He saw Israel as a morally bankrupt nationalists project in the image and likeness of Nazism and Fascism and consistency expressed sympathy and support for the Palestinian armed struggle, which he saw as consistent with his own fight in the days of German occupation. He also saw Zionism and its European agents as complicit in the mass murder of millions of Jews.

Marek Edelman, who died in Poland in 2009, was an almost unknown figure in Israel and partly because of his opposition to Zionism and his life in communist Poland, his name never reached the notoriety that his friend and commander, Mordechai Anielewicz, who was killed during the uprising. And yet, it is precisely the Bundist legacy of Edelman and his commitment to a universalist judaism which makes him perhaps one of the most important anti-Zionist Jews of the 20th century.

To all the leaders of Palestinian military, paramilitary and guerilla organizations
To all the soldiers of Palestinian militant groups:

My name is Marek Edelman, I am a former Deputy Commander of the Jewish Military Organization in Poland, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Insurrection. In the memorable year of the insurrection—1943—we were fighting for the survival of the Jewish community in Warsaw. We were fighting for mere life, not for territory, nor for a national identity. We were fighting with a hopeless determination, but our weapons were never directed against the defenseless civilian populations, we never killed women and children, In a world devoid of principles and values, despite a constant danger of death, we did remain faithful to these values and moral principles.

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We were isolated in our fight, and yet the powerful opposing army was not able to destroy these barely armed boys and girls.

Our fight in Warsaw lasted several weeks, later we fought in the Underground and in the Warsaw insurrection of 1944.

Yet nowhere in the world can a guerilla force bring conclusive victory, [and] nowhere can it be defeated by [powerful] armies, Neither can your war attain any resolution. Blood will be spilled in vain and lives will be lost on both sides.

We have never been careless with life. We have never sent our soldiers to certain death. Life is one for eternity. Nobody has the right to mindlessly take it away. It is high time for everybody to understand just that.

Just look around you, Look at Ireland. After 50 years of bloody war, peace has arrived. Formerly deadly enemies have set down at a common table. Look at Poland... Without a shot being fired, the criminal communist system has been defeated. Both You and the State of Israel have to radically change your attitude. You have to want peace in order to save the lives of hundreds and perhaps thousands of people, and to create a better future for your loved ones, for your children. I know from my own experience that the current unfolding of events depends on you, the Military Leaders... You are wise and intelligent enough to understand that without peace there is no future for Palestine, and that peace can be attained only at the cost of both sides agreeing to some concessions.

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Since the beginning of the Slughter of Gaza, these images have become considerably more common than the oft-cited photographs of Palestinian children brandishing model weapons or marching through schoolyards cladded in Hamas regalia—both of which have long been used to justify Israeli wanton violence against them and their parents.

No expression of the Israeli ideological abuse of its children is more sinister than the video aired on Israeli state TV in November 2023 which shows children singing joyfully about the destruction of Gaza. The childish candor and the charming gestures of youth singing songs of hope for the the “total annihilation of Gaza” offered a hellish picture of what the Israeli occupation has done to its children.

The voices turned into clarions of destruction, suffering and genocidal mass murder and the children into instruments of war before they are old enough to understand the song of death that they have been made to sing. This is a stark example of the ideological abuse of children—of a society that molds them into participants in its violence before they can question it. While Palestinian children are condemned for merely growing up under the symbols of resistance to a brutal occupation, Israeli children are shaped by a culture that feeds them the language of annihilation as though it were a nursery rhyme.

The construction of an Israeli national childhood rooted in a segregationist agenda of religious particularism, national superiority, and ethnic exclusivity is an ideological framework that shapes children not as citizens of the world but as members of a cult of cruelty and self-righteous violence. From an early age, they are taught that their belonging is not universal but conditional on the exclusion and domination of the other. To see themselves as chosen is to see others as undesirable, unrelatable, and ultimately expendable. This is the foundation upon which they are educated, where songs of destruction become acts of self-assertion, and where the celebration of another’s suffering is framed not as cruelty but as destiny.

