Eighty Years after Hiroshima: The American Bombs Have Turned Gaza into Hiroshima 2.0

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 18 Aug 2025

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

Israel’s genocidal patron, namely the leaderships of the United States, have shown an utter and complete lack of human empathy, conscience or regard for the post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust international law, which they helped create.

7 Aug 2025 – Standing at the giant parking lot of Kerem Shalom Crossing in southern Gaza next to the Egyptian border on 29 August 2024, I drew a parallel between Auschwitz and Gaza.

All comparisons typically fail to capture certain aspects. My comparison is no exception.

The aerial images captured from some Jordanian air craft engaged in air drop of aid to Gaza’s population being starved to death by what “Jewish Fascists” of Israel as apartheid “ethnocracy”, to borrow the words of Oxford University’s Avi Shlaim, boast as “the world’s most moral army” blows a hole in my Auschwitz analogy. (See “First Thing: Gaza from the sky – a landscape of rubble, dust and graves”, The Guardian, Wed. 6 Aug 2025.)

Gaza is more than a slaughter house

As evidenced from the freshly emerging videos and photographs, Gaza’s physical landscape today resembles Hiroshima City in the morning after on 7 August 1945. Just as Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians of all ages is the direct, intended outcome by Israel’s planners of this “war for annihilation” of an entire Palestinian society so is the near total destruction of the physical infrastructure that sheltered the 2.3 million Palestinians at the start of the war on 8 October 2023.

The vastly undercounted deaths of over 60,000 — of whom more than 16,000 were babies, and children – by the Gaza Health Ministry must be paired with the staggering number – 377,000 – presented by Dr. Yaakov Garb, Professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev who are “missing” (presumed dead and buried under dozens of tons of rubble of bombed out Gazan buildings).

Let’s also not forget that Israel had allowed Gaza to exist as its “open air prison”, to use the term publicly utter by retired IDF naval admiral Ami Ayalon who also served as the chief of Shin Bet, or Shabek, which runs Gaza like prison guards, since 2007. That was the year when the Hamas became the elected government of the 28-mile strip along the hydrocarbon rich Mediterranean Sea, something Israel eyes with its characteristic lust for land and resources.

Chillingly, the common element here is both Hiroshima and Gaza have been variously vaporized by the American weapons.

Obviously, the estimated 80,000 tons of the explosives delivered through Made-in-USA 1,000 and 2,000 lb bombs, all provided by the bipartisan Washington dropped from F-35s, almost daily and nightly over 660 days, could do a similar degree of physical destruction as Truman’s Bombs did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who then needs atomic bombs to destroy Gaza?

Here worth noting is the fact that the American Creator of history’s first-ever atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer, the German-trained professor of theoretical physics at the flagship campus of the University of California, in Berkeley, was capable of painful and honest self-reflection that “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds“.

Alas, there is absolutely no sign of such capacity for honest soul-searching amongst the American political leaders and their foreign policy advisors: the United States continues to be the destroyer of worlds, that is, other peoples’ worlds (whole sale societies, countries and nations), from the Korean peninsula to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to throughout the Muslim Middle East of Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and now Gaza and all of the Occupied Palestine, as well as Latin America.

In the early autumn of 2016, I visited Hiroshima , with an old British friend of mine, Professor Edward Vickers, whose father is a retired Royal Air Force pilot. Ed resides in Japan with his Japanese partner and their children. I was in Kyoto for a small international seminar on comparative cases of genocidal violence where I presented my main research theme of my own “Buddhist” country’s genocide against Rohingya people, still ongoing to date.

I decided to take a long train journey from Kyoto to Hiroshima and asked Ed to join me at Hiroshima, a place we had both wanted to go. For me, Hiroshima has long had a personal ring: the extended American family (of two sisters, both of whom did their undergraduate degrees at Oppie’s university when the man was on the faculty of physics) who practically adopted me as a young foreign graduate student in Northern California was entangled in the Manhattan Project. The older sister got a job at Los Alamos National Lab where the bomb was developed, specifically as Oppenheimer’s personal secretary. As a matter of fact, her boss walked her down the aisle at a small chapel established for the thousands of project workers as she fell in love with and married a young scientist working on the project.

