The Collapse of our Integrity

Outskirts of Biet Hanoun, Gaza, as seen from Netiv HaAsara in the Gaza Envelope.

“Never again” can’t only mean never again for the Jews, read one of Los Angeles Holocaust Museum’s Instagram posts on September 4th, 2025. For decades, Holocaust museums and memorials have shown us, in better terms than anywhere else, the horrors of genocide; the intense efforts by the museums, in coordination with survivors and their descendants, have helped us recognize that genocide is the highest crime against humanity, against all of us. These museums have correctly called out other genocides while engaging in intense efforts to realize that never again means never again, for anyone.

The Los Angeles Holocaust Museum’s post, later deleted due to “misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East,” was an example of this most honorable advocacy. Although not directly a reference to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the museum correctly recognized that any genocide, whether directed at Jews or not, is genocide.

I have been to several Holocaust and Jewish refugee museums. This year, I have seen the history of Jewish refugees in Shanghai at the Jewish Refugees’ Museum, and I have seen in graphic detail the harrowing images of death and destruction at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Visiting the room of names in Yad Vashem was one of the hardest experiences of my life; knowing that my cousins’ family’s names were forever marked in those books, I was unable to compose myself. The searing memories from Yad Vashem and beyond have compelled me to recognize and call out genocide when I see it–no matter whom that genocide is being directed against.

For all these reasons, Holocaust museums have served as indelible assets to our collective knowledge of history as well as to our ability to avoid repeating past evils. But what do we lose when the museums themselves, the most effective anti-genocide activists, willfully fail to call out genocide? What do we lose when even the most ardent supporters of humanity make themselves blind to the inhumanities committed by countries within their sphere of influence? What do we lose when the term “never again” is only selectively applied?

There is no debate that Israel and the United States’ ongoing war on Palestinians in Gaza is a genocide; a United Nations inquiry has already deemed it so. The United Nations’ Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has classified Gaza City as experiencing level 5, or catastrophic, hunger. While this level–the highest level of famine possible–is just some abstract classification, the hunger on the ground is palpable: 100% of Gaza’s population is experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity, and 32% of the population is suffering from catastrophic hunger. As of September 10th, 2025, there have been at least 404 deaths from hunger alone, a number that is likely a severe undercount due to the near eradication of public health facilities in Gaza. These numbers alone clearly contradict Israel’s defense of its war on Gaza. 

Once we consider Israel’s role in creating these conditions, however, the situation becomes exponentially more dire. Since I visited Israel in mid-March, Israel has cut off all aid to Gaza–food, electricity, water, everything. In the absence of international food aid, Israel and the United States teamed up to create the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF), a PR firm masquerading as an aid distributor, to “bypass the United Nations as the main supplier of aid in Gaza.” Neither Israel nor the United States have made any effort to provide even starvation levels of aid with the GHF, and the IOF, alongside contractors, have killed over 2,000 Palestinians seeking aid. When the world rightly recognized that Israel and the United States have no interest in providing aid, they intensified activism to force Israel to open up Gaza’s airspace for aid drops. Air aid drops are far less efficient and much more dangerous (both for the suppliers and the receivers) than ground aid distribution, but they provided some aid as the famine intensified. But, just like the GHF is a PR campaign, so was the opening of Gaza’s airspace for aid drops (largely) one. The aid drops do not provide anywhere enough aid to address the famine, and they were reportedly paused on September 1st as Israel prepared for a full Gaza occupation. 

Because of Israel’s deliberate mass starvation of the Palestinian people (at the behest of the United States), the famine in Gaza is the world’s worst famine as an act of war since World War II–that is, since the Holocaust. 

And somehow, famine does not even scratch the surface of Israel and the United States’ crimes against humanity in Gaza. 92% of residential buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Over half of Gaza’s culturally important sites–including mosques and churches–have been destroyed. 94% of its hospitals are damaged or destroyed. 99% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been made inaccessible. All of its greenhouses are destroyed. The Palestinian people in Gaza have been forced into ever smaller concentration camps, where they face imminent starvation, no sanitary facilities, and constant fear of attack by air or land (yes, even in the concentration camps). By September 2024, analyses published in The Lancet showed over 300,000 Palestinians in Gaza had been killed since October 8th–that is, 15% of Gaza’s pre-war population. And a recent editorial using the same method found over 600,000 deaths.

The physical damage Israel has inflicted on Gaza and the Palestinian people is blatantly obvious. I made the (painfully late) realization of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza when, from the Gaza Envelope in Israel, I saw Gaza myself. The cover image of this essay is one of the pictures I took–in order to never forget Israel’s inhumanities against the Palestinians–while watching from the border. Even though Israel would not break the ceasefire for another 36 hours, I could hear gunshots–directed by the IOF against Palestinians–just over the massive border wall. As if these experiences were not already a clear-cut indication of the depravity of Israel in its war on the Palestinians (depravity here applies both to the government as well as many of the people, unfortunately), the Israelis who led us to those harrowing sites ignored the damage even as we looked on at it. 

As we were visiting October 7th sites, I understand that they were focused on October 7th, not the the response to it. But I could not help but wonder how anyone could share with us a village in ruin while disregarding entire cities reduced to rubble just beyond a border wall. Further, I could not understand how anyone could justify the complete pillaging of a people as a response to another horrible, yet comparatively localized attack. Since I visited, whenever I look at a city skyline–Boston, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, New York, Chicago–I see the destroyed city blocks in Gaza every time I close my eyes. And yet, the trauma I experienced just seeing the destruction in Gaza pales in comparison to the generations, even centuries of trauma that will follow the Palestinian people–on top of eighty years of existing trauma.

Once I saw it for myself, the genocide was blatantly obvious; so, then, why have Holocaust museums, which for so long have helped bring to light genocides that were nowhere near as obvious, ignored the subject entirely?

Israel, being a nation designed to provide a home for the Jews, is closely connected to the Jewish people. As Israel commits a clear genocide against the Palestinians, Holocaust museums may traditionally be expected to call out the genocide. However, as the genocide has at least large minority support among Jewish Israelis, a vocal number of the Holocaust museums’ many supporters place their interests above genocide education. And the result is the comments section of that post, where many decried the post as “antisemitic” and causing their ancestors to be “rolling in their graves.” 

Over the last two years, many of us have lost our integrity by defending or ignoring the genocide in Gaza; by traveling to Israel, I lost much of my integrity as well. Holocaust museums, on the other hand, have possessed the most historic knowledge, moral clarity, and integrity of us all. What happens when they, too, forget?

I will leave that question for you all to answer. As those fighting for peace and justice are persecuted around the world–in the United States, in Israel, in Europe, in the Middle East and beyond–it is expedient to give up your work and weather the storm of injustice. But this is no time to turn back. Have faith and recognize that, even in the darkest days of the United States and Israel’s crimes against humanity, we may one day turn on a new light–a light where Palestinians have obtained their human, cultural and citizenship rights.