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Justice for Palestine

Justice for the children of Gaza would have to mean at least three things. First, the trial and punishment of those responsible for the genocidal destruction of Palestine in an international court. Second, the reconstruction of Gaza and the West Bank, funded with Israeli assets—either seized or ceded voluntarily by Israel—alongside reparations for Palestinian victims. But that alone would not suffice. Justice for Palestine must mean the end of the occupation, ensuring that the children of Gaza have the right to be free, to dream, and to hope beyond the borders of Jabaliya or Jenin. Beyond the borders of Israel. Beyond the shadows of an oppression designed not only to strip them of their rights and aspirations but to deny them the very essence of childhood: the expectations of becoming men and women not of Palestine but of the world. Perhaps curiously, this is also what justice for the children of Israel ought to be.

The children of Israel, too, should have the right to hope for a future where they are recognized as righteous and just individuals by their neighbors, free from the ideological turpitude of their parents, exempt of the guilt of having sung songs of death and destruction and innocent of the crimes committed by their government. They should have the right to grow up and be citizens of a tolerant and democratic society where not only their own rights but the rights of their neighbors are enshrined in a collective identity that values humanity over religious, national, or ethnic pedigrees. The children of Israel deserve a childhood that is not shaped by the ideological demands of a national narrative that makes them ideological child soldiers.

The children of Israel should be free from the burden of the zionist narratives that demands them to look at themselves as eternal victims and forces them to live in constant fear. They, too, deserve a childhood unshackled from the demand to conform to a collective national trauma. They should have the right to grow up imagining a world beyond conflict, where they need not lay down their life to defend the state and some caricaturesque version of judaism. The children of Israel should be allowed to become men and women committed to ensuring the dignity and rights of all people, regardless of where they were born, what religion they profess, what language they speak. These children of Israel, like all children, deserve the hope that their future will be defined by their own actions and values, not by the cycles of violence and retribution that have plagued their past.

The right to a one state solution from the river to the sea

There is only one condition that can guarantee these rights: a single, secular, and democratic state where the children of Israel can learn to be democratic, tolerant, and just. A state where every individual, from the river to the sea, has one vote—where citizenship is not determined by religion or ethnicity but by the simple and inviolable principle of equality. A state where rights and obligations are shared equally, where administrative detention does not exist, and where no child is dragged away in shackles to disappear into the machinery of repression. In short, a state in which the other is ourselves, where responsibility is not just a legal obligation but a moral commitment to one’s neighbor and to a shared humanity as the fundamental form of identity.

The children of Palestine and the children of Israel deserve each other. They deserve a childhood in which friendships are not foreclosed by guns and walls, where play is not interrupted by air raid sirens, and where neither siblings, parents or friends need to be mourned in premature encounters with death. No novel solution is needed—the world has long known the political model that best allows for this and that is a secular, democratic society, where rights are not granted at birth to some and denied to others. It is only there that justice, peace, and dignity can offer what no wall and gun can ever do. They can offer children a childhood.

Israel must cease to be a Jewish state and perhaps even cease to be called Israel. Instead of a state for the Jews, it would become a state of all its citizens, where membership in the state is not a priviledge of pedigree but a democratic principle based on equal rights and obligations. To abandon the structures and the ideas of national exclusivity at the core of the state that have made the murder of 20,000 children possible, that have enabled the sniping of toddlers in the West Bank, that have justified the incarceration of scores of Palestinian children in Israeli detention camps—this is not just a moral obligation; it is the necessary condition for any future that does not condemn the children (who, as James Baldwin once famously explained, are always ours) to be proud murderers or heroic martyrs.

It is too late to save the children who have already been made to sing songs of genocide and destruction. They will grow into adults who must one day look back on the sinister words they once unwittingly pronounced. But it is not too late to dismantle the system that has recruited them. It is not too late to end the conditions that turn children into ideological soldiers and their future adults selves into perpetrators. A state built on segregation and repression can only sustain itself through violence and that violence needs agents to exercise it. A state built on equality and justice is the only path forward—not only for the many past generations of Palestinian children who have suffered under the ferocity of the Israeli occupation but also for the Israelis who deserve to be freed from the moral decay to which their own delirium of supremacy condemns them.

