A Tale of Two Genocides: Cambodia & Israel

Where Cambodia chose the difficult, winding road of national healing, Israel spurred a suicidal treadmill of retribution in the Middle East, writes Laurent Evrard.

History is written in blood, but it is redeemed by choice. Across the theater of human suffering, few nations have stared into the abyss of total annihilation quite like Cambodia. 

Under the psychotic agrarian utopia of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, nearly a quarter of the country’s population of eight million people was systematically starved, worked to death, or executed in the Killing Fields. It was a mechanized madness intended to reset human civilization to year zero.

Yet, out of those pulverized skulls and mass graves emerged something miraculous: a profound, defiant capacity for resilience and reconciliation.

Compare this monumental human triumph with the tragic, blood-drenched labyrinth of the Middle East — specifically the ongoing devastation in Gaza, the West Bank and the wider web of hostilities involving Israel and its Arab and Iranian neighbors. 

Where Cambodia chose the difficult, winding road of national healing, Israel spurred a suicidal treadmill of retribution in the Middle East, proving that while war is easy to start, vengeance is an eternity that devours its own children.

While Cambodians forgave their killers, the Israelis have exacted revenge — not against their executioners — but against an innocent people whom Israel victimized by ethnically cleansing and seizing their land to create the settler colony of Israel.

The Cambodian Miracle: Forgiveness as a Revolutionary Act

How does a society rebuild when neighbor killed neighbor and children were brainwashed to turn on their own parents?

Instead of plunging into an endless cycle of multi-generational blood feuds, Cambodia engineered a masterpiece of pragmatic peace. Through a combination of legal accountability — symbolized by the hybrid tribunal that brought surviving architects of the Khmer Rouge regime to justice — and the visionary Win-Win Policy, the Cambodian people achieved the impossible.

The state chose national integration over eternal ostracization. Former combatants and even lower-level cadres were folded back into society, stripped of their weapons but granted dignity, land, and a future. 

The Khmer spirit recognized a harrowing truth: if you live by the shovel of the mass grave, you will eventually bury your entire nation. By choosing coexistence over total extermination, Cambodia transformed fields of bones into foundations of a booming, peaceful society. They stopped counting bodies and started counting tomorrows.

Wisdom of the Lotus 

To understand Cambodia’s miracle of reconciliation, one must look to its spiritual bedrock: Theravada Buddhism.

Unlike the rigid, legalistic retributive justice encoded in ancient Abrahamic traditions — exemplified by the Mosaic law of Lex Talionis (“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”) — Buddhist philosophy teaches radical impermanence (Anicca), non-harming (Ahimsa) and the total liberation from the poisons of hatred.

Where a warrior-like ethos demands proportional vengeance and keeps historical trauma alive through sacred memory and divine scorekeeping, Buddhism offers a profound humanism: hatred ceases not by hatred, but by love alone.

This philosophical divergence carries a heavy historical cost. The relentless eye-for-an-eye paradigm — deeply embedded in the cultural and geopolitical survival mechanisms of modern Israel — has blinded its leadership to the universal suffering of others. 

By adopting the very mechanisms of disproportionate destruction that once sought to annihilate them, the moral credit and universal compassion earned by the Jewish people during the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust have been tragically squandered on the smoking ruins of Gaza.

Geometry of Absolute Destruction

Turn your gaze westward, and the contrast is as blinding as it is heartbreaking. In Gaza and the West Bank, the landscape is once again choked with the dust of collapsed apartment blocks and the silent grief of parents holding lifeless infants.

Israel’s military doctrine — driven by an existential trauma that demands absolute security through absolute dominance — has devolved into a murderous frenzy. In flattening Gaza and suffocating the West Bank, it treats entire civilian populations as acceptable collateral damage. 

But physical walls, blockades and iron domes cannot quarantine a people from the blowback of despair. Every child buried under concrete in Gaza is a seedbed for tomorrow’s resistance, ensuring that the trauma of today becomes the terrorism of tomorrow.

Simultaneously, the surrounding Arab dynamics and regional proxy wars have long treated the Palestinian cause not as a human reality to be rescued, but as a perpetual political currency.

This is the architecture of eternal hatred. Israel pounds populations into submission under the illusion of “crushing” an enemy, oblivious to the fact that you cannot bomb a people into loving you or securing your borders. 

The Palestinians and regional actors, trapped in a fatalistic script of perpetual victimhood and resistance, too often romanticize struggle without a horizon of coexistence. It is a symmetrical dance of death where both sides believe that if they just kill enough of the “other,” peace will magically appear on the smoking ruins.

The Lesson of the Century

The juxtaposition of Cambodia and the Middle East lays bare a stark moral lesson for humanity: Genocide and mass violence can either be treated as a terminal disease or a catalyst for profound reinvention.

The Khmer people proved that humanity can metabolize even the most horrific industrial-scale trauma, look the executioner in the eye and decide that the chain of blood must break here. They understood that true victory is not the eradication of the enemy, but the eradication of enmity itself.

