This week, Israel’s most important human rights group, B’Tselem, published a report titled Our Genocide1. Following this, Yuli Novak, the executive director of B’Tselem, published an article in The Guardian titled “I lead a top Israeli human rights group. Our country is committing genocide”2.
Israelis who are willing to directly call Israel’s attack on Gaza a “genocide” remain a tiny minority. Facing the pressure of domestic public opinion, their courage is truly admirable.
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A question has been tormenting me: Is it true? Are we really living through a genocide?
Outside of Israel, millions of people already know the answer. But inside our country, many are unable or unwilling to say it out loud. Perhaps it’s because the truth might destroy everything we believe about ourselves—who we are and who we want to be. To speak the answer means that in the future, we will have to deal not only with our leaders but also with ourselves. However, the price of refusal to face it will be even higher.
For an Israeli of my generation, the word “genocide” should be as distant as a nightmare from another planet. This word should only exist in the photographs of our grandparents, in the ghosts of European ghettos, not in the neighborhoods where we live. We used to stand at a distance and ask: “How could ordinary people go on with their normal lives when such things were happening? How could they let it happen? What would I have done if I were them?”
Now, history has taken an absurd turn, and those questions have returned to us.
For nearly two years, we have heard Israeli officials, whether politicians or military generals, declare out loud what they intend to do—to starve Gaza, to level Gaza, to annihilate Gaza. “We will eliminate them.” “We will make that place uninhabitable.” “We will cut off food, water, and electricity.” These were not slips of the tongue; they were plans. Subsequently, the Israeli military followed through. This is exactly the textbook definition of genocide: an action designed to deliberately target a group of people, based not on individual actions but on the group they belong to, with the intent to destroy the group itself.
We tell ourselves other lies to survive the horrible reality; we lie to distance ourselves from guilt and grief. We convince ourselves that every child in Gaza is Hamas and every apartment is a terrorist’s nest. We have unknowingly become those “ordinary people,” living our lives normally while “that thing” is happening.
I still remember the moment the truth first revealed itself before my eyes. Two months after the onset, when I still called it a “war,” three of my B’Tselem colleagues and their families were trapped in Gaza—Palestinian human rights workers who have been my colleagues for years. They told me their family members were buried under the rubble, that they could not protect their children, and that they were paralyzed by fear.
As I frantically tried to find ways to evacuate them from Gaza, I learned something that is deeply etched in my mind. At that time, paying about 20,000 shekels (roughly 180,000 NTD) could “ransom” a living Palestinian out of Gaza. The price for children was lower. Life was tagged with a price, counted per head. These were not abstract statistics; these were people I knew. At that moment, I understood that the rules of the game had changed.
Since then, surreal situations have become daily life. Cities turned to ash. Entire neighborhoods leveled. Families displaced, then fleeing again. Tens of thousands killed. People are starving due to orchestrated means; relief trucks are ordered to leave or are bombed. Parents feed their children livestock feed, and some die while waiting for flour. Others are shot; unarmed civilians are gunned down because they approached food convoys.
Genocide does not happen without mass participation. There must be a group of people who support the extermination, allow it to happen, or look away. This is precisely part of the tragedy. Almost no nation that has committed genocide understood what it was doing at the time. The process is always the same—self-defense, inevitable, they asked for it.
In Israel, the mainstream narrative insists it all began with the Hamas massacre of civilians in southern Israel on October 7. That day was horrifying; the cruelty and ugliness of humanity erupted. Civilians were slaughtered, raped, and taken hostage. A profound national trauma invoked a deep sense of existential threat in many Israelis.
However, although the events of October 7 accelerated everything, that incident alone was not enough to initiate an extermination. Genocide requires conditions. The foundation is decades of apartheid and occupation, segregation and dehumanization, and policies designed to sever our empathy. The blockaded Gaza, isolated from the rest of the world, became the apex of this project. The people there became abstract concepts, became the permanent hostages of our imagination, became targets of bombardment every few years, where killing hundreds or thousands incurred no responsibility. We knew more than two million people were living under siege. We knew there was Hamas. We knew there were those tunnels. In retrospect, we knew everything. But somehow, we could not realize that some of them would ultimately find a way to break through the wall.
What happened on October 7 was not just a military failure; it was the collapse of our social fantasy—the mistaken belief that we could lock all violence and despair behind a fence and live in peace on the other side. Under the most far-right government in Israel’s history, when ministers in the governing coalition were openly fantasizing about eliminating Gaza, the moment of breaking the wall arrived. Thus, in October 2023, every star in our darkest nightmare aligned.
This week, B’Tselem published a report, Our Genocide, co-authored by Palestinian and Israeli Jewish researchers. This report is divided into two parts. The first part documents how this genocide is being carried out, including mass killings, destruction of life conditions, social collapse, and orchestrated starvation. Israeli leaders incited public sentiment, and the media fueled the fire, causing this to happen. The second part of the report traces back the historical context that led us to this point, including decades of institutional inequality, military rule, and segregation policies, which have led to a widespread belief that Palestinians can be discarded after use without discomfort.
To bravely face genocide, we must first understand it. For this, we—Israeli Jews and Palestinians—must examine reality together from the perspective of people living on this land. We have a moral responsibility as human beings to make the voices of the victims heard by more people. We also have a political and historical responsibility to turn our gaze toward the perpetrators and immediately speak out as to how a society transforms into one capable of committing genocide.
Admitting this truth is not easy. Even for us, who have documented state violence against Palestinians for years, our hearts still resist. We reject facing the truth like repelling poison, trying to spit it out. But the poison already exists. Whether Palestinian or Israeli, this poison has filled the bodies of every person living between the river and the sea, mingled with fear and immeasurable loss.
The Israeli government is committing genocide.
Once you accept this truth, the question we have been asking ourselves our whole lives surfaces urgently again—what would I have done if I were on that other planet back then?
Only this time, it is no longer a rhetorical question. It must be answered; we must answer. And there is only one correct answer:
We must do everything in our power to stop it.