A ferocity instinctive in the Israeli, Zionist and philozionist public, has echoed as the soundtrack of the moving nightmare of the Slaughter of Gaza. The laughter, the joy, the clapping of frenzied hands, the whistling and the wild gesticulations of the celebration of death and destruction and its sinister cacophony of jubilation are a animated by compulsion beyond the ones that animate the pathetic giggles of the proverbial Schadenfreude.

The laughter of hell has haunted me over the past 15 months and has given me no rest. Endemic in German public discourse, the American moral contrarianism and among Zionist thugs on the internet and in the streets, it can only be described as a demonic joy in the suffering of Palestinians. For this cruelty and its enjoyment, for the celebratory echoes that it has produced, Gaza demands the creation of a new word: Gräuelfreude—the delight in atrocities.

This cruelty is not merely the justification of Palestinian death and suffering as a necessary evil as the spartan idiots of the realpolitik camp would like to suggest. These are the good people who online or on your television screens shield their conscience and that of their audience with the grotesque slogan “Of course nobody wants to see dead children but…”

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Nor is it the claim that the suffering is fabricated, which is the main charge of Pallywood libel. Pallywood is an attempt to deflected and deny the charge of evil committed. Children were not killed, they claim., The small bodies wrapped in white shrouds in the floors of Gaza morgues were only puppets meant to excite the moral indignation of us, useful idiots.

These justifications of the suffering of others are ghastly enough but one must accept that these two forms—despicable as they may be—still express a moral concern and attempt, albeit immorally, to deny of justify the crime because they recognise its monstrosity. However, the demonic spirit whose laughter gorges on the death of those children, the one that fills my worst nightmares about human nature, has no moral consideration. Gräuelfreude is the joy of evil.

Hell is empty

The mocking laughter of the incubus emits these gruesome moans of pleasure as my eyes try to absorb in terror the images of scorched cities, starving children scrambling for scattered flour, toddlers sobbing before the bodies of their dead siblings, young girls wailing beside the lifeless corpses of their mothers, fathers carrying their dead children in their arms, journalists lying motionless under the broken gazes of grieving colleagues, reports of female doctors raped to death, eyewitness accounts of toddlers being executed. The unfathomable catalog of barbarity, cruelty, and inhumanity that is now Gaza is their triumph. But this joy is not merely the triumph of depravity over the dignity of the human.

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To the celebrations of displacement, praise for destruction, applause for murder one can add the online declarations of pride and tribal honour by IDF soldiers over the killings and demolitions now documented by the Hind Rajab Foundation for legal proceedings and for posterity. The legal record will probably remember as our horror will not be erased. But of the matters yet unsettled there is one that to me might be more pressing than the question of the legal record, of the mourning of the dead, of justice. In fact, all these matters depend on how we answer this one question.

The question that must be asked and answered is who are we after Gaza? There are only two possible answers: We will be the enablers and promoters of evil, or we will be its enemies. At this hour, I can say with certainty that there is nothing in between and, furthermore, that all matters concerning redress and justice, mourning, grief and consolation are all dependent on all of us witnesses reminding those who pursue justice, those for whom no human suffering is foreign. Justice depends on continue to be haunted by the ghoulish laughter of those who relished the sights, sounds and scents of hell.

Each year, the international community embarks on its ritual pilgrimage to Auschwitz, staging a carefully choreographed performance of remembrance. Heads are bowed, solemn speeches are delivered, and declarations of intention to“never again” allow such barbarity are intoned in somber notes.

This ritual, repeated with almost liturgical precision, has long served as a reaffirmation of a moral lesson extracted from the horrors of the Holocaust. Since the liberation of the camp, the history of post-war atrocities at the hands or on the watch of those very pilgrims should have been enough to put the honesty of those pledge in doubt.

