“The Last Phase before Genocide” by Gideon Levy The Jewish state is erecting a ghetto. What a horrifying sentence. It's bad enough the plan was presented as if it could be in any way legitimate – who is for a concentration camp and who is against it? – but from there the path may be shortened to an even more horrific idea: someone might suggest next an extermination camp for those who do not get through the screening process at the ghetto's entrance. Israel is killing Gaza's residents en masse anyway, so why not streamline the process … Someone might also suggest a compact crematorium on the ruins of Khan Yunis, to which admittance, like the nearby ghetto in Rafah, will be purely voluntary. Of course, voluntary, like in the "humanitarian city." Only leaving the two camps will no longer be voluntary. That is what the Minister proposed … The nature of genocide is that they are not born overnight. One does not wake up one morning and go from democracy to Auschwitz, from civil administration to the Gestapo. The process is gradual. After the dehumanization phase, they move on to demonization … Then comes the fear phase – there are no innocents in the Gaza Strip, October 7 as an existential threat to Israel that could occur again at any moment. After which come the calls to evacuate the population before anyone raises the idea of extermination. We are now in that latter phase, the last phase before genocide. Germany transferred its Jews to the east; the Armenian genocide also began with deportation, which back then was called an "evacuation." Today, we are talking about an evacuation to the south of Gaza … For years, I have avoided making comparisons to the Holocaust … But nothing prepared us for the idea of the "humanitarian city". Israel no longer has any moral right to use the word "humanitarian." Whoever turned the Gaza Strip into what it is and treats it with equanimity has lost all connection to humanity. Whoever sees only the suffering of the Israeli hostages in the Gaza Strip and fails to see that every six hours the IDF kills as many Palestinians as there are living hostages has lost all of their humanity. If 21 months of seeing the death of babies, women, children, journalists, doctors and other innocents was not enough, the ghetto plan should be turning on all the warning lights. Israel is behaving as if it is planning genocide and expulsion.