In the video below, Marilyn Langlois describes her pilgrimage to Hiroshima, Japan, in April 2025, recalling her family connection to the first atomic bomb, countering myths surrounding its use, and stressing the urgency of “never again.”

 

If it weren’t for the name Hiroshima and our historical knowledge it triggers, we would see neither the traces of the old Hiroshima nor the evidence of the first atomic bomb’s impact on the physical and natural environment.

When I visited the dark site, Hiroshima is no more dark or tragic, no traces of the atomic scars of the World War II savagely fought amongst Western imperialists and the axis of fascists for 6 years.

It looks and feels like another vibrant and populous Japanese city, eighty years after the city was reduced to rubble and a large number of its residents instantly vaporised.

That is, until we approached the Hiroshima Peace Park where the museum is located. We immediately recognized an iconic landmark of the vaporised city: the skeleton of a building with its dome, which has been kept as an unreconstructed memorial to the old Hiroshima which existed until 8:15 am on 6 August 1945.

Israel’s genocidal patron, namely the leaderships of the United States, have shown an utter and complete lack of human empathy, conscience or regard for the post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust international law, which they helped create.

The United States has long become death, and destroyer of the worlds, while its corporate political class continues to celebrate its power of annihilation and seeks to send the massage that they will continue to destroy the world, natural and human, in order to rule over it.

For that reason alone, I am not so sure that we can be optimistic about Gaza’s reconstruction alas post-war Hiroshima, even as a Trumpian dystopian Riviera on the “unmarked mass graves of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians exterminated in their extended families over 2-3 generations.

As Rev. Dr Munther Isaac, the renowned Palestinian theologian of Shepherd’s Field, Bethlehem, said in his recent address to the Churches for the Middle East Peace Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, the ongoing US-Israel’s joint mass extermination campaign against his fellow people in Gaza, (and the West Bank) is the clearest indication of the total collapse of the current moral order of this post-Holocaust world.

In Isaac’s words, “Never again!” is really ‘Yet again!” while the Zionized Imperialists have integrated elements of both Auschwitz (closed on 27 January 1945) and Hiroshima (destroyed on 6 August 1945) in their annihilation of Gaza, both the physical environment and residential human population.

Isaac continues, “the law (now) protects the perpetrators of genocide in Gaza while punishing those who oppose (this crime against humanity.”

In passing, I will point out that even the relentless attempts to deny, defy and erase truths about USA and Israel by the planners, executioners and supporters of the genocide in Gaza have a precedent in the way the United States as the occupying military power in Tokyo handled the atomic bomb survivors’ attempts to document and tell the factual truths about what the Americans did with their atomic bomb in a single morning at 8:15 am on 6 August 1945.

The flyer I picked up from the Special Exhibition during my visit to Hiroshima speaks volumes about the typical perpetrator behaviour: erasure or concealment of evidence, oral or physical.

It reads: “In 1950, five years after the bombing, Hiroshima City invited its residents to send stories of their A-bomb experience in order to share with others and thereby help create a peaceful nuke-free world. A total of 165 stories were collected. …

However, due to various reasons such as the intensifying Cold War with the outbreak of the Korean War, a Peace Memorial Ceremony on August 6 that year was cancelled at the last minute by order of the GHQ (General Headquarters of the Allied Powers), which had occupied Japan.”

Fast forward to 2025

The destroyers of Gaza today see themselves as God’s chosen people with the divine right to perpetrate a Holocaust of their own against the largely Muslim population of Palestine whose land they have stolen to build “the Jewish national homeland”, under the imperial patronage of first Britain and now the USA.

There are daily crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in Gaza by USA and Israel over 660 mornings – and still counting.

So expect these two states to become even more shrill and extreme as they struggle to exterminate factual truths about their victim-livestreamed crimes against Palestinians, specifically, the bogus “antisemitism” laws as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) run by the Jewish Supremacist or Jewish Exceptionalist psychopaths working for the genocidal state of Israel.

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

Go to Original – forsea.co

Tags: Gaza, Genocide, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Holocaust, Israel, Mass murder, Palestine, USA

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