But this year, on the 80th anniversary of the day in which the world was allowed to see the postcards of the hell that Germany had built in Poland, the echoes of the barbarity that Israel has unleashed in Gaza make the pilgrimage little more than a spectacle for political consumption and the moral force of the even counterfeit.

The spectacle of penitence appears almost entirely detached from the realities of the world it seeks to shape. It is not merely the utter and pathetic failure to prevent the atrocities but also the complete dereliction of political duties to observe and protect the political order that emerged in the name of preventing those atrocities. The commemoration of Auschwitz has become less an act of historical reckoning than a ritual absolution for those in power.

The Irish Soothsayer

In addressing the audience, Irish President Michael D. Higgins referred to the war in Gaza. He spoke of revenge as a “lessening of the human spirit” and alluded to the devastation and scale of the destruction and death that Israel has visited upon the people of Gaza.

Predictably he drew criticism from Israeli officials. His comments, while not explicitly equating Gaza with Auschwitz, were denounced as the politicization of the event and of the memory of the victims of Nazi crimes. But the clarion call was in order and it served to underscore not only the magnitude of the crimes for which Israeli officials are being investigated for possible incitement to genocide, genocide and crimes against humanity but also the complicity of Western capitals in the slaughter of Gaza.

The outrage over Higgins’s remarks reflects a struggle over the ownership and application of Holocaust memory but this struggle is political and not moral. Auschwitz stood for decades as the very expression of absolute evil and as a symbol of unparalleled suffering but also as the sole domain of Jewish particularity. The result has been a rigid moral doctrine in which Jewish suffering has been granted historical weight and consequence while other suffering—and the Palestinian suffering in particular—however immense, has found no language or means to render it visible.

It is not only the carefully arranged stage set—the theatrical framing of Birkenau’s entrance, the warm glow of spotlights—that has turned Auschwitz and its ghosts into little more than a political spectacle. It is also the profound and ongoing failure by political figures and national leaders to uphold international humanitarian law and defend the integrity of the institutions that were meant to make Auschwitz truly unique in the history of human cruelty.

The weight of its memory was supposed to serve as a foundation for a world in which such atrocities would never be repeated. Instead, the invocation of Auschwitz has become an empty gesture that, at best, coexists comfortably with the very political conditions it was meant to repudiate and, at worse, is used to aid and abet enormous cruelty while keeping the moral conscience of the West safely distracted by speeches and genuflexion.

The Banalisation of Evil

The Israeli government, its promoters and emissaries, as well as its clients across Western capitals find the analogy of Auschwitz and Gaza objectionable. Yet both of these episodes of murderous brutality , albeit in different way, belong to the foundational crimes of the state of Israel. The Israeli qualm is, however, that the analogy of the violence that Jews underwent and the violence that Israelis committed commit the sin of trivialization. The absolute uniqueness of the holocaust, they imagine, should have no parallel or analogue.

Yet, for decades Israel has produced a much more grotesque facsimile of the icons, gestures and mechanisms of Auschwitz which far from being mistakes about the order of magnitude of the holocaust (as the presumed mischaracterisation of Gaza might or might not be) is the full construction of an industry of Auschwitz merchandise and assortments.

Examples abound. The March of the Living in which jewish teens under the pretence of reclaiming the fields of Birkenau from the pangs of historical terror, put up a carnivalesque parade with songs and Israeli flags included among the derelict barracks of the camp. The use of the victimisation of Jews in concentration camps as an ideological scaffold to buttress the ideological project of Zionism. In recent memory, however, few compare to the appalling performance offered by Israel’s former UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan when he sported the ultimate symbol of Jewish suffering—the yellow Star of David—to shield Israel from the rule of international law.

The actions of the Israeli diplomat at the highest level of international representation were a sobering display, not only of the shameless theatrics of a bully acting on behalf of a rogue state but also of the sheer depravity involved in reducing the profound suffering of millions of Jews to a mere logo and catchphrase. This was not just a trivialization of antisemitism; it was an egregious desecration of Jewish suffering and a profound violation of Jewish memory.

