Ritual human sacrifice

How the West normalizes the crimes of Zionism

There is no end in sight for the massacre in Gaza. Nearly two years after the start of Al Aqsa Flood, the United Nations Human Rights Council has—finally—declared Israel’s war in Gaza genocide. Seventy-two pages, with hundreds of footnotes, and a litany of atrocity stories catalogue the devastating human destruction. The details are gruesome. Extermination, torture, sexual violence, and starvation are not outliers but the systematic instruments of genocide.

And yet, anyone with an internet connection and a conscience is witness to these horrors in real time: videos, livestreams, photos, and eyewitness testimony streamed straight to our palms. The evidence was always there.

So why did it take this institution to speak in plain terms? Why, after months of slaughter and daily images of devastation, did this international body only now name what many already knew for so long?

So far, the United Nations has been unwilling and unable to stop the genocide. Member states have also seen what we have seen., And yet, notwithstanding the actions of the Palestinian resistance, including Iran and Yemen, there has been no direct military intervention to stop it.

The United States has led a campaign to normalize and obscure the violence—politically, rhetorically, and materially—while others have moved between active intervention and quiet, or sometimes loud, acquiescence. The world has cleaved into two camps: those trying to stop the killing and those doing everything in their power to let it continue. Those in the second group encompass a wide range of activities, from doing nothing to actively promoting and engaging in the genocide or by attacking and killing those who are opposed to it.

“The colonial world is the Manichean world,” wrote Frantz Fanon. Split into stark binaries, nuance is excised by force. Those are the conditions not of the Native’s own making but brutally thrust upon them. War ends nuance. Bombing a hospital ends nuance. Shrapnel tearing children apart ends nuance. Systemic sexual violence and torture end nuance. Genocide ends nuance.

That is why I have come to see Gaza as more than war, and even more than genocide. What is unfolding is ritualized violence: collective, ceremonial, enacted like a grim sacrament. Ritual human sacrifice may sound archaic or sensational. But if we understand ritual as patterned, public, and meaningful violence—performed to communicate power, to terrify, to extinguish life—then the term clarifies what otherwise seems senseless.

Chinese professor Jiang Xuechin described the Palestinian genocide as ritual human sacrifice in a recent YouTube lecture. While I agree with his definitions, his historical example of the Aztecs doing human sacrifice obscures more than it illustrates the kind of colonial violence practiced in Gaza.

Colonizers often inflate the intra-group violence of the people they conquer often to obscure their own crimes, oftentimes entirely fabricating the atrocities of Natives. The Spanish genocide of Mesoamerican peoples, on the other hand, was so thorough that it killed millions and, according to some experts, even contributed to a global climate shift known as the Little Ice Age. European war and disease killed off up to 90 percent many Indigenous peoples, including the Aztecs.

Indigenous peoples were killed in vast numbers with ritualistic brutality, under the banner of the Christian cross and the authority of the Bible—atrocities that dwarfed those of the Aztecs. The Native population of the Americas has never recovered. It is not “savage” Indigenous brutality that should be cited as the precedent, but “civilized” European ritual human sacrifice, the kind that literally changed the weather.

There is nothing anachronistic about a twenty-first-century genocide. Colonialism and imperialism are not relics; they remain the most recognizable forms of oppression, persisting for centuries. The Zionist genocide of Palestinians draws upon the same biblical justifications that fueled earlier conquests.

As Justin Podur and I discussed in “The Book of Genocide,” the Bible has long served as a genocidal text.

“Remember what Amalek did to you,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reminded Israeli soldiers and commanders in November 2023. “This is a war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness.” The story, which is possibly make-believe, is from the Hebrew Bible. God commands the Hebrews to annihilate the Amalekites: “Utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”

Such biblical incitements to genocide are not outliers in the UN report. They are foundational myths of Zionism, just as they were foundational myths of Manifest Destiny. Anglo settler nations like the United States and Canada intuitively recognize themselves in Zionism. We did it, so it must be right. Settler societies live with the mentality that extermination was proof of superiority—whether of civilization, religion, or race.

The United States has been especially successful at erasing its own history of ritual human sacrifice—hiding it in plain sight, normalizing it, and then sending it down a memory hole.

So what is the effect of ritual human sacrifice today? Israel has taken what should be taboo and, despite global condemnation, normalized its horrors. Given the disproportionate number of Palestinian children killed, we could go further: Zionist violence has taken on the shape of ritual child sacrifice.

There is no exit for Israel from this path but to continue—until it is stopped.