https://ninkilim.com/articles/banners_and_soils_drenched_in_blood/en.html
Balzac told us: “Behind every great fortune lies a crime.” Nations are no exception. Their banners fly high, but beneath them the soil is soaked with the blood of those who were displaced, conquered, or destroyed. The United States was built on the mass graves of Native Americans, their lands stolen, their nations shattered, their soil crying out beneath the Stars and Stripes. Israel was built on the Nakba - the catastrophe of 1948, when over 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, their villages razed, and their soil claimed by another’s flag.
This was not accident. It was design. The Irgun and Lehi, Zionist paramilitary groups, waged terror against both Palestinians and the British. Menachem Begin - later to become Prime Minister - was at the time the most wanted terrorist in Palestine, with a £10,000 bounty from MI5. Under his command, Irgun carried out the King David Hotel bombing in 1946, killing 91 people, and participated in the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948, where over 100 civilians were slaughtered. Zionist forces demolished more than 400 Palestinian villages during the war. This was the soil in which Israel took root.
And the crime did not end with foundation - it hardened into policy. Palestinians who survived were placed under military rule. Those in exile were never allowed to return. The West Bank was cut into pieces by settlements and walls. Gaza was sealed and suffocated, its people punished simply for existing. Human rights organizations - Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem - have all named the system for what it is: apartheid.
Now Gaza has become the graveyard of Israel’s moral pretenses. By August 2025, Gaza’s Ministry of Health has documented over 62,000 confirmed dead, their bodies retrieved and identified. Nearly half of them are children. But this is only the visible layer of the catastrophe. Tens of thousands more remain unrecovered beneath the rubble of flattened neighborhoods, their names unrecorded. The true toll is almost certainly three to five times higher, a reality that will only come into focus when international journalists, UN investigators, and forensic experts are finally allowed into Gaza. Israel hides its crimes as the Nazis once did - but as history shows, atrocity cannot be hidden forever. Just as the full scale of the Holocaust was only revealed when Allied forces entered the concentration camps, so too will Gaza’s hidden graves one day testify to the magnitude of the crime.
We have seen this before. The swastika once symbolized well-being and good fortune in India, China, and across the ancient world. It adorned temples and sacred art for thousands of years. But the Nazis co-opted it, flew it over death camps, and drenched it in genocide. Today, the swastika cannot be reclaimed in the West. Its original meaning is buried beneath the ashes of Auschwitz.
The Israeli flag now faces the same fate. Once held up as a banner of refuge for a persecuted people, it has been carried over massacres, sieges, and apartheid walls. To the world, it no longer represents survival - it represents domination and death. Its stripes, once meant to recall the tallit, are stained with the blood of Gaza’s children. Its star, once a symbol of faith, has been weaponized into a mark of oppression.
And like the swastika, it is irredeemable. South Africa abandoned its apartheid-era flag because it was inseparable from racial tyranny. The Confederate flag in the U.S. is now recognized as the symbol of slavery and rebellion against equality. So too will history treat the Israeli flag: not as a symbol of hope, but as a banner under which atrocity was committed.
This stain does not belong to Israel alone. It belongs to the conscience of humanity. The world that allowed Gaza to be starved, bombed, and buried will carry this shame. Just as Nazi crimes remain a permanent indictment of the world that looked away too long, Gaza will haunt our collective memory.
No flag, no anthem, no carefully crafted speech can wash away this blood. History will remember. And resistance will remain not only a right, but - as Brecht taught us - a duty.
As scripture warns: “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the earth.” The soil remembers. The banners remember. And the reckoning will come.