Gaza and Auschwitz

It is in any case true that the comparison between Auschwitz and Gaza is infelicitous and as matter of indicating a difference of degrees should be avoided. Gaza is simply much worse than Auschwitz and to present Gaza as a continuation of Auschwitz is a trivialization of the monstrosity of Gaza.

For one thing, Auschwitz operated largely concealed from the everyday life and line of sight of those who were meant to benefit from its atrocities—the German people. While its existence was not entirely unknown, its full horror remained hidden from the public. The fabrics of death were both physically distant and shrouded in deliberate secrecy.

Not so Gaza. Until they started to be haunted by authorities around the world during their vacations, Israeli soldiers happily boasted their murderous exploits on social media platforms across the digital ecosystem. Meanwhile, the victims of Gaza armed with cellphones recorded and broadcasted their own extermination. Nobody with a computer could claim ignorance of what the Israelis did in Gaza and more importantly, none of its putative beneficiaries in the Jewish community could could plausibly deny knowledge of the extent of the crimes committed in their name.

Gaza has another particularity which makes it considerably worse than Auschwitz. In Gaza, the Israelis have enlisted the ghosts of Auschwitz in the murder of children, women and men. The Israeli machine deployed the victims of Auschwitz and their memory as instruments in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and in the commission of what by most lights increasingly looks like a genocide.

The monstrosity of asserting the complicity of the million of dead Jewish children of Auschwitz in the killing of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza is nothing less than the geometric proliferation of evil. An evil built on the evil utilisation of the evil of all evils because while evil preserved the moral integrity of the victims, the Israelis desecrated their silence.

Auschwitz after Gaza

If one is to believe Israel and its clients, between the keffiyeh or the word Palestine and Auschwitz there is not a difference of kind but merely a difference of degree. Well, it seems fair and perhaps critical to say that antisemitism both in its history and its actual unfolding has little in common with the products that emerge from the assembly line of Israels Auschwitz industry and the holy of holies that the money merchants have turned into a Jewish suffering theme parks.

The conflation of all things that Israelis dislike—from keffiyehs and watermelons to Bernie Sanders and Karim Khan—into the ranks of antisemitism have made antisemitism trivia. The ideological engine that once drove the extermination of large parts of the Jewish population of Europe has been reduced to nothing more than a cry of wolf, shrugged off and dismissed. In doing so, Israel’s campaign of trivialization has turned both Auschwitz and its evils into mere trifles.

In my Auschwitz, the one in my mind, I mourn for Gaza. I mourned for Hind Rajab, I mourn for Zina Al-Ghou, I mourn for Mohamed Al-Masry, I mourn for Shaban al-Dalou who burned alive, I mourn for Refaat Alareer, I mourn for Ayat al-Khadour, who announced her death to anyone willing to listen.

And I mourn for the ghosts of Auschwitz buried, under the ruins of Gaza along our moral certainties, our sense of humanity and the magnanimity with which I was able to look at my fellow men. My hand runs constantly over their names.

With the first detonations over the heads of the people of Gaza, the Jewish century ended on the 8th of October of 2023. The monstrous brutality unleashed on that day, differs from the demonic brutality of the last seven decades of Israeli occupation and its machine of death in its intensity and concentration.

Yet the current chapter of the Nakba, of the catastrophe, which never stopped since at least December of 1947, is in all sorts of ways the legitimate successor of al-Tira, of Deir Yassin, of Tantura, of the Rafah massacre of 56, of Sabra and Shatila, of the Ibrahim Mosque Massacre, of the murder in broad daylights of Muhammad al Durrah, of the slaughter of 300 children during Ehud Olmert’s Operation Cast Lead, of the murder of the Bakr children during Netanyahu’s operation Protective Edge, in which Israel murdered more than 500 children, of the infernal wave of pogroms in the West Bank perpetrated by the children of the Kach party and under the auspices of the IDF and of the perpetual apartheid that underpins this rapacious exercise of religious nationalism.

