Right-wing Israelis protest near the Gaza border in support of the re-establishment of Israeli settlements in the Strip, in southern Israel, July 30, 2025. (Tsafrir Abayov/Flash90)

Gaza City is engulfed in flames, as the Israeli army embarks on its long-threatened ground offensive after weeks of relentless bombardment. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, already facing an international arrest warrant on suspicion of crimes against humanity, described this latest assault as an “intensified operation.” I urge you to watch the footage streaming out of Gaza, and see what this euphemism really means.

Look into the eyes of people gripped by a terror unmatched even in the darkest moments of this two-year genocide. See the rows of ash-covered children lying on the blood-soaked floor of what was once a medical center — some barely alive, others wailing in pain and fear — as desperate hands try to comfort them or treat them with whatever medical supplies remain. Hear the screams of families fleeing with nowhere to run. Witness parents scouring the inferno for their children; limbs protruding from beneath the rubble; a paramedic cradling a motionless girl, pleading with her to open her eyes, in vain.

What Israel is doing in Gaza City is not the tragic byproduct of chaotic events on the ground, but a well-calculated act of annihilation, executed in cold blood by “the people’s army” — that is, the fathers, sons, brothers, and neighbors of us Israelis.

How is it that, despite the mounting testimonies from Gaza’s concentration and extermination camps, no mass refusal movement has taken root in Israel? That after two years of this carnage barely a handful of conscientious objectors sit in prison is truly inconceivable. Even the so-called “gray refusers” — reserve soldiers who do not oppose the war on ideological grounds but are simply exhausted and questioning its purpose — remain far too few to slow the killing machine, let alone bring it to a halt.

Who are these obedient souls who keep this system running? How can a society so deeply fractured — between the religious and the secular, settlers and liberals, kibbutzniks and urbanites, veteran immigrants and new arrivals — unite only in its willingness to slaughter Palestinians without a moment’s hesitation?

Palestinians mourn loved ones killed in Israeli attacks, at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza City, August 21, 2025. (Yousef Zaanoun/Activestills)

Over the past 23 months, Israeli society has spun an endless web of lies to justify and enable Gaza’s destruction — not only to the world, but above all to itself. Chief among them is the claim that hostages can only be freed through military pressure. Yet those carrying out the army’s orders, raining mass death upon Gaza, do so knowing full well they may be killing the hostages in the process. The indiscriminate bombing of hospitals, schools, and residential neighborhoods, coupled with this disregard for the lives of Israelis held captive, proves the war’s true aim: the sweeping annihilation of Gaza’s civilian population.

Israel is unleashing a holocaust in Gaza, and it cannot be dismissed as the will of the country’s current fascist leaders alone. This horror runs deeper than Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich. What we are witnessing is the final stage in the nazification of Israeli society.

The urgent task now is to bring this holocaust to an end. But stopping it is only the first step. If Israeli society is ever to return to the fold of humanity, it must undergo a deep process of denazification.

Once the dust of death settles, we will have to retrace our steps back to the Nakba, to the mass expulsions, the massacres, the land seizures, the racial laws, and the ideology of inherent supremacy that normalized contempt for the native people of this land, and the theft of their lives, property, dignity, and the futures of their children. Only by confronting this deadly mechanism inherent to our society can we begin to uproot it.

This denazification process must begin now, and it starts with refusal. Refusal not only to take an active part in Gaza’s destruction, but to put on the uniform at all — regardless of rank or role. Refusal to remain ignorant. Refusal to be blind. Refusal to be silent. For parents, it is a duty necessary to protect the next generation from becoming perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Israelis bathe in a spring in Lifta, a Palestinian village forcibly depopulated during the 1948 Nakba, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, July 28, 2021. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Denazification must also include the recognition that what was cannot remain. It will not be enough to simply replace the current government. We must abandon the myth of Israel’s “Jewish and democratic” character — a paradox whose iron grip helped pave the way to the catastrophe we are now immersed in.

This deception must end with the clear recognition that only two paths remain: either a Jewish, messianic, genocidal state, or a truly democratic state for all its citizens.

The Gaza holocaust was made possible by the embrace of the ethno-supremacist logic inherent to Zionism. Therefore it must be said clearly: Zionism, in all its forms, cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.

Denazification will be long and all-encompassing, touching every aspect of our collective life. We will likely sacrifice more generations — both victims and perpetrators — before this scourge is fully uprooted. But the process must begin now, with the refusal to commit the horrors taking place daily in Gaza, and the refusal to let them pass as normal.

Orly Noy