We didn't save Gaza, will we save ourselves? "Part of the culture of extermination is the lack of guarantee that we won't become its target."

Paweł Mościcki Source: Private archive / Maciej Zygmunt

"The story of the origins of the state of Israel, well documented by historians and researchers, yet for some reason seems very controversial to us, so we don't openly acknowledge that it's a classic example of settler colonialism, something that the founders of this state, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, explicitly called it. The man whom Hannah Arendt called a fascist in the 1950s, and who is the ideological patron of both former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, and today Benjamin Netanyahu, spoke openly about the colonization of Palestine. He used the words "colony," "colonization," "colonizing." It was no secret to them; they were fully aware of what they were doing," says Paweł Mościcki, philosopher and essayist.

Marta Byczkowska-Nowak: In your book "Gaza: A Story of the Culture of Extermination," you write about the bankruptcy of the legacy of World War II. How do you feel when you hear the phrase "never again" today?

Paweł Mościcki: I feel this is a failure of our shared heritage and our institutionalized memory, which, instead of working for the community, for all of humanity, began to serve the particular interests of a single group. The slogan, created to name and commemorate the crimes of concentration and extermination camps, was intended to have a universal appeal—to remind us of World War II and Nazism, which targeted various groups of people for extermination and posed a threat to all of humanity.

It actually used to work like this: mass atrocities must never be committed again.

Later, this slogan began to refer specifically to the Holocaust and became the property of a single group. Because European Jews were particularly targeted by Nazism, they became the most prominent victims. Today, we see institutions representing Jews, their history, culture, and traditions, becoming custodians, in a sense, owners of this shared heritage. Consequently, they govern how we understand this slogan.

Unfortunately, in the context of the existence of the state of Israel, and especially its policies and the ideology behind them, "never again" has been narrowed to "never again to us." This doesn't even mean all Jews, but only those who identify with Zionism and the state founded on it. In this way, a slogan that was meant to unite all people, like a protective umbrella, in search of some formula for organizing international and social relations so that such crimes would never happen again, has been distorted.

How did Israel achieve such a narrative shift? How did it succeed?

This is the result of a well-described political and social process, described by Israeli historian Idith Zertal, among others, and many other researchers and authors. The entire national narrative of the Israeli state has been constructed around the figure of the Holocaust. All those subject to this narrative become, in a sense, hostages to an absolutist understanding of history, in which we constantly encounter attempts to repeat the Holocaust of European Jews. This is a form of conditioning of our response, calculated to prevent us from reacting in any way other than with a sometimes frantic, thoughtless defense of Israel.

This evolution of the narrative could have happened because Israel plays a key role in international interests, and any attempt to challenge this narrative of history is doomed to emotional blackmail and accusations of anti-Semitism.

The power of this narrative, like any other narrative in politics, is a function of the resources that perpetuate it—political, economic, institutional, etc. This teaches us one thing that I consider absolutely crucial—both for my book and for the debate on this topic in general: the discussion about the state of Israel is not a discussion about Jewishness or Jewishness. It is only very marginally about Jews.

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