For over two decades, my life’s work has revolved around trauma, war, and the extraordinary cruelty and resilience of the human spirit. I have written extensively about the Second World War, delving into the suffering of prisoners of war, the destruction of nations, and the enduring scars of conflict. I have written about the Holocaust, not just as a tragic episode in human history, but as a chilling case study in the systematic dehumanisation and extermination of entire peoples. I have stood at the gates of Auschwitz, have interviewed survivors, listened to voices tremble with memory and I have wept quietly over dusty archives, and later, was humbled to be invited to a Holocaust memorial service in recognition of my work. I stood side by side with Jewish survivors, men and women whose pain I had spent years trying to understand. 
And yet, now, in the stillness of the pages of my books, I find myself staring at a television screen, paralysed with grief, but above all with disbelief.
Because just across the Mediterranean Sea from where I live, I am witnessing what I can only describe as the echoes of the very crimes I have documented so much. In Gaza, I see history repeating itself, in a way that any historian of war and atrocity will recognise. I see children shot while standing in bread queues. I see neighbourhoods flattened, I see food withheld, water poisoned, entire families buried beneath rubble. I see suffering inflicted with an impunity that chills the blood.
Twelve months ago, I would not have dared to write these words. Even now, I hesitate.
But silence is complicity. As a historian, my job is not merely to record the past but to illuminate the present too, and what I am seeing is not just a war. It is not merely a military campaign. It is, increasingly and undeniably, a humanitarian catastrophe with deliberate, structural features of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
And this is what tears me apart: that the perpetrators, or at least the architects, speak in the name of Jewish survival.
I have always been careful to separate people from governments. I still try to. I tell myself: it is Netanyahu, it is the far-right settlers, it is the generals, and the hardliners. And yet, I watch video after video of young Jewish settlers, often American-born, burning Palestinian olive groves, storming villages, celebrating in the rubble of homes they have stolen. I watch ordinary citizens blocking aid trucks. I read about families cheering as bombs fall on refugee camps, and I cannot help but feel that something inside me has cracked.
How is it that the families of the people I once wrote about with reverence and admiration, the survivors of the camps, the descendants of the ghettos, can now stand by as this happens? How is it that the world, having once vowed never again, allows again to unfold before our eyes?
This is not a comparison I make lightly. As a historians, I know that context matters, but the scenes I am witnessing recall the darkest chapters of the 20th century. The strategy of starving a civilian population to induce surrender - the Hunger Plan, was used by the Nazis in the Soviet Union. The idea that children, simply by virtue of their birth, are considered legitimate targets, was part of the genocidal logic of the Nazis.
I am not the only one who sees it. UN officials have called it collective punishment. Human rights organisations have warned of war crimes. Survivors of the Holocaust themselves, righteous, brave voices have broken ranks to speak out against what is being done in their name. But they are vilified, cast out as traitors to their own people, and still, the bombs fall.
I hate that I feel this way. That my once instinctive solidarity with the Jewish people has been so deeply shaken. That I must keep reminding myself: it is not the Jewish people, it is this Israeli government, it is this military campaign. But when the line blurs between people and policy, when complicity becomes mainstream, and outrage is muted, then I falter.
What haunts me most is the sense that we, as a world, are failing once again. That we have learned little from the past I have devoted my life to studying. We invoke history when it suits us, we pay lip service to the values of human dignity and never again. And yet, in real time, we watch another people being brutalised, displaced, dehumanised, and we look away. 
As a historian, I have written about the complicity of ordinary Germans, of the silence of Polish neighbours, of the fear that turned into hatred. I have written about how it happens. How slowly, then suddenly, genocide takes root. And now, I see it again, this time not in dusty archives, but in high-definition.
I write this not in anger, but in grief. I write it as a man who once stood beside a Holocaust survivor and felt proud, and now I wonder what that man would say if he were still alive to see what is happening, I wonder what he would say if he saw the same tactics the Nazis used to terrorise the ghettos being deployed against the people of Gaza.
History does not repeat in the same uniform. But the boots are similar, the excuses are the same, and the screams of children buried alive are indistinguishable.
There will be those who accuse me of antisemitism. So be it. I know what I am. I know what I have written about in the past, I know how I felt as I wandered around Auschwitz Birkenau in a tear filled daze, and I know that if we cannot speak honestly about power, morality, and suffering, then history truly has no meaning.
I remain, painfully and imperfectly, on the side of the oppressed. I remain a historian and I will keep writing until the silence ends.