How To Admit You Were Wrong About A Genocide

July 27th, 2024. Richard Forer, a former member of AIPAC, describes what happened when he committed himself to “studying the [the Israel/Palestine conflict] as objectively as [he] could”:

I only wrote down the names of books and the names of authors who were Jewish. I wasn’t going to trust that a non-Jewish author could be honest or not antisemitic, [and] at a certain point […] I was going through shock at what I was reading.

‘Oh my God. I’ve supported Israel all these years. This is what Israel’s doing? Oh my God!’ And then anger at Israel for misguiding me all my life […] then my anger turned in on itself, and I got angry at [myself] for being such a dupe and being so ignorant and never checking anything […] and then finally, a great sorrow for the Palestinian people for all that they had been through.

September 24th, 2024. Bina Greenspan, a Jewish pro-Palestinian advocate, describes the fallout from her discovery that Palestinians are sentient beings like her:

I’ve been protesting on behalf of Palestinian liberation for about a year now. I grew up very Zionist, and I didn’t really think of Palestinians as real sentient beings like you and I, and now I realise that I was so wrong, and I grew up very indoctrinated […]

I grew up hearing very depersonalising, dehumanising things about Arabs […] being told that they just want to kill us because they just like being evil, when in fact, the provocation came from the US and Israel.

July 22nd, 2024. Gabor Maté, an author and trauma specialist, describes the consequences of accidentally studying the Israel/Palestine conflict from a Palestinian point of view:

As a Zionist, I was given the task of preparing a talk on how to counter Arab propaganda on the campuses […] so I start reading, and I find out there’s a whole other point of view. And then I found out that there were Jews who said the same things, who had the same critiques. All along, right from the beginning […]

…by ’67, I’d woken up, and I’d researched it deeply, and I wrote an article for the student newspaper about how, y’know, this is actually what happened here. I was kicked out of my parent’s home […] I was betraying the tribe, I was betraying my people, I became persona non grata in the Jewish community. But […] I said to my father, ‘You know Dad, it was in your house that I learned to love truth. I can’t help it if you don’t like the truth that I see.

If human beings were better at admitting when we’re wrong, we’d have achieved world peace by now.

Americans would stop measuring things in quarts and yards, Commonwealth countries would drive on the right side of the road, and we’d all be able to admit that a nineteen-month, almost entirely one-sided campaign of bombardment, starvation and displacement against a civilian population is not “self-defence.”

But while we may never achieve the first two, we’re seeing some movement on the third.

On May 15th, Shmuel Lederman, an Israeli scholar who spent almost a year resisting the use of the word “genocide” to describe the “war” in Gaza, joined six other genocide experts in reversing his position.

A week earlier, Mark Pritchard, a Member of UK Parliament, admitted that while he’s “supported Israel, pretty much at all costs,” over the past twenty years, he “got it wrong” regarding Gaza.

Even Piers Morgan recently confessed that “the incessant bombing and killing […] with no attempt to have any real plan for how this ends or what happens when it ends,” have “long since crossed the line of proportionate response”.

But a disappointing number of people would rather (53,655 Palestinians and 58 Israelis) die than admit they were wrong.

Because let’s be clear, nobody who cares about the hostages is unaware that 140 of the 148 hostages safely returned so far (that’s 95% for everyone keeping track) were secured through diplomacy and ceasefire deals, not “military operations.” Or that 100% of the hostages would already be home if Israel hadn’t violated the January ceasefire deal from day one. Or even that carpet-bombing the same twenty-five-by-five mile strip of land where the hostages are being held is an odd strategy if you care about bringing them back alive.

Nobody who claims that the IDF is trying to “eliminate Hamas, not kill Palestinians,” missed the fact that Israel has spent the past 77 days starving Gazan children, that politicians right up to Netanyahu have openly discussed their plans to ethnically cleanse all 2 million Gazans, and that a senior IDF spokesperson admitted almost a year ago that “anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.”

Heck, the IDF hasn’t even limited itself to killing Palestinians in Gaza. Over 600 people have been killed in the West Bank for reasons that nobody has even tried to justify.

And come on, none of the people insisting that Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties, could have missed the countless reports of snipers targeting women and children, or the tank operators who killed six-year-old Hind Rajab and her family one-by-one, or the clearly-marked ambulance workers the IDF ambushed and buried in a shallow grave, or the troops caught on camera high-fiving each other for killing an unarmed, 73-year-old Palestinian man, or the ubiquitous use of innocent Palestinians as human shields by IDF platoons, or the dozens of other “tragic mistakes” and “bad apples” for which there’s been almost no accountability or punishment.

Heck the IDF even took a shoot-first-shoot-later approach to three shirtless, unarmed, white-flag-waving, Hebrew-speaking hostages!

None of this is a secret. None of it is being hidden. Doctors and aid workers have been telling us for over a year that Gaza has been turned into a “slaughterhouse,” IDF soldiers and politicians cheerfully post their war crimes and genocidal rhetoric on social media, the paramedics and journalists and children being slaughtered are recording their final moments for us as proof.

But sure, if it’s a choice between defending their murder and admitting you were wrong, I can see how that’s a tough decision…

In 1944, dissidents risked their lives to smuggle evidence of the Holocaust out of Poland, only for the world to ignore it. In 1970, police brutalised and arrested protestors for opposing the senseless war in Vietnam. In 1994, government officials refused to use “the g-word” to describe the Rwandan genocide because it might “commit [them] to actually ‘do something’.”

And in 2025, history is busy rhyming.