Your Never Again, Our Never-Ending Nightmare

Europe spent centuries perfecting the art of colonial violence—in the Americas, in Africa, in Asia. It wielded this barbarism and called it “civilization.” It was only when those same methods—racial hierarchy, ghettoization, extermination—returned home under the banner of Nazism that Europe recoiled. But its horror was selective, and after a brief pause, those methods found new sponsors for export.

Zionism became that sponsor through a process of colonial reversal—where claims of seeking refuge became the cover for adopting the oppressor’s methods. In fleeing the ghettos and death camps of Europe, Zionism absorbed the racial hierarchies and settler-colonial ethos of the West, becoming a project of domination and ethnic cleansing.

The Arcade War Machine by @NorrieHarman

Mobilizing Jewish trauma as ideological fuel, victims became colonizers. The project was new, but the myths that served as justification stayed the same: spreading civilization, making the desert bloom, fulfilling divine destiny—only now backed by Western guilt and Christian Zionist fervor.

The result was a racial state based on religious supremacy, eventually enshrined in Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law: the right to national self-determination is unique to the Jewish people. Two tiers of humanity, codified in law. The structure mirrors Nazi racial laws—legal supremacy for the chosen group, legal subordination for all others.

But the similarities run even deeper. Zionism resurrected the logic of Lebensraum—or space to live—a term used by the Nazis to justify expanding eastward by displacing or exterminating native populations to make room for the so-called master race. Under Zionism, the logic stayed identical: seize land for the chosen people, expel Palestinians. The myth of eternal Jewish victimhood provided the narrative that turned historical suffering into pretext for permanent aggression.

Zionism learned the wrong lessons from the Holocaust. When Israel now imprisons, starves, and exterminates Palestinians, it does so with impunity enabled by Western guilt and moral cover—not because it forgot the Holocaust, but because it absorbed Nazi methods while appropriating the Holocaust’s moral authority.

The resemblance is undeniable. Proposals to deport Palestinians to Egypt and Arab countries echo the Madagascar Plan. Images of starving children in Gaza evoke the concentration camps. The language used to describe Palestinians—human animals, cockroaches, beasts walking on two legs—mirrors Nazi discourse.

Dehumanizing language enables violence. Bombing, starvation, and displacement become routine once targets are rendered subhuman. Genocide follows naturally. The template remains unchanged.

The methods simply alternate. When he’s not employing Nazi discourse, Netanyahu, true to form, recites the colonial script: “This is a war between civilization and barbarism.” “We are the children of light,” he proclaims. But as Edward Said reminded us, the colonizer always projects barbarism onto the colonized. The colonizer kills—but always in the name of civilization, never conquest.

The colonial system has always created, and continues to create, its own rationales. In this case, if Palestinians resist, they prove they are security threats requiring neutralization. If they comply, they demonstrate that more pressure will achieve complete submission. If they exist, they occupy land the state requires. Their very presence becomes the threat that justifies their removal.

In 2017, Bezalel Smotrich—now Israel’s Finance Minister—laid out what would become a blueprint for official policy: his so-called “Decisive Plan,” offering Palestinians three options: leave the land, remain in Israel as second-class residents with no national rights, or resist. For those who remain, he insisted, “according to Jewish law, a certain inferiority must always exist.” For those who resist, he declared, “then the Israeli army will know what to do.” When pressed on whether this included killing families and children, Smotrich replied without hesitation, “war is war.”

Today, that same ideology guides the highest levels of Israeli power, where a far-right government openly enacts the logic of expulsion, subjugation, or extermination as state policy. It is no longer limited to rhetoric—it is now legislative. Last year, the Knesset passed a resolution explicitly rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state anywhere in historic Palestine, “under any future political arrangement.” This month, it passed a vote declaring the West Bank “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel” and affirming Israeli sovereignty over even more of Palestine.

VR Spectators by @NorrieHarman

In practice, the implementation of these resolutions had already been underway—fully aligned with the colonial playbook: in the West Bank, settlement expansion; in Gaza, total destruction—annihilating its homes, neighborhoods, and infrastructure, and forcing mass exile.

But how does this settler-colonial regime metastasize, in this day and age? Through Western funding, media cover, and moral silence. The answer lies in how the West remembers—and how it forgets.

There is no remembrance day for the 90 million Indigenous lives erased by European settlers across the Americas. None for the 10 million killed in the Congo under King Leopold. None for the 30 million who died in British-engineered famines in India. But for the West, there is Holocaust Remembrance Day—because this time, Europeans did to Europeans what they had long done to the rest of the world.

We are reminded of it daily, even as its logic is repeated—by those claiming to act in its name. The selective memory reveals a hierarchy of grief: when colonial violence targets the Global South, it disappears from consciousness. When it targets Europeans, it becomes the defining moral trauma of modernity.

The victims of yesterday have become the colonizers of today. That is the unspeakable truth. And the so-called civilized world funds it, shields it, and calls it peace.