“The situation for
Palestinians in Gaza is beyond description, beyond atrocious and beyond
inhumane.”[1]
So wrote Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, on May 17,
2025. He could have been looking at films taken when the Nazi concentration
camps were liberated in 1945 at the end of World War II. It was a shock to the world
back then. The scale of the inhumane atrocity of over a million people living
in rubble and starving by design in the next century raises the question of
whether extreme inhumanity toward a group in searing hatred was becoming
normalized, and thus tolerated by the world absent even a coalition of the
willing to step in and counter what even democracy could inflict.
At the very least, the
impunity enabled by Israel’s major ally pointed to a fatal flaw in the
post-World-War II world order, including the United Nations. Ironically, the
collapse of the Soviet Union made the world vulnerable, given the bias in there
being one less superpower. “A policy of siege and starvation makes a mockery of
international law,” the head of the UN wrote.[2]
He added that annexation and settlements in the Palestinian territories are
illegal, and “nothing justifies the collective punishment of the Palestinian
people,” or, I might add, of any people.[3]
Yet even such strong phraseology is but dry parchment while Israel killed over
100 residents of Gaza on next day—bombing a hospital no less in an attack
called Operation Gideon’s Chariot.
To be sure, the Israeli
government announced it would “allow a ‘basic amount of food’ to enter Gaza ‘to
ensure a famine crisis does not develop’ after blockading the territory for 10
weeks.”[4]
Lest humanity be presumed to be the motive, Israel’s IDF made the
recommendation “out of the operational need to enable the expansion of the
intense fighting” as Israel’s army expanded its presence in Gaza.[5]
A similar logic may have been behind Eichmann’s frustration that there simply
were not enough ovens so the number of people gassed daily had to be reduced.
In both cases, group-identification led to viewing some humans as not human.
It is as if the world and
especially the Israelis learned nothing from the disclosure of Hitler’s
brutality, for by the 2020s, group-identification itself had still not come to
be viewed as dangerous, especially when the obsession becomes reductionistic, and
large-scale, planned-out atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine were allowed to go on.
Eerily, were the Russian government successful in riding Ukraine of Ukrainians
and the Israeli government successful in exterminating the Palestinians in Gaza,
would the rest of the world blink? More likely, the tyranny of the status quo
would turn a blind eye and go on as if nothing atrocious had happened.
I think it very likely that not
even Guterres’s strong words would be enough to translate any political will
into action to forestall the victimizers even by the UN. The lesson
is perhaps that having strong allies can indeed enable a government to enact Nazi-level
atrocities with impunity while the rest of the world looks on as if
collectively helpless. What was shocking in 1945 may be viewed going forward as
a precedent rather than a “never again,” line in the sand. Remembering past systematic
atrocities by governments, whether of Hitler or Stalin, that were oriented to
punishing or even eliminating a people out of hatred doesn’t help if such
large-scale inhumanity is actually (i.e., de facto) to become precedent. In the
midst of destructive, large-scale technology and the banality of efficient
state organizing, the world could do worse than come up with a new world order in
which having a powerful ally does not give victimizing governments a de facto
veto over countervailing efforts to protect peoples from being exterminated out
of sheer hatred.
John Locke knew that one rationale for government is that victims make lousy judges of their respective aggressors. That governments might view themselves as victims and leash out hyperactive vengeance may not have occurred to Locke, or even to Kant, who stated that a world federation would only possibly but not probably ensure world peace. It seems that political development beyond the nation-state needs to catch up to the modern reach and intensity of government being used as a tool of hatred. Even in 2025, Putin’s hatred of Ukrainians and Netanyahu’s hatred of Palestinians were of such intensity that both men should have been rendered unfit for office by international if not by domestic means.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Wyre Davies and Rushdi Abualouf, “Israel Says It Will Allow Basic Amount of Food into Gaza, Ending 10-week blockade,” BBC.com, May 18, 2025.
5. Ibid.
