Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.

The following is an excerpt from The New York Times’ bestseller, Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation, by Sim Kern. Check out Sim’s recent interview on CounterPunch Radio, and head over to Interlink Press to pick up a signed, deluxe copy of this important book. Proceeds support the Middle East Children’s Alliance.

When you say “Genocide bad,” Zionists will counter, “But Hamas [did something terrible].”

“But Hamas” comments try to derail you from talking about Israeli violence by asking you to first address the violence of the Palestinian resistance.

Comments might sound like, “Do you condemn Hamas?” or “But Hamas started this!”

They may share facts, such as, “Hamas abducted children,” lies such as, “Hamas beheaded babies,” or—trickiest of all—partial truths, like, “Hamas calls for a genocide of Jews in its charter.”

As I’m writing this chapter, Israel has just invaded Lebanon, and this familiar refrain on cable news networks has shifted to, “But Hezbollah!” If Israel continues expanding its regional war, Hasbarists will continue responding to any criticism of Israel by asking you to first condemn any local populations daring to take up arms and resist their own extermination.

It’s up to you whether you want to get derailed here. Because sometimes we do need to talk about Hamas. We need to talk about the important distinction between violence that comes from imperial colonizers versus violence that comes from Indigenous people defending their homes. Though if you start down that road, you’re going to have to define what you mean by “colonizers” and “Indigenous,” and you’ll get drawn into debating the meaning of Indigeneity.[1]

But notice—you were trying to say “Genocide bad,” and now they’ve got you arguing semantics!

We also need to contradict blatant lies about the Palestinian resistance, like the “Hamas beheaded babies” story. It’s important to clarify that, no, they did not. That story proved to be false. Israelis are the only military force that have actually beheaded babies over the past year, babies like Ahmad Al-Najr, eighteen months old, whose head was severed from his body in the bombing of a Rafah tent encampment on May 26, 2024. The video of Ahmad’s father, shaking his headless child’s body, wailing in agony as people burned alive in the holocaust of tents behind him, was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, even after a year of this digitally broadcasted genocide.

So Israel beheads babies, not Hamas.

Remember: every accusation, a confession.

What’s trickier and more time-consuming than contradicting outright lies is picking apart the strands of partial truths—but this is especially important work, as these half-truths, or truths-stripped-of-all-context can cause a lot of confusion. Take the example above, that “Hamas calls for a genocide of Jews in its charter.”

The kernel of truth here is that Hamas’s original 1988 charter defined its struggle as a “struggle against Jews,” included a quote from the Quran about a prophecy of Muslims killing Jews, and decreed in Article 15: “In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.” However, in its 2017 revised charter, Hamas clarified, “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine.” Hamas also explicitly condemns anti-Jewish hate in its revised charter: “Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage.”[2]

You might also take the time to unpack the anti-Muslim hate and panic that informs Westerners’ understanding of the word “jihad.” Many USians think “jihad” is a synonym for suicide bombings or genocide. When they hear “jihadist” they picture ISIS fighters storming their suburb to enact Sharia law. In reality, the word just means “struggle” or “fight,” and is often used in Arabic in nonviolent contexts, such as a struggle for self-improvement or what a Christian might term “wrestling with your faith.”

But if you get into all of that, not only are you now miles away from whatever point you started off making (genocide bad), now a hundred Zionists in your comments are still going to insist, “BUT HAMAS BEHEADED BABIES!” And you’re back where you started.

If you give a Zionist a cookie, they’re going to ask you to condemn Hamas.

And maybe, in fact, you do want to condemn an action of Hamas. Maybe Hamas has done something that violates your moral code, and it’s important for you to make sure your audience knows that, because otherwise you fear you’ll lose credibility with them.

