‘No mechanism to stop the atrocities’ — a conversation with Israeli rights organisation, B’Tselem

style="font-weight: 400;">Yuli Novak addressed a combined crowd of around 250 South Africans via Zoom.

As the executive director of the globally respected Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, Novak spoke directly to the concerns of her audience. Her talk, titled, What is our role in the face of such horrors, was targeted at the moral distress of this relatively small group of local Jews, people who had broken from the mainstream community to take a stand against Israel.  

“I want to speak to you,” said Novak, at the beginning of her talk, “not only as a Jewish Israeli but also as someone who holds South Africa very, very close to her heart. My most important lessons about justice and power, and blindness and fear, are things that I learnt in South Africa.”

Read more: Middle East crisis news hub

For the next hour, Novak led her audience — including this writer — through the horrors committed by the “most extreme government in Israel’s history”, a government “that told us precisely what it is planning to do, [mere] days after October 7th”. She invited the audience into her own experience of the Hamas assault, which she called the most terrifying and influential day of her life. Throughout the talk, she referred back to the lessons she had learnt in South Africa — lessons about entrenched separation, willful blindness and existential fear.     

During question time, in a voice that was at once wracked with emotion and infused with clarity, she let us know why — in her estimation — we had not yet seen the worst. 

The following day, Monday, 28 July 2025, Novak went global. The group had been told that B’Tselem was about to release a “big report,” but had no idea how big. The report, titled Our Genocide, was the first time that an Israeli organisation had condemned in such unflinching terms its own government and society. For the next week, although she would be completely ignored by Israeli media, Novak’s words would reverberate around the world.

Disconnected from the reality

“It is devastating as an Israeli,” she would tell CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, noting the silence of her compatriots and the lack of interest by her country’s press, “but it is a really good example of how disconnected a people that conduct genocide can be from what they actually do.”

Through the first half of August, in fulfilment of Novak’s dark prediction, things would indeed get worse. Shortly after Daily Maverick had interviewed Shai Parnes, B’Tselem’s spokesperson and departmental director, the Israeli military would assassinate six Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza City, just as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was making plans to reoccupy the enclave. 

“The killing of journalists is a deliberate policy to eliminate witnesses and erase the record of Israel’s genocide,” B’Tselem would state, in a social media post on the incident. 

As part of its “Our Genocide” report, B’Tselem had already outlined — citing Reporters Without Borders — how Gaza had become “a place where journalism itself is threatened with extinction.”

Daily Maverick’s discussion with Parnes was therefore anchored in the most relevant and up-to-date context. Throughout the discussion, like Novak, he spoke in a voice that was at once wracked with emotion and infused with clarity.     

Kevin Bloom: In the executive summary of the report, B’Tselem notes that “both morally and legally, genocide cannot be justified under any circumstances, including as an act of self-defence.” The summary goes on to note that the “atrocious attack” by Hamas and other armed groups on 7 October 2023 — which “included many war crimes and also crimes against humanity” — was the “trigger” that unleashed the “pre-existing conditions in Israel” for its “genocidal assault”. At what point, in B’Tselem’s estimation, did the Israeli regime move from acting in self-defence to committing what the report calls “one of the gravest crimes in international law”? 

Shai Parnes: So, pretty much in the first days of the Israeli assault, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke about the Gazan “Amalek”, which, as almost every Jew and Israeli knows, refers to the biblical order for the Jewish people to eliminate “all Amalek”, including women and children and even the animals. President [Isaac] Herzog said it’s a “whole nation” out there that’s responsible for the atrocities of 7 October. Minister of Defence [Yoav] Gallant said, again in those first days, that Israel will put a “total blockade” on Gaza, including “no electricity, no water and no food.” And there have been many, many other top officials saying that there aren’t any “uninvolved”, also in declarations from those first days.

