Under the pretext of 'self-defence', Israel has systematically devastated Gaza: nearly 63,000 Palestinians killed, including more than 18,500 children; 2200 entire families erased; and civilian infrastructure reduced to rubble, and starvation. Photo: AP
On 29 January 2023, the world heard the haunting final call of six-year-old Hind Rajab before she was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Trapped in a car surrounded by the bodies of her relatives, Hind pleaded for help as an Israeli tank loomed nearby. Hours later, the two paramedics who had secured permission to rescue her, Yousef Zeino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun, were themselves killed when their ambulance was bombed.
Hind Rajab was not just another casualty of war. She is Gaza’s Anne Frank — a child whose final moments testify to the brutality of our age. Just as Anne’s diary bore witness to Nazi persecution, Hind’s voice, cut short, records the atrocities committed under the banner of Zionism.
Today, Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to a modern-day genocide, carried out with a cold inhumanity unprecedented in this century. The time has come to recognise Zionism for what it has become: a supremacist ideology with chilling parallels to Nazism.
Zionism, founded in the late 19th century by the secular nationalist Theodor Herzl, emerged as a political project rather than a purely religious one. Cloaked in the language of Jewish self-determination, it quickly assumed the features of a colonial, exclusivist ideology — embedding racism, dispossession and, later, apartheid into its foundations.
By 1948, as the State of Israel was declared, Zionist militias unleashed terror campaigns that displaced more than 750,000 Palestinians — an event remembered as the Nakba (“catastrophe”). Villages were massacred, homes destroyed, and families driven into exile.
To put this in perspective: in 1917, Arabs constituted 90% of the population of historic Palestine, while Jews represented about 10% and owned just 2% of the land.
The subsequent creation of Israel was never grounded in international legality. The League of Nations’ mandate on Palestine did not envision sovereignty for one ethnic or religious group at the expense of another. But the conceptual “land of Israel” — exclusively white Jewish — has transformed into a modern-day reality. The Palestinian Arabs and North African Jews are treated as second-class citizens in Israel. While Jews worldwide enjoy the “right to return” and full Israeli citizenship, it is denied to the Arab Israelis and Ethiopian Jewish migrants to Israel even had their women subjected to forced sterilisations.
Zionism today functions as an ideology of supremacy. Its defenders often insist that opposition to Zionism equals antisemitism. But this conflation collapses under scrutiny. There are more than 5,000 ethnic groups worldwide and only 193 recognised states. Few have achieved national sovereignty, and most ethnic movements had to integrate into broader, civic forms of nationalism.
For Palestinians, however, even the most basic right to self-determination has been systematically denied. Instead, Zionism has entrenched a system of dispossession, illegal settlements, and military occupation. It presents itself as a liberal democracy but, in reality, operates as a settler-colonial regime sustained through violence and exclusion.
Since October 2023, Israel’s assault on Gaza has revealed, in stark detail, the true nature of this regime. Under the pretext of “self-defence”, it has systematically devastated the enclave: nearly 63,000 Palestinians killed, including more than 18,500 children; 2200 entire families erased; and civilian infrastructure reduced to rubble.
Israel has dropped bombs on refugee camps, starved two million people as a weapon of war and targeted humanitarian convoys — from the World Central Kitchen to the World Food Programme.
Three American doctors who volunteered in Gaza described a chilling pattern of sniper-inflicted gunshot wounds to the heads and chests of children under 12. The deliberate targeting of children is not an accident of war — it is policy.
Almost every major humanitarian organisation — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Médecins Sans Frontières, Unicef (United Nations Children’s Fund), Oxfam, Christian Aid and even the International Court of Justice — has condemned Israel’s offensive as a gross violation of international law, and in many instances, as genocide.
Israel has disregarded almost every clause of the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute.
Israel is perhaps the only colonial occupier in history that consistently positions itself as the eternal victim. The pattern is predictable: strike first, claim victimhood, and repeat. Whether in the mass killing of Palestinians or the assassination of Iranian scientists, Israel relies on a sophisticated propaganda machine and diplomatic alliances to reframe aggression as self-preservation.
In truth, Zionism remains the last active settler-colonial project of the modern era. It is built on the bedrock of dehumanisation and elimination.
The Holocaust, one of history’s greatest crimes, should serve as a universal warning against genocide. Instead, its memory is routinely invoked to sanitise Israel’s persecution of Palestinians and any condemnation of Israel’s actions is dismissed as antisemitism.
Let us be clear: antisemitism in all its forms must be condemned. But conflating antizionism with antisemitism is propaganda designed to shield Israel from accountability. At this historical moment, Israel does not need more indulgence — it needs uncompromising criticism.
There is no escaping the comparison. The systematic killing of children, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the erasure of entire families and communities — these acts recall the darkest chapters of the 20th century. Nazism is being reincarnated in the form of Zionism, an ideology that mirrors its supremacist logic and genocidal consequences.
Zionists should be named and shamed in the same way that Nazi or apartheid sympathisers were. Only when society refuses to normalise such ideologies — when they are confronted with collective outrage and moral rejection — can their destructive power be broken.
Aayesha J Soni is a neurologist/epileptologist working in South Africa and medical volunteer with the Gift of the Givers organisation.