For example, I am staunchly against abducting children. I don’t think children should be taken from their parents at gunpoint, under any circumstances. So yes, I condemn Hamas’s abduction of thirty children from their families on October 7th. I’ll also condemn the abduction, rape, torture, and killing of any civilians.[3]

But consider—why am I asked to condemn Hamas for abducting children first, when every year, Israel abducts an estimated 500–700 Palestinian children at gunpoint? Since October 7th, at least 640 children in the West Bank have been arrested by the IOF, many facing medical neglect, abuse, and even torture in Israeli prisons.[4] Furthermore, before October 7th, Israel had killed forty-one Palestinian children in the West Bank, taking them from their families forever. Between October 2023 and July 2024, the Lancet, a leading international medical journal, estimated that 186,000 deaths “could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” And because 47 percent of the population of Gaza are children, 87,420 of those killed by Israel may be children. Though even that’s likely a conservative estimate, as children are more vulnerable to violence, famine, disease, and medical neglect, so the number of Palestinian children killed by Israel’s genocide may be even higher.

For whatever action you’re being asked to condemn Hamas, the IOF has done something similar, more extremely and more frequently, to more people, for a longer period of time—and they fucking started it.

So sure, sometimes we need to talk about Hamas, but most of the time, we should avoid this derailment tactic that sets us on a defensive footing, apologizing for the actions of an impoverished, besieged Indigenous resistance rather than attacking one of the most powerful and violent colonial militaries in the history of the world.

That’s why, 99 percent of the time, I shut down people asking me to condemn Hamas with, “Forget Hamas! My tax dollars don’t fund Hamas.”

^^That’s where I ended this chapter when I first drafted it. With a tidy soundbite that let me avoid going too deep into my thoughts and feelings on armed resistance—which are unsettled at best. I’m way out of my depth on this topic. And armed resistance is a very loaded topic to discuss, because if I misstep, I risk, on the one hand, being exiled from the Free Palestine movement for the crime of normalization,[5] or, on the other hand, landing on a government no-fly list for being a radical terrorist sympathizer.

Or … worse. There are worse things that have happened to authors who are proponents of armed anti-colonial struggle.

So you can see why I hesitated to get too deep into my thoughts. But since completing that first draft, I watched on my phone—on my little handheld magic window into war crimes—the last moments of Yahya Sinwar, chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, before he was killed by a gunshot to the head. I suspect he was killed by the Israeli drone that filmed his last moments, although that detail has not been confirmed.

Now I have more to say about Hamas, although it’s all kind of a mess in my head. Forgive me that what follows is fragmentary and won’t come to a tidy resolution.

You should watch the video if you haven’t seen it.

The clip begins as a disembodied viewpoint swooping over an apocalyptic landscape. From the abrupt, robotic adjustments of the flight path, you can tell this is drone footage—and a very expensive drone at that, delivering crystal-clear HD images. I had to remind myself, in those first moments, that I wasn’t watching the intro to some Hollywood movie. The demolished city was no multi-million dollar set or CGI creation, but the very real ruins of thousands of homes in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood in Rafah, a refugee camp—and now a graveyard for countless people who died beneath the rubble.

In 2017, the sci-fi series Black Mirror aired a chilling episode called “Metalhead,” which follows a woman as she flees through an abandoned landscape from a pack of dog-like, four-legged armed drones. Throughout the tense, forty-one-minute episode, she is mostly silent, because the drones are attracted by noise. After surviving several near-death encounters with the metalheads, she is wounded and takes shelter in an abandoned home. In the final shot, an aerial drone pans away from the house, showing a dozen of the killer robot-dogs closing in on her location, and we presume she is done for.

“Metalhead” was a cultural phenomenon in the US—the kind of TV that got everyone in the teacher’s lounge at my school insisting, “You have to watch it.” “Metalhead” left such an impression on me that I included police drone-dogs in my 2023 sci-fi novel, The Free People’s Village, the cover of which features a masked punk smashing a Metalhead-like drone with a baseball bat.[6]

But in Gaza in 2024, there’s nothing futuristic about armed robots hunting down human beings—that nightmare has become a part of everyday life. One evening last June, that reality came crashing into my own cushy life in the imperial core. I was in Berkeley, California, attending the Bay Area Book Festival to promote The Free People’s Village. I was walking towards an author meet-and-greet event, wearing my keffiyeh, because I had vowed to bring Palestine with me onto every stage I was afforded. Still, I was trying to compartmentalize the genocide, for the moment. I was having fun. My kids were back at the hotel with my spouse, and I was looking forward to a free drink ticket, cheese plate, and schmoozing with other authors, feeling swept up in the glamour of the rare chance to travel for my author career.

