Never Forget? Never Forgive? Never Again?

Let’s talk about memory, forgiveness, and the selective outrage that props up the logic of endless war.

A commentor told Films For Action on a recent post: 

"It’s pretty simple:
October 7, 2023—a sadistic massacre. 
Never forget. Never forgive. Never again. 
Hamas and Iran are existential threats. It’s valid to eliminate such threats in self-defense, even with civilian casualties."

Let’s be absolutely clear: The massacre of civilians on October 7 was an atrocity and a war crime. No one with a conscience should excuse it. But the moral bankruptcy of this position is exposed the moment they pretend history began on October 7, as if violence and mass killing suddenly erupted out of a vacuum. This is the logic of empire: erase the context, erase the decades of suffering, and then sanctify your own violence as “defense.”

Never forget? Let’s remember:

- For over seven decades, Gaza has served as an overcrowded refuge for Palestinians uprooted in 1948—confined and denied basic rights under ongoing siege and occupation..
- During the Suez Crisis in 1956, Israeli forces killed over 1,200 Palestinians in Gaza, including the infamous Khan Younis and Rafah massacres. At the time, 1% of Gaza’s population was killed, wounded, tortured, or imprisoned by Israel[1].
- In 2008–2009, Israel’s Operation Cast Lead killed up to 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and destroyed vast swathes of Gaza’s infrastructure—schools, hospitals, mosques, homes.
- In 2014, Israel’s invasion of Gaza killed 2,251 Palestinians (65% civilians), destroyed 25% of homes in Gaza City, and left 520,000 people—30% of Gaza’s population—internally displaced.
- In 2018–2019, Palestinians participating in the Great March of Return—unarmed protests—were met with Israeli sniper fire, killing over 200 and wounding thousands.
- The blockade imposed since 2007 has turned Gaza into what even mainstream observers call an “open-air prison,” with collective punishment condemned by the UN and human rights organizations as a war crime.

Never forgive? Tell that to the families who have watched their children die in airstrikes, the parents who have buried their loved ones after every “mowing the lawn” operation, the generations who have lived their entire lives under siege, occupation, and bombardment.

Never again? For whom? 

Because when Israel, with the backing of the US and Europe, responds to October 7 with a campaign that has killed over 54,000 Palestinians in Gaza—most of them civilians, thousands of them children—where is your outrage? Where is your invocation of “never again” for the people of Gaza, who have endured more death in the past year than in all previous wars combined?

“It’s valid to eliminate such threats in self-defense, even with civilian casualties.”

This is the language of every empire, every occupier, every perpetrator of mass violence in history. It’s the logic Bin Laden used to justify 9/11: “You are complicit in your government’s crimes, so you are fair game.” It’s the logic that justified the firebombing of Dresden, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the My Lai massacre, and every act of collective punishment ever committed. It’s not justice. It’s not self-defense. It’s the logic of terrorism, no matter who wields it.

Let’s be honest:
- If Hamas’s killing of civilians is a war crime (and it is), then so is Israel’s systematic killing of civilians on a scale 50 times greater.
- If you believe in “never again,” it must apply to all people, not just your own side.
- If you justify the mass killing of civilians as “self-defense,” you have forfeited any claim to the moral high ground.

History did not begin on October 7. The cycle of violence is not broken by more violence.

If you want to end the bloodshed, you have to end the occupation, the apartheid, the siege, and the logic of domination that has fueled this tragedy for generations. 

Anything less is just another chapter in the same book of endless war.

Never forget that.