The Israeli army is not defeating Hamas—it cannot even locate it. Instead, it is targeting civilians: children, mothers, the elderly. Hospitals are reduced to rubble. Entire neighborhoods turned to ashes. This is the reality.
We are told it is a “war.”
No. It is a siege turned into a slaughterhouse. It is an open-air prison for 17 years, transformed into a mass grave. It is a slow-motion genocide, unfolding before our eyes.
Thousands dead, the overwhelming majority women and children. Neighborhoods flattened, hospitals destroyed, entire families wiped out under the bombs. This is the naked truth. And yet today, this is cynically described as “security.”
But this bloodbath is not accidental. It follows a long-standing logic. David Ben-Gurion said it bluntly in 1937: “The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan; nor does it preclude expansion in the future.” Expansion was envisioned long before 1948, long before the Holocaust. And it continues today, inscribed openly in the Likud charter, which claims Israeli sovereignty “from the river to the sea.”
The supreme hypocrisy: Palestinians are accused of seeking Israel’s destruction when they repeat the same slogan to demand freedom and equality. Yet it is Israel that has applied this vision all along—through colonization, blockade, and expulsion.
This logic of domination now takes a terrifying form. Israeli Minister Israel Katz has proposed building a so-called “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah, to confine 600,000 displaced Palestinians. A militarized enclave, without freedom of movement, without a future. A “city”? No. A cage. The echo of history is chilling—walls repainted to disguise oppression, recalling other times when suffering was hidden behind façades.
Even within Israel, cracks are visible. Reservists returning from Gaza have written to the military justice system, denouncing illegal orders marked, in their words, with “a black flag.” When soldiers themselves fear becoming complicit in war crimes, it is not just that the red line has been crossed—it has been trampled.
As for Netanyahu’s government, it does not defend Israel: it sacrifices hostages, ignores its generals, undermines its intelligence services, and traps its own people in a suicidal spiral. This is not about security—it is about political survival, the preservation of corrupt power at the cost of Palestinian lives and Israel’s international isolation.
And the West? It watches. The United States, above all, endorses, finances, arms. It speaks of peace while delivering bombs. It speaks of law while turning a blind eye to systematic violations of international conventions. This is not silence—it is complicity.
So let us stop. Stop calling this a “war.” Stop repeating that “Palestinians reject peace” when they have been trapped for seventy-five years in denial and dispossession. Stop claiming Israel “has no choice” when everything proves otherwise.
The truth is brutal but undeniable:
You cannot build peace on ruins and mass graves.
You cannot imprison two million people in a besieged and starving enclave, then feign surprise when they resist.
You cannot call Israel a democracy while a part of its population lives under permanent occupation and blockade.
You cannot invoke the memory of the Holocaust to justify oppression, when that very memory should be the strongest reminder that no people should ever again endure humiliation, exile, and erasure.
We must have the courage to name injustice. Gaza is not a threat: it is a wound. And as long as that wound is left open, as long as bombs are dropped instead of negotiations, colonization continues instead of recognition, starvation replaces freedom—there will be no peace, no security, no future.
It is time to say loudly and clearly: enough lies, enough massacres, enough hypocrisy. Human dignity is not optional—it is a universal right. And today, it demands that we cry out: Never again—for anyone, and above all for Gaza.
Gaza is the mirror of the world. If we accept that a people be treated in this way, we accept the collapse of our own humanity. If we tolerate these crimes, we renounce everything that gives human dignity its meaning.
Today, only one word remains to be said, to be shouted, to be written everywhere:
Enough.
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✍️ Kader Tahri
Engaged columnist, concerned observer
“We must say things as they are, but refuse that they remain this way.”
https://kadertahri.blogspot.com/