Halfway to the event, my phone buzzed with a notification—it was my friend Mohammed in Gaza.

Throughout the spring, I had been using my TikTok platform to fundraise for pregnant and postpartum people in Gaza who were trying to evacuate to Cairo. I had used a random number generator to select Mohammed’s campaign from a list of hundreds of such fundraisers. By raffling off signed copies of my book, I had raised the nearly $100,000 in bribe money that Mohammed’s extended family needed to pay off Egyptian officials and evacuate. But in June, before any members of Mohammed’s family were able to evacuate, Israel had destroyed the Rafah border crossing—the last route for Gazans to escape from genocide.

Though their plans to evacuate had fallen through, Mohammed, his wife, Shahd, and I had stayed in touch. Their baby, Heba, had been born just a few days after my own baby. We started chatting regularly, sending each other baby pictures and updates on our kids’ milestones. I learned about how Mohammed had visited my state of Texas as a teenager, on a foreign-exchange student program, staying on a ranch where he’d fallen in love with the USA and horses and wide-open spaces. I learned that they were both doctoral students in biomedical engineering, still somehow taking exams and writing papers between bombardments and diaper changes. By June, I loved baby Heba like a niece, and I considered Mohammed and Shahd to be friends.

So that evening in Berkeley, my heart dropped into my stomach as soon as I saw the notification. It was the middle of the night in Gaza, so something must be terribly wrong.

Mohammed texted me that an armed quadcopter was patrolling the street outside the building in Rafah where they were then staying. A dog right outside their window had just barked at the drone and been shot dead. Mohammed was terrified, because there was no glass in the window. Only a thin curtain separated his sleeping family from the quadcopter, which would attack anything that made a noise. What if baby Heba woke up and started screaming?

I slumped against the side of a building, the horror of Mohammed’s reality shattering that balmy northern California evening. Couples strolled past me on the sidewalk, chatting in soft tones or laughing with their heads thrown back. I was holding my breath, hoping a robot didn’t massacre this precious family on the other side of the world.

I could do nothing for Mohammed but be there with him, digitally at least. I could bear witness as he stayed awake through the long watches of the night, tensed to comfort Heba at the first sign of movement. I texted some pitiful banalities, like, “That’s so terrifying. I am praying for you.” And even though I’m not religious, it was true.

They got lucky. Heba slept soundly. The quadcopter moved on. My friends have survived, to the day I am writing this. And Heba’s mother, Shahd, has written a powerful letter to you, dear reader, which you’ll find on the final pages of this book.

So of course I was thinking about that quadcopter when I watched the video of Sinwar’s last moments. I wondered if the drone stalking him was the same make and model of machine that had killed a dog outside the window where baby Heba slept. I wondered about all the people who built these machines, and what they got paid for their labor. I wondered what it cost the Israeli military to buy a drone like that. And I wondered who profited the most from their sales.

In the video of Sinwar’s last moments, the quadcopter zooms into the bombed-out side of a building, where everything is thickly dusted with rubble. It takes the viewer—and the drone—a few moments to recognize that a man is sitting there on an overstuffed sofa. He’s camouflaged by the asbestos-filled dust that coats his skin as thickly as everything else in the room. But if your eyes can’t pick him out, don’t worry—the drone’s AI software soon identifies the human form, tracing a helpful red line around his head and torso.

Like Predator. Like Terminator. Except wait—you must remember! You’re watching real life, not a movie.

At that moment, you might notice that the man is missing a hand, and the blood leaking from the stump of his arm has darkened the armrest of the sofa. He holds very still, like he is hoping the drone will not spot him. But we viewers have already seen the red identifying line, foreshadowing the man’s death. We have seen the caption of the video—“Sinwar’s last moments!” Time flattens; in the video, the man is alive and hoping to survive, but we in the future know he is doomed.

Growing up, my older brother was obsessed with Star Wars. He had Star Wars bedsheets, a collection of the original 1970s action figures, and dozens of tiny plastic ships that he would arrange in elaborate formations on the carpet before acting out space battles, making the laser beam sounds with his mouth. Pew-pew! Because I idolized my big brother, I........

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