The horror ... the horror ...

The Israeli government, like Walter Kurtz, has crossed the moral event horizon; it now operates outside the boundaries of any acceptable human conduct.

When Captain Willard is dispatched to terminate the command of Colonel Walter Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, he is told that the man has gone insane.

To demonstrate the depth of that insanity, Willard is played a truly shocking recording of Kurtz speaking — to God knows who — on the radio:

“We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig. Cow after cow. Village after village.”

It is the language of genocide.

What makes it more jarring is what we learn next — that Kurtz was once a moral man. A decent man. A good man. A man of compassion. And now?

“He is out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct... and he is still in the field, commanding troops.”

No one can quite point to the exact moment when the moral standing of the Israeli state disappeared upriver and into the swampy jungle it now inhabits.

All we know is that it happened. At some point, it happened — and now they are out there, operating without any decent restraint, beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.

It is tempting to say that it happened after 7 October, after the Hamas attack on Israel. It is easy to say that — but it is mostly false. 7 October unleashed something, yes — but what it unleashed had been long coiled, long prepared, just waiting to spring forth. That moment was not a transformation. It was a reveal.

There is a term in international relations: “rogue state.” It isn’t a legal term. It’s a political one. A label used — usually cynically — to brand countries that operate outside the so-called rules-based order.

The term is often abused to serve other agendas. But sometimes it fits. Sometimes, it describes not a state that misbehaves, but a state that has crossed a moral event horizon.

Israel is surely outside the mainstream of international conduct. It crossed that line a very long time ago.

The difference now is that the mask is off. The beast is loose. And it is tearing Gaza to pieces while the world looks on.

There are echoes of Kurtz everywhere here.

The Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared: “We are fighting human animals… I have removed all restraints.”

Knesset Deputy Speaker Nissim Vaturi bluntly urged: “Burn Gaza now… erase the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” He went on to add, for good measure, “I don’t think there are any innocent people there now... If there is an innocent person there, we will know about them. Whoever stays there should be eliminated, period.”

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “There are no half measures… Rafah, Deir al‑Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation.”

And former IDF Major General Giora Eiland wrote: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist... Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal.”

In a grotesque attempt at justification, May Golan, Israel’s Minister for Social Equality, actually stood in front of the Knesset and said: “I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza, and that every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did when they murdered their families, raped them and kidnapped their citizens! Neither a dove nor an olive leaf, only a sword—to cut off Sinwar's head!”

These aren’t fringe voices.

These are incumbent cabinet ministers and senior officials — speaking the same genocidal language Kurtz uses in that tape: village after village.

You cannot blame an entire country for this. You cannot accuse a whole population of committing crimes against humanity.

Because the whole country does not commit those crimes. That responsibility lies, as it always does, with a few people at the top — those who give the orders to bomb homes, to level schools, to massacre civilians, to reduce a refugee camp to dust and call it a “surgical strike.”

You cannot indict a whole nation. It is never the whole nation’s fault.

So when we condemn Israel, we do not condemn its people. We condemn its gangster government.

We condemn the men and women operating without restraint, who perhaps no longer even understand what the word restraint means. We condemn those who can look at a devastated city and still call in the airstrikes.

Last week, Channel 4 bravely aired a documentary about doctors in Gaza — and how they are now being deliberately targeted by the Israeli war machine.

The beast that Netanyahu and his government have unleashed is accused of being indiscriminate. That is far from the truth. It discriminates. Of course it does. It is impossible to conclude otherwise; it’s all there in those statements. The intent is clear. Gaza must be annihilated by any means.

There’s nothing about it that isn’t vile. There’s nothing that doesn’t make you want to see Netanyahu and his cronies walk through The Hague.

As Amnesty International noted: “Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts… in defiance of countless warnings.”

And the UN Commission of Inquiry warned: “Israel’s actions… constitute crimes against humanity… including extermination of Palestinians and gender persecution.”

The arrests and the trials, they won’t happen. We don’t live in that world. We should — but we don’t.

But the indictments were necessary, and they were deserved.

Following the ICC warrants, Human Rights Watch stated: “The ICC arrest warrants against senior Israeli leaders… break through the perception that certain individuals are beyond the reach of the law.”

These are the kind of people who — had they come into a village after the children had been inoculated — would have hacked off every vaccinated arm, so long as those children were Palestinian.

These are the kind of people who have looked the horror in the face and not recoiled — but embraced it.

Kurtz had an excuse. He was driven mad by the annihilating weight of war, by something so devastating it crushed his soul.

What excuse do these people have?

What excuse does the rest of the world have, when they’re standing by and doing nothing? When does inaction make you complicit in the crime?

Let’s go further: when you’re selling the weapons used to commit the atrocities, when you’re treating the people who order them as if they are legitimate figures on the world stage instead of criminals on an undeniable scale, when you are criminalising organisations that protest against what these people are doing — then isn’t there a fair argument to say that you’re complicit already?

Future generations will be just as appalled and disgusted by what we’ve allowed to happen here as we are today when we look back at apartheid South Africa. History does not absolve those who were silent.

It does not forget those who refused to act, who refused to condemn. It remembers them with contempt — and it should.

What we are witnessing? It’s long past time the world called it what it is: the Gaza Holocaust — perpetrated by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who survived the actual one.

And that is, perhaps, the most horrifying thing of all.

There is no diplomatic term for evil. It does not belong in the lexicon of international relations.

But if there is a hell, then these people are surely headed there — and if there is any justice in the universe, so are those who have enabled them.

They have not just embraced the horror.

They are the horror.