Jews are going to have to make a painful reappraisal of the project that imposes a “Jewish” state in Palestine. Understanding our willful blindness and self-deception that facilitate the abuse of the non-Jews of Palestine will mean giving up the evasive palliative of pseudo-humanistic posturing from groups like J Street.

We may feel insignificant in Israel, but here, in Gaza, we are King Kong, a little tyrant on a little throne. We stride through the rubble of Gaza, surrounded by the might of industrial weapons, able to pulverize in an instant whole apartment blocks and neighborhoods, and say, like Vishnu, “now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The genocide in Gaza is the moment of moral conscience for this generation, as Vietnam was in the 1960s. As Derek Sayer writes, Israel’s violence and the repression on American university campuses are intimately connected. It is time we lifted our heads from our everyday evasions and diversions, our compromises and complicities, and started to listen to the kids.

Over the past six months, newspapers and television shows in the US have generally written about Israel’s genocidal violence using passive voice. Even on social media, the ax fell on key phrases; for instance, despite his professions of commitment to free speech, Elon Musk said that terms such as “decolonization” and phrases such as “from the river to the sea” would be banned on X.

We are seeing opposing world views play out in clashes between police and professors and their students across American college campuses. It is a harbinger of encampments that have already started to sprout here. Let us hope that authorities and institutions do not see fit to trample upon free speech and academic freedom, mistaking a call for life for its opposite.

Israel’s Western backers know they are losing. They know that, despite the carnage the Israeli military is unleashing on Gaza, it is not any closer to defeating Hamas. They know that Israel is quickly becoming a pariah state, and as its global reputation sinks like an anchor, it’s dragging down Western credibility with it.

There are many shameful periods in American history. The genocide we carried out against Indigenous peoples. Slavery. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. The genocide in Gaza, which we fund and support, is of such monstrous proportions that it will achieve a prominent place in this pantheon of crimes. History will not be kind to most of us. But it will bless and revere these students.

The great science fiction fear has always been of AI escaping human control and the machines taking over, as in The Matrix films. The story of Lavender suggests, on the contrary, that the real danger arises when the awesome data-crunching capacities of AI are put in the hands of human beings. Derek Sayer on Israel’s human targeting software and the banality of evil.

Even if Hamas did commit every one of the atrocities of which it has been accused, this would not justify Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza, either morally or in international law. The comparison that needs to be made by the international community is rather with the infinitely greater horrors Israel has inflicted on Gaza since October 7.

The saying that “justice delayed is justice denied” has a parallel for news media and war—journalism delayed is journalism denied. The refusal of the Times to cover the story after it broke was journalistic malpractice, helping to make it little more than a fleeting one-day story instead of the subject of focused national discourse that it should have been.