Until leaders in Tel Aviv, Gaza, and across the Middle East look at the ruins of their own making and realize that absolute military victory is a delusion — and that collective punishment only breeds collective doom — they will remain prisoners of their own history.

Cambodia rose from the ashes because it chose the courage of pardon. The Middle East continues to burn to the ground because it insists on the cowardice of endless revenge.

Laurent Evrard is a Belgian finance and wealth management professional with 30 years of experience in the Luxembourg financial sector (1991–2021). Currently based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, he divides his time between managing hospitality ventures, lecturing on financial analysis and international strategy at the university level, and writing on global financial and strategic matters

https://consortiumnews.com/2026/08/18/a-tale-of-two-genocides-cambodia-and-israel/

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A public library in metropolitan Sydney, Australia confirmed Tuesday that it removed a book critically examining Western media coverage of Israel’s annihilation of Gaza from its shelves, reportedly after a complaint that its prominent display was distressing to a survivor of last year’s mass shooting targeting a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi Beach.

How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, by US journalist and media critic Adam Johnson, was pulled from Waverley Library in Bondi Junction and placed under review. JWire reported last week that the Waverley Council removed the book after a Bondi massacre survivor saw it displayed on the library’s “New Release/Hot Item” shelf.

However, Johnson said Tuesday on X that “British-Australia media keep buying this line that my book was pulled from the library after a ‘complaint from a Bondi attack survivor.’ We have no evidence this is true. This is simply the story they’re telling. Has anyone independently verified this chain of events?”

Johnson also noted that the Bondi massacre, in which two gunmen fatally shot 15 victims, “had nothing to do with Palestinians or Gaza.”

“There is ZERO link between the two, and it’s false [to] keep implying there was,” he added.

Johnson’s book, published in April by Pluto Press, argues that US corporate media have helped enable Israel’s devastation of Gaza through sanitizing Israeli actions, obscuring US responsibility, and dehumanizing Palestinians as Israeli forces killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of them in what United Nations experts, human rights groups, a South Africa-led case currently before the International Court of Justice, and many others call a genocide.

Johnson told The Guardian that critics “seem to be objecting largely based on the title using the word ‘genocide.’” a

“But ‘genocide’ is not my word, or my finding,” he stressed. “The fact of genocide in Gaza is the overwhelming consensus of the human rightsworld, and it is a wholly mainstream opinion among those tasked with studying and determining such matters.”

“That it makes some people upset is unfortunate, but reality is often upsetting,” he said. “This particular reality is especially upsetting... to the parents of the over 20,000 children killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023.”

“Do Sydney officials plan on removing pro-Israel books from their libraries because it potentially upsets these community members?” Johnson added.

The Sydney dispute is hardly an isolated case of the silencing of pro-Palestine speech or criticism of Israel’s well-documented crimes against humanity and war crimes, for which alleged perpetrator Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

In March, Adelaide University canceled a venue booking for a literary event featuring Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Organizers accused the university of bowing to political pressure.

In the United States, college campuses were the epicenter of suppression. New York University withheld a graduating student’s diploma after he condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza during his commencement speech. New York authorities also violently cracked down on NYU’s anti-genocide protests, and the school adopted a definition of antisemitism conflating anti-Zionism and hatred of Jews.

Seven miles uptown, Columbia University suspended its chapters of the nonviolent groups Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace.

George Washington University in Washington, DC banned a graduate from campus after she criticized the university’s ties to Israel, while earlier this year the University of Southern Maine withdrew its supportfor a Palestine conference because it was slated to include remote participation by Albanese. USM officials cited the dubious sanctionsimposed on Albanese and her family by the Trump administration.

There has also been widespread censorship and suppression of pro-Palestine speech in countries including Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

These incidents are indicative of a wider pattern documented by Irene Khan, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, who in 2024 reported that courses, lectures, and panels on Palestine have been canceled and that institutions in Western Europe and North America have restricted books, art, scholarship, and speech concerning Israel and Palestine.

While some Jewish leaders and groups welcomed the removal of Johnson’s book from Waverley Library, others decried the censorship.

“Public libraries belong to all of us, and should host a range of views and topics, be they books about queer families or Israel’s widely condemned war crimes,” Bart Shteinman, an executive member of the progressive Jewish Council of Australia, told The Guardian. He also called the decision to pull the book “deeply alarming.”

One Palestinian account on Bluesky posted: “Is the idea that nothing critical of Israel can ever stand? Because the lobby groups keep telling us there’s a difference between prejudice and criticism, but they keep acting like there’s not.”

Another social media user, this one on X, lambasted what she called the “lily-livered library” for “pandering to the vile zealots who protect Israel, despite the evidence before our eyes.”

Rhonda Garad, a researcher at Monash University in Melbourne, bluntlysaid on X that “we’ve reached the book-burning stage of the fascist takeover.”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-genocide-censorship

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