Again and Again
“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a rucksack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home to find their parents have disappeared.”
This little diary entry, with some modifications, could have been written by an older Hind Rajab in Gaza, or by Jawad Younes in Saksakiye in Southern Lebanon or by Fatima Salari, one of the 100 school children murdered in Minab in Iran. It was written however by Anne Frank on the 13th of January 1943 in her diary.
Two and a half years later Anne died in a concentration camp. The house that she had hidden in, in Amsterdam, later became a museum. Eighty one years later and almost an hour away in Utrecht, a public art exhibit featured a small car pockmarked with 335 bullet holes in remembrance of Hind Rajab. Both memorials – one institutionalised and the other mobile and therefore transient – are testaments and reminders of the phrase ‘Never Again.’ But today we must ask, ‘never again for whom?’
When Donald Trump and Peter Hegseth bellowed for Iran to be bombed back to the ‘stone age’, they would have done well to read Anne Frank’s diary entry from May 3, 1944.
“There is a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start all over again.”
For the little girl whose diary came to be taught in schools around the world and was translated into 70 languages, her canvas was not her community but the world. This was in stark contrast to Meir Kahane, a militant ethno-nationalist rabbi who used ‘Never Again’ as the title of a manifesto to justify terrorist attacks in the name of fighting anti-Semitisim. To understand Israel today, it is crucial to understand Kahanism, a movement inspired by his ideas. Kahane also coined the slogan ‘every Jew a .22’ in order to spur people on to violence as the only path to self-preservation. Imagine, a terrorised 13 year old child could foresee that war only begets war and on the other hand an adult, indeed a rabbi, could only bay for more blood. Anne Frank refused to be a victim. Kahane could only imagine himself and his community as victims.
Leader of the Kach right wing movement Meir Kahane speaking before his followers in his office in Tel Aviv in 1984. Photo: Wikipedia (CC BY 4.0).
Today the ethno-supremacist ideas preached by Kahane are central in the policies of both the Israeli army and politicians. Ben Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security, was convicted in 2007 of inciting anti-Arab racism and for support for the Kach group which was on the Israeli and US terrorism blacklist. In a memorial for Kahane in 2015 Gvir said that the memorial was not just a way of remembering the person ‘but it is a pledge of allegiance to continue his way.’ He then went on to demand complete segregation between Israelis and Palestinians and asserted that he wanted ‘the ideas of Rabbi Kahane in power.’ That desire is now of course a reality as Ben Gvir, with his macabre noose shaped lapel pin, recently celebrated the passing of a law mandating the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners convicted for lethal attacks with champagne in the Knesset. So far the only official execution in Israel was of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann in 1962.
Comparing the crimes of the Israeli government and armed forces today to those of the Nazis is often dismissed as a hackneyed cliché despite the fact that chilling parallels exist. The Nazis used Zyklon B. The Israelis use white phosphorus. In fact as early as 1948 typhoid bacteria was used to poison Palestinian wells by the Haganah. The Nazis used IBM’s German subsidiary Dehomag, to supply Hollerith punch card technology for use in census’ to identify Jews. The Israelis use Lavendar AI and Palantir’s secretive Project Maven to create kill lists of Palestinians and others that number in the thousands. However, it is perhaps best not to compare brutality for it can only be measured by the pain of those who suffer because of it. The pain of others always pales in comparison to the suffering one’s own community if victimhood becomes the defining feature of a community’s identity. If Anne, Hind, Jawad or Fatima could speak today they would each share their pain and terror in deeply unique yet fundamentally similar ways.
Now, as Israel invades South Lebanon and seeks to create a security buffer zone south of the Litani river, it has broadcast a message to the Druze and Christian communities that they should not offer shelter to the Shi’as who are being pushed out of the area. Many years ago when I visited South Lebanon, I went to Qana where in 1996 Israeli airstrikes on a UN compound killed 106 Lebanese people and injured Fijian peacekeepers. Around 800 people had taken shelter in the UN compound thinking it would be safe.
The day I went to Qana, a group of young men from Saudi Arabia were listening to a short man and watching him leaf through an album of photos outside the memorial to the 1996 massacre. As i peered over the shoulders of one of the Saudis, i saw the Lebanese man flick through gruesome photos of mutilated children, charred torsos of toddlers and mangled limbs. He spoke softly and slowly as he went through the photos. He said that along with some others, he had snuck into the area despite the Israeli ban and had photographed everything.
I remember Jamil Ali Salim’s sad eyes, his deep worry lines etched on his face like the scarred terrain around him and his gesticulating fingers on which he wore turquoise and carnelian rings. Later Jamil told me that the group of friends that had ventured out to photograph the site included Christian friends from the area. Qana and its environs have ancient Christian populations although the South of Lebanon is predominantly Shia.
Smoke rises from a building destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in the southern port city of Tyre, Lebanon, Saturday, April 4, 2026. Photo: AP/PTI.
Almost 20 years later, I wonder what Jamil’s Druze and Christian neighbours would do now that Israel has essentially announced that it wants to ethnically cleanse the South of Lebanon of the Shia. On May 25, 1944, just two months before their hideout was discovered by the Nazis, Anne Frank wrote, ‘this morning Mr. Van Hoeven was arrested. He was hiding two Jews in his house.’
Perhaps, Jamil’s neighbors would do for his family what Mr. Van Hoeven did for Anne Frank’s? Or maybe now the cost is too high? After all a drone or an air strike will not just target an individual but an entire neighbourhood. Qana’s history remains bloody but unbowed. The 1996 massacre, the 2006 invasion, killings in 2024 and now bombardment in 2026 all point to the fact that the residents of the area cannot even dream of saying ‘never again.’ Over years of Israeli violations of ceasefires as well as of Lebanon’s sovereignty, Shias from the South have often found refuge in Christian towns: Hasbaya, Kawkaba and Marjayoun. Now town counsellors are reluctantly asking the Shia to leave while also worrying about future repercussions from angry neighbors who may feel betrayed.
As Anthony Shadid writes in his memoir, House of Stone, the south of Lebanon in general and Marjyayoun in particular was a place where communities had learnt how to live together. A Christian wrote out prescriptions for a Shia Sheikh while prayers rang out on Good Friday from the store of a Sunni Muslim. Memories of those times are now perhaps only carried in the trees and in the stones. As geo-political lines are redrawn across the Middle East, Israel is perhaps banking on pushing Lebanon, and indeed the wider region, into political anarchy, economic collapse and sectarian strife. Fawda, or chaos, is the only goal that dictates Israeli policy. ‘Never again’ is now replaced by ‘again and again.’
Ali Khan Mahmudabad is Associate Professor of Political Science and History at Ashoka University. He is on X @mahmudabad.
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