Israel’s Assassination of Memory

By Malik Mukhtar | August 25, 2025

There is a cruelty worse than killing people. It is the killing of memory — the deliberate erasure of history, culture, and identity, so that even the dead have no place to rest. This is what Israel is doing to Gaza.

Yes, the war is ethnic cleansing. Yes, it is genocide. But it is also something more sinister: the annihilation of a people’s existence in time itself.

Gaza City, one of the oldest cities on earth, is being bulldozed into dust. Ancient fortresses, centuries-old mosques, Ottoman harbors, cemeteries of Roman and British soldiers — all are gone. Cafes where friends once argued politics, boarding houses where refugees rebuilt a fragile life, archives where scholars preserved memory — flattened, erased, disappeared. To destroy Gaza is to destroy the evidence that Palestinians were ever here at all.

The parallels are not accidental. Chris Hedges reminds us of Warsaw, 1944 — when Nazi General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski turned a city into rubble. The Nazis sought to erase not only Jewish lives but also Jewish presence in history. Israel now mirrors that crime, razing Gaza with tanks, bulldozers, and bombs, while famine tightens its grip like a medieval siege.

The world’s leading authority on food security has confirmed it: Gaza is in famine. Half a million people face starvation, and nearly 300 have already died — 112 of them children. A kilo of flour costs $22, or perhaps your life. Water is cut off. Disease spreads. And what do Biden, Trump, and Europe do? They wring their hands, feign sadness, whisper about “Palestinian statehood,” and then send Israel more weapons. This is not leadership. It is complicity. It is, as Hedges calls it, Kabuki theater — a staged morality play so that when the genocide is over, these leaders can pretend they “stood on the right side of history.”

But history does not forgive the liars.

History is what Israel fears most. Because history tells us that Palestine was never empty, never a “land without a people.” History reveals centuries of Palestinian presence, culture, and worship. History exposes the truth of Zionism — a European settler project implanted by violence. History mocks the myth of “a villa in the jungle.” And so, Israel wages war not only against Gaza’s people, but against Gaza’s memory.

This is why the Nakba cannot be commemorated in Israel. Why Palestinians cannot even carry their flag. Why ruins must be carted away, mosques erased, cemeteries bombed, harbors reduced to rubble. Memory is dangerous. Truth is indestructible once spoken. And so truth must be buried under concrete and silence.

But erasure is not victory. It is suicide. Societies that deny truth calcify. They lose the ability to speak outside their own lies. They become incapable of reform, incapable of healing, incapable of dialogue with the world. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission taught us that shared truth is the first step toward redemption. Israel, by contrast, silences truth, jails truth-tellers, and mocks those who mourn.

The price will not only be paid by Palestinians. Israel, too, is destroying itself — morally, spiritually, historically.

Because a nation that kills memory, kills its own future.

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