Genocide in Realtime

21 July 2025 – “If you’ve ever wondered what you would have done during the holocaust – you’re doing it now.” – Miyah Byrd

I wanted to write some persuasive thing; or some kind of historical witness statement. But really I just have grief and anger, and not much eloquence. I don’t expect much of this to be news for you here reading it. But if it is, maybe write to your politicians about it. There’s a links section at the bottom if you just want resources.

My social media is a parade of photos of starving Palestinians, begging for money to let them buy another kilogram of rotten flour or a moldy loaf of bread, begging me to save their kids from being starved to death, while UNRWA warehouses full of enough food and medicine for everyone wait just outside the Gaza strip, blocked by Israel.

The tiny trickle of aid Israel does allow in now is distributed by a private American group (GHF) working with the Israeli military, and dozens of Palestinians are killed or injured every day attempting to collect food from the designated points – shot for sport, shelled by tanks, or just killed in the panicked stampedes when the shooting starts.

Observers are warning that we’ve probably passed the point of no return; tens of thousands of people are going to die of starvation now. Even were aid to restart immediately, it just wouldn’t get circulated in time. Most Gazans are now in the final stage of starvation. The starvation is intentional and calculated.

The few hospitals still operating in Gaza (Israel has destroyed most of them) are running out of food – no food for staff providing the care, no food for patients who need to eat for their bodies to repair. The hospitals are wildly beyond capacity, full of people with gunshot wounds (1) (2) and whole families of tank-shell and air-strike victims they can’t treat anymore – and now they can’t feed them either.

The vast majority of the wounded are civilians.

Targeting civilians, hospitals, civilian housing, water and food infrastructure: these are all war crimes, and Israel has been going at them all like it’s a competition.

Israel is committing a genocide; a textbook genocide; just an absolute classic. Right out in plain sight.

All of this – the starvation, the ethnic cleansing, the clearing of the Gaza strip for luxury real estate – apparently has support still from two thirds of Israel’s population. It’s not just their government.

I honestly don’t know what to do with all of this. It’s not as if there’s any real doubt what’s happening, but the powers of the world (particularly the western world) don’t seem that interested in stopping it.

This has all been a work-in-progress for Israel from 1948 and even earlier, but it seems they might finally get what they want. At the expense of becoming a nation of inhumane monsters who should be shunned by the entire world for the rest of history. At the expense of genocide.

There’s more to be said about the tragic aspects of Israel becoming the very monster it most feared; about genocide being the thing that destroys a nation’s ‘right to exist’; about Israel actively destroying all possibility of the peaceful coexistence that may have been its own path to peace and longevity. But I’m not feeling much sympathy for Israel right now.

(This week the Israeli Knesset voted to fully annex the West Bank too.)

As with the Rohingya, and the Uyghurs, once again I don’t know that there’s much to do. The things I can do, and am doing, are just too little. Even mass collective action doesn’t seem to be enough in this era of leaders ignoring the public. Power is making itself felt. The UK has decided to declare protesters to be terrorists, while continuing to send weapons to Israel. Our government here is just largely ignoring us.

‘Never again’ apparently doesn’t apply to everyone. I guess I know now what I would have done during the holocaust: stare it in the face, feeling sick and powerless.