Right now, Israel is attempting to erase history itself. It is obliterating Gaza City. Demolishing what is left of its historic mosques, churches, cafes, schools, parks and neighbourhoods. Forcing its inhabitants to flee and killing anyone who remains.
A city that once welcomed Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman and Ottoman travelers is rapidly becoming a killing field of dust and ash. Without a doubt, this destruction of one of the world’s most ancient cities is by design.
After almost two years of relentless atrocities, Israel is now trying to sanitize the scene of the crime. Killing journalists is one of its tactics. Witnesses, especially those with journalistic training and integrity, tell the truth. And they are the biggest threat to the machinery of colonization. But erasing the history of a people delivers a blow that is even more devastating.
Early on, Israel blew up Gaza’s universities and libraries. It razed its grand boulevards, reduced its archeological sites to rubble and even bulldozed its cemeteries. There was no reason to do any of this except to demoralize the Palestinians. To inflict both a wound and an insult to its collective and shared memory.
From its inception, Israel has been at war with the truth. It invented a homeland in a place that already had a people. It used the real generational trauma of Jewish suffering in Europe and elsewhere to instill perpetual fear and victimhood in its population and taught them to be repulsed by anything that smacked of “weakness.” It built a state that saw its neighbours as alien. As inferior. As savages.
But Israel itself is a fantasy. It is a beach resort built on a mass grave in Tantura. It is a soulless mall erected over the stones of a once bustling souk in Jerusalem. It is a bland settlement sprawling over uprooted, ancient olive groves. It is non-indigenous trees planted over the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages. Trees that now ignite in flames each year thanks to an angrier climate and the fact that they never belonged to that land to begin with.
Israel took notes from the cruelest pages of European and American colonial settler projects and it modernized it. It learned from the Spaniards who razed Mayan and Incan temples and built cathedrals on their foundations. It studied the British who locked Indigenous Africans in concentration camps where they were starved and tortured. It copied the Americans who wiped out the Buffalo knowing it would mean certain death for Native Americans. And, as all settler colonial projects, its racist ideology led to its logical conclusion in the annihilation of its Indigenous peoples.
There is no such thing as a democratic ethno-state, yet this is what Israel has wanted the world to accept for 80 years. In doing so, it unwittingly created a psychosis that has poisoned its society and driven it into the iron grip of genocidal mania. In fact, polls show that most Jewish Israelis support its government’s actions in Gaza, with many believing it hasn’t gone far enough.
But even as Israel carries out its Final Solution in Gaza, its image and connection to the world has been forever soiled. Some dolts will forever cheerlead its sadistic project and attempt to smear those who oppose it as antisemitic, even if they are Jewish. But Israel will never be accepted as a democratic state again. And on some level, most Israelis know this. Many of those who have traveled abroad in recent months have found this out.
This is of small consolation to the Palestinians who are now living in a hell that is only made possible by the support of the US and other Western nations. But memory is imperative. It is the cornerstone of democratic values and the only bridge to a future where everyone is afforded the same rights. The same dignity. If we lose it, we are bound to repeat this horror again and again.
Kenn Orfanos, September 2025
Kenn Orfanos 