Genocide is as old as human society. It is older than the bible, which is rife with mass vengeance, human and divine. But few centuries have been shaped as profoundly by genocide and its consequences as the twentieth.
No accident then, that the word itself, genocide, was finally coined (by a Jewish lawyer) in the middle of the twentieth century, in 1943. For over forty years, I have travelled Europe and the Middle East, finding testimony of perpetration and victimhood in 20th century genocides and mass killings. These texts, audio and video documentaries, are a developing record of some of these encounters.
Testimony is at the heart of this work. Without evidence, denial thrives. Denial is the invariable companion of genocide, a crime so intolerable, that perpetrators know how essential it is to deny. The greatest deniers are governments, because they are the greatest perpetrators of genocide.
The answer to denial is to ask questions. As long as we keep asking, there is a hope of finding answers.
KEYS: A Troubled Inheritance
Podcast / Audio
Follow Mike Joseph on this epic journey to uncover his family inheritance of victimhood in the Holocaust, a journey that progressively drives him towards his other family inheritance – perpetration of the expulsion of the Palestinians, the 1948 Palestinian Nakba.
How can both catastrophes be narrated in the same story?
Gaza: A Story of Love and War
Documentary
Two journalists, one Welsh and unable to get into Gaza, one Palestinian and unable to get out, meet to share stories over a Zoom link. In this film, partly shot days before the Hamas invasion of Israel, and then four months later after Israel’s destruction of Gaza, we hear how for Gazans, the disaster started not in 2023 but in 1948, and hear the wide array of human responses from romantic hopes to despair.
Featured Articles
Waiting for the End
The conflict which led to 15 months of war in Gaza did not start on 7th of October 2023, but over a century ago. And the ceasefire announced for the 19th of January 2025, whatever it brings, will not end the conflict, but open a new phase, perhaps burdened with even...
No bombs, no bodies
‘No bombs, no bodies’, wrote a viewer about my film, GAZA: A Story of Love and War, ‘and yet so powerful and moving’. Lacking the expected screenplay of horror that fills television and online news daily since October 2023, this film may at first seem little more than...
Gaza: What do we do?
This short sequel to GAZA: A Story of Love and War, records the audience discussion with Ceredigion MP, Ben Lake, after the autumn 2024 screening of the documentary in Cardigan. Ben Lake reveals that no subject concerns his constituents more urgently than Gaza....
The Video header explained
What’s happening here?
Two histories of mass violence collide: The Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba.
Yad Vashem is Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum. New army recruits complete their training, touring the dark underground galleries which chronicle the traumas of Europe’s Holocaust, climbing steadily to this highpoint: a sunlit platform to view Jerusalem Forest and the land of Israel, which these new soldiers are to defend.
The soldiers see the woods, but they don’t see beneath these trees the ruins of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, where a 1948 massacre by Jewish forces triggered mass Palestinian panic and flight.
Yad Vashem once sacked a museum guide who mentioned that.