Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation 
Sim Kern, Interlink, £16.99

SIM KERN’s latest book has one overriding point: whether it’s Egyptians doing it, or Japanese doing it in Nanjing, or Nazis doing it, or Khmer Rouge doing it, or Rwandans doing it, or Israelis doing it in Gaza, genocide is bad.

The book, Genocide Bad, came out of a series of videos Kern posted post October 7 on their TikTok account, normally used in support of their writing projects. The videos depict Palestinians as victims, and was condemned as an outrage by the zionists controlling Israel and much of its media.

Sim Kern is Jewish and they made that point clear in their Tik Tok videos after the massacre and kidnapping in Palestine in which they do the unthinkable and express their support for the suffering population of Gazans in the predictable retaliatory Israel strikes on the civilian population of Gaza that followed. Predictably they were called a Jewish self-hater.

“For every individual Israeli killed by a Hamas fighter on October 7th,” writes Kern, “I knew the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) would slaughter tens or hundreds or even thousands more Palestinians in retaliation.”  Kern replaces Defence with Occupation in IDF as a thesis statement.

“Pretty much everyone else I followed — extended family, former co-workers, fellow authors, and publishing people — quickly transformed into flag-waving zionists,” Kern wrote. But they saw it differently.

In “But Hamas!”, the chapter that Kern regards as the most important in Genocide Bad, they confront the myths, lies and propaganda that props up the zionist project in Palestine. Kern argues that there is “the important distinction” to be made between the violence being meted out by the aggressive occupier, and the defending indigenous group being erased.

“Zionism is an ideology that insists on the necessity of a Jewish nation-state,” writes Kern, “where only Jewish citizens get full rights... All zionists agree that Israel [is] a Jewish-supremacist ethnostate [that] should continue to exist on stolen Palestinian land.” Such colonial thinking is inimical to peace, especially in the postmodern 21st century.

In simplifying, non-obfuscating terms, they compare that position to anti-zionism.  “Anti-zionists believe that a Jewish supremacist ethnostate should NOT exist on stolen Palestinian land (or anywhere). Not because we’re anti-Jewish (as zionists claim) but because we’re anti-religious-supremacy, anti-apartheid, and anti-stealing-peoples’-land.”  It’s bad. Simple as that. And the descendants of the progenitors of the moral codes that are the core of the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic faiths that have guided the West for millennia know that.

The book sets out to debunk a long series of excuses and propping-up lies that make up the modern mythopoesis of Israeli greed for The Promised Land. Each of the nine essential chapters addresses a defensive proposition: For instance, Chapter 1. “Who Are You to Speak on Israel?” and Chapter 4. “But the Holocaust!” and Chapter 8. “Criticising Israel Is Antisemitic” - all get called out for the bullsh*t they represent.

The main distinction in all this is to regard the Palestinians as the Indigenous occupants of the land and the Israelis as the usurpers and colonizers. To avoid what is an obvious truth to many secular minds, the Israelis fall back on religious-historical justifications, which sound flat, and even dishonest, to modern godless ears.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has equated the precipitating massacre with the events of 9/11 in New York. And when he spoke to Congress and likened it to a Pearl Harbor wake-up call, he got multiple standing ovations. Kern sees this response as manipulation.  

Kern’s bold stance recalls the backlash faced by Susan Sontag after 9/11 when she failed to wring her hands in grief and rage for revenge in a piece for New Yorker, and instead brought attention to the incoherence and immaturity of the American response. Reactionary reasoning prevailed, rather than clarity over the real causes.

For Kern, what happens in Gaza has profound implications for our species; it is not merely “a cause”. What is left of human moral integrity is at stake - and we had better not lose the battle.