The question "Can this really be what it looks like?" is beginning to nag at us. While masses of people worldwide already know the answer, here in Israel, people still have trouble answering.

Maybe that's because they understand that the truth threatens the foundations of what we thought we were and who we wanted to be, and will also require us to recognize very difficult truths about the future. But the price of not seeing is far higher than the price of recognizing the truth.

The term "genocide" describes something that's hard to grasp. For Israelis of our generation, it's a distant nightmare, something from another place and another time, something that happens on other planets. Anyone who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust has asked themselves at least once in their life, "How did ordinary people go on with their lives and let this happen?" But in a horrifying twist of history, today we, the people living here, are the ones who have to answer that question.

For almost two years, we have been hearing our public officials and senior army officers advocate starving, liquidating, razing and destroying the Gaza Strip. And for revenge. They declared from the beginning that this is what they intended to do, and then they sent and led the Israeli army to do precisely that. This, in one sentence, is the definition of genocide – a deliberate, coordinated attack on people belonging to a certain group not because of who they are or what they did as individuals, but with the intention of destroying their group.

But we failed to hear what was explicitly said. We told ourselves a story that would allow the soul to bear the atrocities so we wouldn't have to take responsibility for them and to keep the guilt and pain at bay. We became those ordinary people who go on with their lives and let this happen.

I'm trying to recall the first moment when I felt that something in reality had changed, that we were in another world. I think it was two months into what I then still called "the war."

These are people who have worked with the organization for years – true partners, leading human rights defenders – and they were telling us about relatives buried under the rubble, about their complete inability to protect their children, about a paralyzing fear.

From there, a chain of events began for them that may or may not be told........

© Haaretz