If it's genocide, why so slow?

Written By Richard C. Ledes

ANSWERING QUESTION POSED BY BRET STEPHENS IN NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL, JULY 23RD, 2025

If the Israelis are acting like the Nazis, by committing genocide, why aren’t they eliminating Palestinians even quicker, since they have the technological means?

It is important to realize that—starting from the time Hitler came to power in 1933—the Nazis combined the planning and eventually the use of two methods to eliminate European Jews: ethnic-cleansing and genocide, the latter with increasingly technologically sophisticated methods. The first approach is sometimes referred to as the “First Solution” that they used in combination with the “Final Solution." Over time, they shifted more to the Final Solution, which they had described from the beginning. You can read about the combined use of these methods in, for example, James Q Whitman’s book Hitler’s American Model (Princeton, 2018) and Egan Bloom’s book Arthur Ruppin and the Production of Pre-Israeli Culture (Brill 2011). 

However, there are other factor besides technology. First, there are also psychological and symbolic considerations, including of law. In terms of law, the Nazis felt it was necessary to remove citizenship from German Jews before undertaking the Final Solution. Inspired by Jim Crow laws in the United States, they created a second lower status of citizenship for Jews in 1935. Israel legislated a second lower form of citizenship for their Palestinian citizens in 2018. The Palestinians of the Occupied Territories, which include Gaza, are stateless. As Hannah Arendt described the status of statelessness, they have been deprived of the right to have rights. In terms of psychology, there is by both ethno-nationalist states not only the use of advanced technology but also of the logic of deception—including self-deception—and also at present the use of a logic of "disavowal," which has become increasingly important in our current information societies. You can read about this latter logic in the book Disavowal by Alenka Zupančič (Polity 2024).

In conclusion, the State of Israel is not only committing genocide against the Palestinians; like the Nazis did against the Jews of Europe, it is committing both genocide and ethnic-cleansing. For bureaucratic and ideological reasons, I would argue, the perpetrators need to maintain both of these approaches today, as they did then.

Richard C. Ledes

Producer, Writer, Director

Producer, writer and director Richard C. Ledes was not named ”Richard” after his mother’s brother, who died a schizophrenic in a veterans psychiatric hospital after he either escaped or wandered off and was hit by a train. He was named after her father, a judge in Baltimore, who died of sadness a few months after his son, the schizophrenic, was hit by a train. Richard C. Ledes was not named after a schizophrenic.

Ledes’ film FRED WON’T MOVE OUT was named by the BFI (British Film Institute) as one of the 10 essential films of legendary actor Elliott Gould (MASH, THE LONG GOODBYE). Ledes’ film THE CALLER won Best NY Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival.

His first feature film A HOLE IN ONE, set in 1953, starring Michelle Williams, about a woman who wants a lobotomy, originated in a piece of performance art that Ledes based on the psychiatric records of his maternal uncle. He made A HOLE IN ONE after completing a doctorate in comparative literature at NYU. Much of his research for the film derived from the research he did for his dissertation; it was on the cultural traces of the rise of mental healthcare in the U.S. around treating veterans after WWII. During his research he volunteered at an outpatient center for severely mentally ill: assistant-directing their theater program and leading groups in which they read aloud the short stories of Poe, Melville and Hawthorne. This combination of a personal connection to a film’s theme with research into its broader significance remains an important dimension of his work.

His recently completed film ADIEU LACAN, starring David Patrick Kelly and Ismenia Mendes, is based on the play "Goodbye Doctor" and the novel "Lacan's Parrot" both by Betty Milan. ADIEU LACAN is the story of the struggle of a young woman to understand, through a psychoanalysis with the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, why her own path to motherhood has reached an unbearable impasse.

His upcoming film IKONOPHILE Z, “a light romantic comedy about the extinction of all life on earth,” is currently in post-production. Additionally he is in development on VIENNA 1913, based on a play by the same name written by the late renowned French psychoanalyst and playwright Alain Didier-Weill.

Ledes is also the only translator of William Burroughs into English (Burroughs did a series of interviews in France that were published in French; the original recordings were lost; for a collection of the work of Burroughs published by Semiotexte, Ledes translated the French translations back into English).

http://richardledes.com
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