The author is co-founder of the Forces of Renewal Southeast Asia and a Myanmar genocide scholar and a UK-exiled Myanmar dissident.

ISTANBUL  

As evidenced from the freshly emerging videos and photos, Gaza’s physical landscape today resembles Hiroshima on the morning of Aug. 7, 1945, just as Israel's mass killing of Palestinians of all ages is the direct, intended outcome by Israel's planners of this "war for annihilation" of an entire Palestinian society mirrored by the near-total destruction of the physical infrastructure that sheltered the 2.3 million Palestinians at the start of the war on Oct. 8, 2023.

The vastly undercounted deaths of over 60,000 – of whom more than 16,000 were babies, and children – by the Gaza Health Ministry must be paired with the staggering number 377,000, a number presented by Dr. Yaakov Garb, professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev as "missing" Gazans (presumed dead and buried under dozens of tons of rubble of bombed out Gazan buildings).

Let’s also not forget that Israel had allowed Gaza to exist as its "open-air prison," to use the term publicly uttered by retired Israeli Navy Adm. Ami Ayalon who also served as the chief of Shin Bet, or Shabek, which runs Gaza like prison guards, since 2007. That was the year when Hamas became the elected government of the 45-kilometer (28-mile) strip along the hydrocarbon-rich Mediterranean Sea, something Israel eyes with its characteristic lust for land and resources.

Chillingly, the common element here is that both Hiroshima and Gaza have been variously vaporized by American weapons.

Obviously, the estimated 80,000 tons of explosives delivered through Made-in-USA 500 and 1,000 kg bombs – all provided by bipartisan Washington – and dropped from F-35s almost daily and nightly over 660 days, could do a similar degree of physical destruction as then-US President Harry S Truman’s bombs did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

Who needs atomic bombs to destroy Gaza?

Here worth noting is the fact that the American creator of history’s first-ever atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the German-trained professor of theoretical physics at the flagship campus of the University of California, in Berkeley, was capable of the painful and honest self-reflection that "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

Alas, there is absolutely no sign of such capacity for honest soul-searching amongst the American political leaders and their foreign policy advisors: the United States continues to be the destroyer of worlds – that is, other peoples' worlds (wholesale societies, countries, and nations), from the Korean Peninsula to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to throughout the Muslim Middle East of Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and now Gaza and all of the occupied Palestine, as well as Latin America.

In the early autumn of 2016, I visited Hiroshima with an old British friend of mine, Professor Edward Vickers, whose father is a retired Royal Air Force pilot. Ed resides in Japan with his Japanese partner and their children. I was in Kyoto for a small international seminar on comparative cases of genocidal violence, where I presented my main research theme of my own “Buddhist” country’s genocide against Rohingya people, still ongoing to date.

I decided to take a long train journey from Kyoto to Hiroshima and asked Ed to join me at Hiroshima, a place we had both wanted to go. For me, Hiroshima has long had a personal ring: the extended American family (of two sisters, both of whom did their undergraduate degrees at Oppenheimer’s university when the man was on the faculty of physics) which practically adopted me as a young foreign graduate student in Northern California was entangled in the Manhattan Project. The older sister got a job at Los Alamos National Lab where the bomb was developed, specifically as Oppenheimer’s personal secretary. As a matter of fact, her boss walked her down the aisle at a small chapel established for the thousands of project workers as she fell in love with and married a young scientist working on the project.

If it weren’t for the name Hiroshima and our historical knowledge it triggers, we would see neither the traces of the old Hiroshima nor the evidence of the first atomic bomb’s impact on the physical and natural environment.

Israel’s genocidal patron, namely the leaderships of the United States, have shown an utter and complete lack of human empathy, conscience, or regard for the post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust international law, which they helped create.

The United States has long become death, and destroyer of the worlds, while its corporate political class continues to celebrate its power of annihilation and seeks to send the message that they will continue to destroy the world, natural and human, in order to rule over it. George Orwell got one thing wrong: war is profit (for corporate masters of our universe), not peace. For that reason alone, I am not so sure that we can be optimistic about Gaza’s reconstruction a la post-war Hiroshima, even as a Trumpian dystopian riviera on the unmarked mass graves of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians exterminated in their extended families over two or three generations.

As Rev. Dr Munther Isaac, the renowned Palestinian theologian of Shepherd’s Field, Bethlehem, said in his recent address to the Churches for the Middle East Peace Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, US, the ongoing US-Israel’s joint mass extermination campaign against his fellow people in Gaza (and the West Bank) is the clearest indication of the total collapse of the current moral order of this post-Holocaust world.

In Isaac’s words, "Never again!" is really "Yet again!" while the Zionized Imperialists have integrated elements of both Auschwitz (closed on Jan. 27, 1945) and Hiroshima (destroyed on Aug. 6, 1945) in their annihilation of Gaza, both the physical environment and residential human population. Isaac continued: “The law (now) protects the perpetrators of genocide in Gaza while punishing those who oppose (this crime against humanity.”

In passing, I will point out that even the relentless attempts to deny, defy, and erase truths about the US and Israel by the planners, executioners and supporters of the genocide in Gaza have a precedent in the way the United States as the occupying military power in Tokyo handled the atomic bomb survivors’ attempts to document and tell the factual truths about what the Americans did with it in a single morning at 8.15 am on Aug. 6, 1945.  

Fast forward to 2025

The destroyers of Gaza today see themselves as God’s chosen people with the divine right to perpetrate a Holocaust of their own against the largely Muslim population of Palestine, whose land they have stolen to build "the Jewish national homeland," under the imperial patronage of first Britain and now the US. There are daily crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in Gaza by US and Israel over 660 mornings – and still counting.

So expect these two states to become even more shrill and extreme as they struggle to exterminate factual truths about their victim-livestreamed crimes against Palestinians, specifically, the bogus “antisemitism” laws as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) run by the Jewish Supremacist or Jewish Exceptionalist working for the genocidal state of Israel.  

*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu's editorial policy.