History Repeats First as Tragedy, Then as Hypocrisy:

A dark projection of what happens when the enablers of yesterday become the censors of today — and tomorrow’s accused.

It began, as these things often do, with silence.

Not an empty silence — but a curated one. The kind that buzzes behind polished podiums, late-night monologues, and platitudes about “complex situations.” The silence of countries too “civilised” to scream, too “mature” to intervene, and far too proud to realise that history was already loading the next act.

In 2024, Gaza burned. UN officials said it. Human Rights Watch said it. The world’s foremost genocide scholars said it. This was not war. This was extermination. UN rapporteurs called it what it was: genocide. Human Rights Watch did too. Doctors Without Borders were bombed for saying it aloud. Palestinians died by the tens of thousands — starved, shelled, trapped. The evidence mounted. The world watched.

Israel denied it, of course. Then accused those who said otherwise of antisemitism — including Jews. And Europe, perhaps desperate to prove it had finally learned from its past, responded in the only way it knew how: by criminalising speech, censoring protest, and arresting truth.

And Europe and the U.S. chose to criminalise the watchers.

Germany led the charge — a nation so haunted by its Holocaust that it chose to silence anyone who noticed another one. Gripped by a historical guilt it could not outgrow, they made protesting Israel’s actions near-illegal. Public broadcasters silenced dissent. Jewish voices opposing the war were deplatformed as “self-hating.”It banned Palestinian flags in schools. Police snatched keffiyehs from children’s necks and tore flags from their hands — sometimes, quite literally, mid-march. Public broadcasters blacklisted Jewish voices that challenged the Israeli state. Holocaust survivors warning “it’s happening again” were called security risks. And when a UN Special Rapporteur mentioned genocide, Germany blacklisted her, too.

This, from a country where over 170,000 Jews were deported from within its borders, many with the help of civil servants who later became architects of its post-war democracy. Today, it arrests students for holding signs. The state armoured its identity behind the phrase: Staatsräson (reason of state). The idea that Israel’s security was Germany’s raison d’être (reason for being), no matter what Israel did.

The Netherlands, once a quiet collaborator in the Final Solution — where three-quarters of Dutch Jews were rounded up with the help of local police became disturbingly good at spotting flags — now proudly teaches tolerance while banning pro-Palestinian protests. In 2024, police were filmed snatching a Palestinian flag from a small child’s hand while his mother cried. “Incitement,” they said. “Public order” statutes were used more and more “We are protecting against hate,” they said, while turning water cannons on peace marches.

In Amsterdam, a Jewish-Dutch journalist was attacked by security while covering a peaceful sit-in. He wore a yarmulke. No one cared. His voice was “too critical,” his ethnicity no longer convenient.

France — which once herded Jews into the Vélodrome d'Hiver, before sending them to Auschwitz — now bans protests against genocide under the guise of “public order.” Police raided student dorms and demanded lists of Arab students from university registrars. Booksellers were told to pull certain titles “temporarily.” That temporary status quietly became indefinite.

Britain, as ever, balanced its repression with bureaucratic charm. Still wearing the shrapnel of empire like a family heirloom, it rolled out counter-extremism briefings for university students who dared to question Israeli policy. In 2024, a school suspended a 14-year-old for writing “Free Palestine” on his notebook. Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, declared that Israel had “the right” to withhold food and water — an open endorsement of collective punishment. At the same time, universities were ordered to report any use of the phrase “From the river to the sea” as potential extremism. Civil liberties, once fought for in pubs and courts, were now buried in compliance documents and press briefings.

America, that loudest exporter of democracy, meanwhile funded the bombs while pretending to moderate the volume. Protestors had tear gas thrown at them outside consulates. Congress passed laws threatening to strip university funding from institutions that allowed chants of “From the river to the sea.” They called it incitement. No one explained how the chant was more dangerous than the tanks flattening hospitals. In several states, chanting “intifada” could land you on a terrorism watchlist. Israel dropped 2,000-pound bombs on refugee camps; CNN asked if the real issue was tone.

Canada and Australia, always loyal second cousins to the empire, eagerly fell in line. Canada froze funding to UNRWA over unverified Israeli claims that were later quietly discredited. The freeze stayed. Australia, too far away to matter and too close to follow, arrested protestors for blocking traffic in the name of peace. In some states, chanting “Free Palestine” was considered hate speech. Their politicians nodded in unison, mouthing “Israel has a right to defend itself” while quietly tightening surveillance on Arab communities. They banned pro-Palestinian marches in Melbourne, while its intelligence services monitored Arab families’ WhatsApp chats under expanded security powers.