For 22 months now, we have seen these statements become practices and methods of operation. So what we are seeing on the ground is pretty much each and every Palestinian in Gaza being targeted, not because they are suspected of anything, just because they are part of the group. And that is the definition of genocide. By that I mean, Israel is starving each and every individual in Gaza, two million people, including one million minors. So genocide is not only the mass killing of 60,000 Palestinians; it’s the coordinated, systematic effort by Israel to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza.

We have seen aerial footage of Rafah, which pretty much no longer exists. We have seen the destruction of the health system. We have seen Israel not only destroying “present” Gaza but also “future” Gaza, in its destruction of the entire education system, including the universities, including the libraries, including even the cultural and social life of the place, through its destruction of mosques and monasteries. Again, this is the textbook definition of genocide.      

KB: Indeed, thank you for that clarification. And so, in the Jewish diaspora, we are now beginning to see a harsh and sometimes violent split between Zionists and anti-Zionists, with families and even entire communities breaking apart under the weight of this ongoing moral atrocity. But in Israel, we are told, there is no such split, mainly because the vast majority of the society remains in denial about the genocide. It is now almost two weeks since the B’Tselem Our Genocide report was released. Have you personally witnessed anything in that time that indicates the situation may be changing?

SP: First of all, I would say it’s hard for me to refer to Zionist and anti-Zionist, as it’s vague and conceptual, it doesn’t say a lot these days. But I would beg to differ, there are a lot of conflicts in the society, even between friends and family here in Israel. It’s very common, for the last couple of years, to break relationships over what’s going on. A lot of people we are talking with had these internal conflicts in their family or in their social circles, so I’m not sure that this assumption is correct.

Although, in greater numbers, I would say — and also according to polls — the majority of Jewish Israelis now want to stop what Israel is doing in Gaza, but not because of what the country is inflicting on the Gazans. There are other reasons, which are more instrumental — because they just want to end what they call “the war” and secure a final deal to return the hostages, or because people are fed up with serving in the reserves, or because it’s hurting their families and their businesses. That’s pretty much the vast majority of Israelis. 

There is a fraction that wants to continue, unfortunately that fraction has huge representation in the government, and so [their wish] is what we are seeing on the ground. Also, there is another minority group, which wants Israel to stop on the basis of moral grounds. I would say that the vast majority of Israelis didn’t hear about the B’Tselem report, as there was silence or self-censorship, or call it as you wish, in the mainstream media. So that was just a continuation of the same mainstream media not covering what Israel is actually doing in Gaza. I mean, there were some images of the starvation that broke through, but before that there was literally no coverage — and that’s also a part of how genocidal societies act, it’s not something invented by Israeli society. 

Usually, genocidal societies don’t know that they are genocidal, and they cannot accept it, or comprehend it; that’s just part of the mechanism, the denial, the hiding. It takes years and years for a genocidal society to comprehend what it has actually done.    

KB: Would you be willing to comment, then, on how being associated with this report has affected you on a personal level? As a Jew, in other words, how difficult was it for you to conclude that Jewish people — victims of the Holocaust and of countless pogroms throughout history — had become the perpetrators? Also, what has been the reaction of your family and immediate community to both the report and your involvement? 

SP: I would say, personally, in my family heritage, it hasn’t affected me whatsoever. I don’t see any difference between me and any other human being in the world. Anyone could, or might be, the victim, and anyone might be the victimiser. I can understand, as a people, the historical significance of what we are seeing now, but I think it’s way too soon to analyse how it will affect Jews around the world. It’s way too soon to grasp the enormity.

But for me as a human rights defender, and as a person who lives here, it’s a terrible period of time. Just to be a local here. I am speaking as part of a group that still has all the rights, I can still express myself pretty much freely. I enjoy all the political rights, all the movement rights. And yet I am part of a society, I live in a society, the Jewish Israeli society, that is in many ways genocidal — and so it’s very hard to follow the mainstream media, it’s very hard to hear our political elites, it’s very hard to hear ordinary people in the gym or in buses or at the next table at a restaurant.

