Commentary
From Srebrenica to Gaza, ‘never again’ has lost all meaning
Israel’s government is saying that Gaza’s inhabitants should be free to leave if they wish. Like it or not, those statements eerily recall Ratko Mladić’s words in 1995, when he said the people of Srebrenica could either stay or go.
We swear “never again,” yet it keeps happening — 8,372 bodies have been found in mass graves, with hundreds more reduced to fragments.
This was Srebrenica: an unmanageable pocket filled up beyond belief by desperation and resistance amid the tangled logic of ethnic cleansing along the Bosnian front. A Muslim enclave sacrificed because it lay outside the territorial chessboard of the peace maps. It stood too far away to be linked to the narrow land corridor that the negotiators in Dayton, Ohio drew up for Gorazde, late at night and after a good dose of whisky. Srebrenica was abandoned by everyone, including the United Nations, which had solemnly labelled it a protected area.
The Bosnian war turned humanitarian aid into a weapon: what mattered was who let which convoys through, and to what political end. The Bosnian Serb forces had the advantage of weaponry, driving the Muslims to the brink of starvation, manipulating aid supplies to move people out. Most of the sieges – the one of Sarajevo included – targeted water, bread and the black market; snipers and mortars did the rest. The plan was to starve and terrorize to force people to move elsewhere. What endures of Srebrenica is the image of Ratko Mladić handing chocolate to children, assuring them they had nothing to fear, and that of the gaunt father forced to shout for his son hiding in the woods – neither of which survived.
The UN General Assembly has declared July 11 the “International Day of Reflection on the Srebrenica Genocide.” Israel is among the states that continue to hold that one should not speak of a single, stand-alone genocide here; its line is to downgrade the atrocity to war crimes, pointing to the separation of women and children before the mass executions as a mitigating element.
Relations between Israel and Serbia remain very cordial, as shown by the recent visit of the Belgrade parliament’s spokeswoman to Tel Aviv. Arms sales from Israel to Serbia are officially dismissed as only occasional, yet an investigation by BIRN and Haaretz found that, at the height of the Gaza assault, Serbian weapons exports to Israel jumped 30-fold – from $1.6 million to $42.3 million – which was helped along by the presence of the Israeli spin doctor managing the image of embattled president Aleksandar Vučić.
Evidently, the uniqueness of the Holocaust allows for no exceptions: the fear is that the gravity of the crime will be diminished. Equally evident, however, is the fear that the reverberations of violence against civilians could set a precedent, and not only because Gaza is being invoked by the survivors of Srebrenica themselves. The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia have in fact called this massacre a genocide, perpetrated while the international community was busy intervening in the broader context of the war in Bosnia, while the latter was not recognized as genocide. In short, genocide can occur in one place, in the shadow of a broader war context.
It takes real effort to avoid noticing the parallels. Today Israel’s government is saying that Gaza’s inhabitants should be free to leave if they wish, and that it is working with the United States to find countries willing to receive them, guaranteeing them “freedom of choice.” Like it or not, those statements eerily recall Ratko Mladić’s words in 1995, when he said the people of Srebrenica could either stay or go.
They had the choice to either leave or die of starvation in a vast concentration camp amid the rubble. Now, 30 years on, the rhetoric, the inertia and the sophistry of the debate sound strangely familiar, though on a quite different scale.
In Italy we have watched Paolo Mieli lean closer to the TV camera to praise the idea of a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah – where, according to Israel’s Defence Minister, 600,000 Palestinians would be confined -because “an island of reconstruction has to be set up, where everything is orderly.” We have read historian Paolo Pombeni asking, on the basis of data from supposed unnamed international observers, “why are the children killed in Kyiv worth less than those in Gaza?” – as if the numbers and nature of the war violence were comparable, perhaps measured by the pound; and as if the West had not sanctioned Putin while arming Netanyahu. On the other side of the spectrum, we have heard the tirades of the most squalid revisionists of Assad’s or Putin’s crimes – let alone China’s repression of the Uyghurs – all suddenly turned into scholars of international law.
Historian Enzo Traverso has argued that we cannot analyze the 20th century without placing the Holocaust at the center: a living and breathing memory that shed light on the fundamental rights in our democracies. At the same time, we must also note the paradoxical metamorphosis this memory has undergone, becoming a weapon to support – unconditionally, or at least disproportionately – Israel’s actions, almost as a badge of respectability for political forces. This is not the oft-invoked trivialization of Holocaust “guilt,” but rather a matter of power relations and of technological and military dependency in a world sliding back to geopolitical blocs.
The rhetorical “never again” rooted in that memory ends up bent to justify military operations in which drones drop grenades to displace Palestinians, while the soldiers themselves admit they target civilians so that others “learn not to come back.” Day after day, Gaza displays ever more features of genocide. The perverse long-term effect of this metamorphosis is devastating: it strengthens the idea that a mythologized memory of genocide is itself poisonous as it is being wielded for oppressive ends, and gives precedent to the relativization of antisemitism itself.
The ongoing attack on UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese can be read as a portent of a brazenly law-free world in which some states, claiming the right to commit crimes without accountability, feel no constraints whatsoever. Upholding our commitments to the rule of law, democracy and human rights will become harder still; much of the planet will see only the persistence of colonial hierarchies, reflecting racism and the West of the colonial genocides in the name of its civilizing mission against the intolerance of the barbarians.
The crime of Srebrenica has not remained unpunished: Bosnia’s judiciary still issues investigations, arrest warrants and indictments for genocide. It is striking now to see IDF soldiers having themselves photographed only from behind, hiding their faces – perhaps defiantly, perhaps to shield them against future charges.
For 30 years Europe has lived with this wound that will not stop bleeding, its echoes feeding a public debate that is increasingly being exploited for particular ends.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/1995-2025-srebrenica-nel-riverbero-di-gaza on 2025-07-12