Many have called the war that Israel is waging in Gaza, in response to the October 7, 2023 attack, a genocide. What is the difference between this war and the genocide of the Jewish people perpetrated by Nazi Germany in the 20th century? Hitler coldly decided to eliminate the entire Jewish people, person by person. For him, the world had to be conquered through the Nazi-Fascist war, but at the same time, the presence of the “Jewish race” had to be eliminated from the entire world—understood as an ethnic group, not as a nation, since the State of Israel was created only after the Shoah, that is, after the fall of Nazism.

That of the Nazis was a commandment-style genocide: to kill the human being of different faith in order to seize the power of God. For Jews, God was the sovereign power that also politically united the Jewish people dispersed throughout the world. Hitler, who sought total power, had to eliminate the Jewish God in order to dominate the world itself. With the Shoah, Nazism has globally and definitively legitimized, in the 20th century, the practice of genocide. All current wars still have common roots: the attempt to eliminate one or more religious-cultural groups in order to increase one’s own power.

A cannibalistic system still prevails in the world—one that consists in physically feeding on human beings belonging to a different cultural race. The practice of homo homini lupus continues. One community feeds on human beings from other communities, claiming the highest right to do so because those other people are treated as beasts, to be consumed in order to sustain one’s own unlimited growth. So we must now come to an understanding about a phenomenon that indisputably encompasses the whole of human society, and that is this: Every war is genocidal. I repeat, every war is genocidal. I reason as an artist. Art is creation. Today, art offers the formula for creation. Let us use it! Let us use it to overturn genocidal war with generative peace.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Biella, May 31, 2025