(August 27, 2025)

As the descendant of a Jewish family from Poland, the words “never again” have significant meaning for me. In the aftermath of the Second World War, humankind vowed to never again allow such atrocities to occur. The Holocaust, the mass extermination of the Jewish people, plumbed the very depths of tyrannical evil. Precisely because of this heritage, I view “never again” as a universal imperative.

In 1948, the international community adopted the universal declaration of human rights and the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. In the decades since, we have failed globally many times to safeguard this invaluable truth: that people must not perish in flames, and such heinous crimes must not be perpetrated while outsiders stand idly by. But never in recent times have people around the world started into the abyss of annihilation as we are doing today in Gaza. As such, “never again” is not merely a moral reminder but an ethical decree to act.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, as the saying goes. It seems that Netanyahu manages to fool western leaders time and time again. On Friday, in response to the IPC declaration of famine, the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, said it was an “utterly horrifying and wholly preventable man-made catastrophe”. May I ask Lammy and the rest of the British cabinet – are you among the people responsible for this catastrophe?