Angela Lano, a writer, professional journalist, researcher at the University of Salvador de Bahia in Brazil, and director of the news agency InfoPal.it, is the author of this recently published essay from Edizioni Al Hikma in Imperia. The book features an engaging preface by Pino Cabras and a legal appendix by Falastin Dawoud. At 191 pages and priced at €14, all proceeds from the book will go toward the “1,000 Blankets for Gaza” campaign.
The book’s title references American Holocaust by historian David Stannard, which examines the genocide of Native Americans carried out by European colonizers. Lano uses this theme as a backdrop to examine the tragedy faced by Palestinians from the moment the pioneers of the Zionist colonial project began settling the land—a project rooted in “white” supremacy and aimed at replacing the native population, while opportunistically invoking biblical narratives to justify their claimed rights.
The author writes that Palestine is not only the site of immense suffering; it also stands as “the contemporary symbol of millennia of injustice, genocide, and ethnic cleansing carried out in the name of racist and supremacist notions of superiority” that have long defined European “civilization.” This is the same civilization that, five centuries ago, initiated the extermination of Native Americans and, on the remains of more than 60 million Indigenous people, built the so-called democratic United States—today Israel’s foremost supporter and the enabler of its ongoing, incremental genocide of the Palestinian people.
The author asserts that genocide is “not just part of Western colonialism—it has always been its foundation.” Today, she says, Gaza is “the end of the line for humanity and international law.” Without a compliant, servile media, the true nature of the Zionist project—its horrific, dehumanizing practices and the web of political, governmental, financial, and economic complicities that protect it—could never have been hidden.
Page by page, the reader comes to see that arbitrary arrests, ongoing illegal land seizures, massacres of innocents, horrific torture of prisoners, the sadistic pride of IDF soldiers, targeted killings of hundreds of journalists, medical workers, and aid personnel, Nazi-style laws, and total disregard for international law and its highest institutions—none of this “is a mere side effect or accidental consequence of Zionist oppression.” It is violence at its core, “rooted in Zionist ideology and systematically produced by colonialist mentalities.” Lano warns that it would be a grave mistake to view the IDF’s criminal actions over the past two years as a reaction to the October 7, 2023, Al-Aqsa Flood operation, led by Hamas—a campaign she describes with remarkable honesty, despite the almost inevitable, opportunistic charges of antisemitism.
Angela Lano writes that “by storming military bases and kibbutzim, Palestinian militants aimed to capture as many Israeli soldiers and civilians as possible” to secure the release—through prisoner exchanges—of the thousands of Palestinians of all ages arrested, and often abducted, by the IDF across Palestine. She emphasizes that “the Resistance must be seen within a broader international geopolitical context: it is a decolonial struggle, a rebellion… by the Palestinian people against their century-old oppressor… against Zionism and its settlers…”
The book then documents the events of those dramatic hours, which our media labeled a “pogrom” against Jews, embellishing their narratives with horrors that never occurred, as confirmed by Israeli investigations. Calling this violent—but clearly a revolt against an oppressor rather than a racially motivated attack—a pogrom exposes the real racism of the white supremacist supporters of which Israel is fully a part.
The author points out that our media have neither corrected nor retracted their earlier claims, built on lies now fully exposed. The stereotype of Arabs and Muslims as ignorant and violent reinforces negative perceptions and strengthens “the idea of inferiority,” dehumanizing these populations and keeping them “in subordinate positions, subject to smear campaigns that are hard to dismantle.” In short, she writes, “we are facing neo-colonial forms… white supremacy, and the Orientalist view of the Islamic world…”
The author argues that Hamas, along with other smaller movements, embodies the rejection of Palestine’s colonization and affirms her people’s right to self-determination—even, if necessary, through armed resistance, as recognized under international law. She explains that “the emergence of Hamas in the late 1980s, its 2006 democratic election victory, and its political and practical approach to liberating Palestine,” culminating in the October 7, 2023 operation, have returned the Palestinian issue to the global stage, underscoring the necessity and legitimacy of resistance. She adds that anyone who still claims Hamas is an “Israeli creation,” rather than a genuine expression of the Palestinian struggle, is either acting in bad faith or simply repeating a lingering product of enduring Western colonialism.
Paradoxically, Angela Lano writes, the Gaza “holocaust” is exterminating the very descendants of the Jews who, some 2,500 years ago, occupied the land of Canaan—those who stayed or returned to Palestine, some keeping their religion, some converting to Christianity, and later some to Islam. In effect, a Semitic holocaust carried out by Zionists in the name of defending against antisemitism. The early 20th-century alliance of British colonial interests and the Zionist project cared little for this, since “Zionism explicitly defined itself as ‘a Jewish movement for the colonization of the Orient.’
Holocausts and ethnic cleansing, as this book shows, have been a recurring feature of so-called Western civilization. A few examples suffice: U.S. racial laws later copied by Hitler; American eugenics, still a reference for Nazism; African concentration camps and the German genocide of the Herero and Nama, thirty years before Nazism took hold; and U.S. apartheid, lasting into the mid-20th century. Lano exposes a bitter, little-explored truth: Nazism was not an external evil imposed on the West, but its own product, a direct offspring of colonialism. It was “born in its womb and still dwells there.” The ongoing genocide in Palestine, supported by accomplices and tolerated by their vassals, proves it—and the media’s power to shape perception, deploying “a language that anesthetizes horror,” acts as its enabler.
In conclusion, this book courageously and honestly opens the door to discussion—a key reason it deserves to be read.