What’s more, part of our team at B’Tselem are Palestinian. In a way, for me, that’s a privilege, because I get the victims’ point of view, and I can totally see, or experience, what the other part of our society has been going through for the last 22 months. I would say in terms of our actual work at B’Tselem, their courage, the field researchers’ courage in the West Bank or in Gaza, that’s the most important thing. Their courage in getting to these places to cover the atrocities, to record the testimonies, while some of their family members have been killed in Gaza, or their houses have been destroyed… I have nothing but admiration for them.    

KB: Thank you for that, Shai. So through the 88 pages of the full report, the word “apartheid” is mentioned 17 times. To what extent has South Africa’s past, and specifically our history of ethnic supremacy, influenced the conclusions in the report? I am thinking here specifically about the year 1948, which was when the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Zionist regime in Israel laid the foundations for what was to come.

SP: As much as I am an expert on what is going on in Israel-Palestine, I am not an expert on the subject of South Africa. One has to acknowledge that while “apartheid” was the name of the regime that was in power in South Africa, it is also the name of a crime against humanity. We are pretty much saying here [in our report] that the book of law in Israel is based, in its foundational elements, on ethnic discrimination. We see this in the laws of immigration, in the laws of political participation, in property and movement rights. We see the fragmentation, as in apartheid South Africa, of people according to ethnic background.

The state of Israel accords different sets of rights to those who live under its law. We see that Gazans have practically no rights. We see Palestinian West Bankers, they are also divided by a set of rights. East Jerusalemites have the most rights, but not the same as Jews. We have those who live in Area C, Area B, Area A, and then another set of rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, who also do not enjoy the same rights as I do.

There are differences, of course, but as a concept this discrimination according to ethnic background is pretty much parallel. In 2022 already, our paradigm shifted to defining Israel as an apartheid state, so it’s nothing new. But what we are witnessing now is Israel transforming from an apartheid regime into a genocidal regime.         

KB: We are now in the second week of August 2025, waiting to see whether Prime Minister Netanyahu will follow through on his promise to occupy the whole of Gaza. In the context of the previous question, it therefore seems that there is absolutely nothing in Israel-Palestine that gives us any hope for a democratic transition akin to South Africa’s in 1994. In fact, to the world’s horror, it doesn’t even seem that the genocide will stop any time soon. With reference to B’Tselem’s objectives in compiling the Our Genocide report, could you comment on that?          

SP: First of all, I have to say that I totally agree with you. There is no mechanism inside Israel that can stop the government acting out on their policy, and what we have been seeing inside Gaza for the last 22 months is a policy. It is a well-coordinated and systematic way to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. Israel is still moving in that direction.

Unfortunately, we also don’t see any mechanism internationally to effectively even try to stop Israel from committing these atrocities. Of course, I am well aware of the South African government appealing to the [International Court of Justice], but I have to say that those legal procedures do take a lot of time. They are important in terms of the aftermath, the historical record and bringing perpetrators to account, but they don’t help people on the ground right now.

For the last 22 months, the international community not only did nothing to save human lives in Gaza and Palestine, those world leaders violated their duty to do so. And in some Western countries’ and Western leaders’ cases, not only did they do nothing, they assisted Israel and therefore made themselves party to the horrors.

Those world leaders in those countries know exactly their power, how they can pressure Israel, and they know exactly what’s going on — better than B’Tselem, better than anyone. They have the satellites, they know everything. What they’re lacking is the political courage to act to make Israel stop the genocide, or the moral will to do so. But that’s what we have to demand.

The world must act to stop Israel committing this genocide, as genocide is an attack on humanity. If it’s okay to target this group today, maybe it’s okay to target your group tomorrow. And no, it’s not okay in both cases.

So genocide is an attack against humankind, and that’s why we demand and expect the international community to act immediately. DM