And the people who objected? Arrested. Censored. Smeared. Fired. Flagged. In some cases — disappeared from public life.

But then came the recoil.

By 2035, a new generation had come of age, one raised on screenshots of bombed-out schools, buried toddlers, and censored truths. They saw through the myths their governments had spoon-fed. They marched. They remembered who had silenced them, the children that watched those flag-snatchings and detentions had grown up. They remembered. They had screenshots, transcripts, and archived streams. They had learned what governments preferred they forget: that silence can be legislated, but not sustained.

And then, in a poetic spiral, the laws those governments had crafted to suppress speech turned inward.

The laws used to crush solidarity turned inward — not with a bang, but with the slow, mechanical purr of precedent.

In Germany, the constitutional court reversed decades of free expression. “State defamation” laws were expanded to prosecute Holocaust survivors who criticised Israeli war crimes. Jewish academics had their funding pulled. Jewish anti-Zionist groups were banned. The Bundestag passed a bill forbidding the display of “unapproved genocide analogies.” The Nazis had made genocide industrial. Germany had made censorship an art. Holocaust survivors who’d once warned “it’s happening again” were denounced for “undermining national memory.”

In France, the police powers used to arrest pro-Gaza protestors were repurposed to crack down on climate activists and pension strikers. If a demonstration “undermined national integrity,” it could be banned. The precedent had been set: if a protest “offends national identity,” it is illegal. The mechanism was apolitical — and therefore impossible to stop. Palestinian flags had paved the way for that logic. The bans now included union banners.

Britain, ever the lab rat of authoritarian efficiency, repurposed its surveillance infrastructure to monitor “anti-Western sentiment.” Dissent had become dangerous. Anti-war campaigners, already branded “terror sympathisers,” were jailed under the new National Unity Act. One clause allowed the Home Secretary to detain any citizen “acting in a way likely to undermine the government’s foreign policy credibility.” The prisons filled with academics and teenagers. What started with chants for Palestine now swept up environmentalists, whistleblowers, and teenagers with bad tweets. By 2040, the National Security Memoirs Act classified 30 years of foreign correspondence. “For context,” they said.

America, caught in its own trap, saw the Supreme Court uphold “material support for terror” charges against journalists who interviewed Palestinian resistance figures — echoing the same logic once used by Britain to criminalise contact with the IRA, a group America’s political class once quietly tolerated, funded, or cheered from afar. By 2040, several states had laws criminalising advocacy for any group under US sanctions. The First Amendment, bless its heart, was still standing — but only just. Those prosecuted under “material support for terrorism” laws now included journalists who interviewed figures from the Sudanese resistance and the Iranian diaspora. The Patriot Act was never repealed — it was just rebranded. The irony? Entire generations of American Jews who had once opposed apartheid South Africa were now being arrested for opposing apartheid Israel.

Canada passed a “Digital Harmony Act” banning the online publication of any NGO report not cleared by the Foreign Ministry. Global human rights organisations were no longer welcome — especially those who’d once dared to use the word genocide.

Australia used its protest crackdown toolkit to criminalise climate blockades and indigenous land rights campaigns. “We support peaceful protest,” the prime minister intoned, “when it aligns with national values.”

And Israel? By then, an ICC warrant had been issued — but never enforced. Gaza was rubble. The country stood isolated, defiant, and armed. Its war on memory was complete: critics were traitors, survivors were silent, and what was once a tragedy had become policy. A new generation of Israelis had never met a Palestinian. The world, having ignored the genocide in real time, now offered posthumous memorials, exhibits, and “think pieces” about the “complex tragedy of Gaza.” The victims, as ever, were honoured too late.

Brussels, 2049.

A dusty EU tribunal hall. A former student protestor gives testimony.

“We were arrested for chanting stop the bombing. Not Death to Israel. Not Intifada. Just stop the bombing.”

A German delegate — elderly, weary — raises his hand.

“How did we let this happen?”

A Palestinian woman, born in Rafah and stateless in Europe, leans forward.

“You didn’t let it happen,” she says. “You rehearsed it.”