Ghaleb Cachalia - I felt like a Nazi in Gaza.

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Ghaleb Cachalia

11 hours ago

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Many of my Jewish friends’ parents wouldn’t buy a Mercedes; they bought Jaguars instead; some still won’t today. Not because they hated cars, but because a brand can carry the weight of a history that was never fully settled for them.

Greeks can feel something similar about Turks. Not the Ottomans, but the modern Republic: Smyrna, 1955, Cyprus – a history that remains unresolved rather than safely confined to a textbook.

Armenians feel it hardest of all, because Turkey still won’t say the word “genocide.” When the wound is denied instead of owned, it never gets to close. Same with the Palestinians. They know what it means for historical trauma to remain unresolved, contested and painfully present. Much of the other examples are history, painful as it is.

So when Jewish people react hard, sometimes too hard, to criticism of Zionism, try to understand where that reflex comes from. But don’t pretend that every critique of Israeli policy is automatically hatred either, and never lose sight of what is unfolding daily, and documented, before our eyes.

Both things can be true at once: real trauma shapes real reflexes, and legitimate criticism of a state’s actions is not automatically bigotry.

There is an even harder truth here. History does not guarantee that the victims of violence will never inflict violence themselves. Sometimes the opposite happens and an old wound, left unresolved, becomes part of the justification for a new one. The victim can become the perpetrator, not because the original suffering was imaginary or deserved, but because suffering does not confer permanent moral immunity.

Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer, wrote about this. He developed the idea of the “grey zone” in The Drowned and the Saved, where under extreme systems of violence, the boundary between victim and perpetrator can become horribly complicated, and victims can be drawn into perpetrating harm against other victims.

So, history contains a terrible paradox: victims do not automatically become more humane when they acquire power; sometimes, carrying the memory of what was done to them, they become capable of doing it to others. 

History doesn’t ask permission before it moves into your nervous system.

The question is whether we’re honest enough to tell the difference between an old wound talking and a new argument being dodged.

In interviews published by Haaretz, multiple IDF soldiers confessed to feelings of deep unease and moral disintegration during operations in Gaza. One soldier, in particular, stated, “I felt like a Nazi in Gaza. It looked exactly like we were the Nazis and they were the Jews.” Now we have the acclaimed film, NAZA - a 2026 British documentary film written and directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. It follows the ongoing mass killing of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces during the Gaza war, through 24 interviews with anonymised military and intelligence insiders.