But there is at least one way in which the Slaughter of Gaza differs from the history of Israeli atrocities with its long catalogue of raped women including minors, murdered children and bereaved parents. The Slaughter of Gaza, despite the best efforts of the Israeli military complex and of the ministry of strategic affairs is not hidden from view. The evil that is being committed in the name of Jews and Judaism is being done in broad daylight and in front of cameras for everybody to see. The trembling hands of the Palestinian victims hold the phone cameras to broadcast their own murders and of their children. And then out of courage or desperation these men and women are fulfilling the journalistic and moral duties that editorial board ideologues, newsrooms mercenaries and cowering reporters have betrayed:

My catastrophe

I sit here and watch a little girl, probably no more than three. She cries in desperation. She is wounded. Her head is wrapped in bloodied bandages. She cries for her mother who the reporter explains was killed in the massacre of Nuseirat. Coming into frame, next to her, lays the ashen body of a small toddler. Her younger brother, explains the voice. I lost count of the number of dead and desperate children that I have seen in eight months of Israeli atrocities.

The world bares now witness to a spectacle of evil so profound, so gruesome and so unrelenting that all attempts at finessing it, dismissing it or explaining it have nothing but the unmistakable accent of the most villainous of complicities. This one particular postcard of hell with a child wounded and alone sitting in the only familiar presence of a corpse is only one episode of an infernal catalogue of Israeli monstrosities which refuses the defence of ignorance.

This is the curious matter at hand. As opposed to the brutality of history which can only be assessed in its aftermath--the owl of Minerva flights at dusk—the brutality of the present moment is offered to us for viewing and assessment as it unfolds and this also means that it is in this moment that the demand to make this evil stop is being put to us simultaneously.

The ubiquity of the images of the horror and the brutality perpetrated by Israel will never go away. But what is perhaps more importantly, is that the permanence of those images of charred bodies, decapitated children, common graves and men summarily executed in broad daylights will stand for good as a testament to the moral bankruptcy of the Jewish post-war project.

J'Accuse...!

Jews who could not repeat the name of Muhammed al Durrah should never be allowed to forget the name Al Shifa. Jewsish communities that have spent decades espousing humanistic values must now reckon with their implicit commitment to oppression. Jews who took pride in the works of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel must explain to themselves their support for racial discrimination, celebratory lynching and impune murder. Jews that saw as their life work to rummaged among the books of the tradition in search of holiness must now confront the fact that they have been the enablers of the darkest of evils.

This evil, greater than Auschwitz because it profits from Auschwitz to further the work of evil, cannot be washed away and it cannot be hidden from our own eyes. No Jew can allege ignorance. Willingly or unwillingly, we Jews are forced to be witnesses of the atrocious and murderous judaism, to which many among us claimed loyalty seven decades ago and the horrors seen cannot be unseen. The horror of what has been done in our name and the horror of not having disallowed the Zionist project to carry our name and our consent has now bloomed in the death of the Judaism we believed we were part of.

What is the use of Jewish values that require feigned ignorance to protect our conscience from the hell that we have helped to foster for children like ours, women like ours, men like ours. What use is a Judaism that could not protect us from becoming that which we have abhorred most? The Judaism of the Jew that should have known and took solace in not knowing as the Judaism of the Jew who knew and applauded, as the Judaism of the Jew that found excuses for the pogrom in the West Bank, for the rape of women in Tantura and for the extermination of entire families in Gaza dies with the Zionist project with which it chose to poison its own blood.

This is the Nakba of Judaism and it is the unavoidable effect of the Palestinian Nakba that with voice and coin, it helped to promote. What is now needed is a new Judaism. One capable of returning to the values and intuitions of Hillel the Elder who not only writes: “Whosoever destroys one soul, it is as though he had destroyed the entire world. And whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the entire world.” but perhaps more importantly:

“Where there are no men, strive to be a man!"