As the Zionist project devolves from apartheid and ethnic cleansing to the final solution of its decades-long genocide, we also commemorate 80 years since the August 6 and August 9 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let us consider what are the implications of remembering the nuclear genocide in this present moment of technogenocide in Gaza.

On October 24, 2023, Omar El Akkad, Egyptian-American journalist and novelist, posted on X: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” The tweet, viewed over ten million times, was expanded into a book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, published earlier this year. Interspersed with reflections on the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza are reflections on his own and his family’s history. As an Arab and a Muslim, El Akkad muses about how he might respond when told, “Go back to where you came from.” He thinks to himself, “If you like authoritarian governments so much, why don’t you go to where I came from?”

To what extent might anyone been against the atom bombings? And how have attitudes toward the bombings evolved since? In 1945, public opinion in the U.S. favored exacting revenge for Pearl Harbor and destroying Imperial Japan. Portrayals of Japanese as vermin or monkeys drummed up support for the bombing of the civilian populations of all of Japan’s major cities (save Kyoto). The March 9-10, 1945 bombing of Tokyo left some 100,000 dead. Together, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings left some 150,000 to 246,000 dead by the end of 1945. Given the secrecy surrounding the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bombs, there were very few individuals who might have opposed using them before they were deployed. Among them were Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian physicist who circulated a petition during the summer of 1945, mostly among scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, opposing the use of the weapons without giving Japan an opportunity to surrender.

In 1942, in the Continental U.S., under an executive order signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Japanese-Americans were dispossessed of their land and property and incarcerated in prison camps. Nothing of the like was perpetrated on those of German or Italian descent. Shouldn’t we call this ethnic cleansing? Is it fraught to interpret history through modern categories? While Harry Truman suggested that, by averting the need to invade the Japanese mainland, the atomic bombings spared the lives of perhaps a half-million U.S. troops – most historians say that Imperial Japan knew that it was finished and was ready to surrender. The stated intent of the atomic bombings was to bring about the end of the war. Other unstated reasons included demonstrating the new weapon to the soon-to-be Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, and justifying the cost of developing the weapon to the U.S. taxpayer. While the end result was many Japanese dead, the stated intent was not genocidal – so, therefore, we do not officially call it a genocide. (Of note, however, the etymology of “holocaust” is “to burn all” – and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were certainly that.)

In 2025, every rational person opposes nuclear war, as even a “limited” nuclear war can result in nuclear winter, which can lead to the extinction of the human species. Yet, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moves its Doomsday Clock ever closer to midnight.

Currently, it is at 89 seconds to midnight. The hibakusha (A-bomb survivors), now mostly in their 80s, cry out: “No More Hiroshimas! No More Nagasakis! No Nukes! NO WAR!” As the 80-year memorial approaches, activists for Palestine in Hiroshima are trying to focus this moment not only on the thousands of Japanese, Koreans, and others who were killed and injured in the nuclear genocide, but also as a day of protest against the current genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing throughout Palestine.

In acknowledging 80 years since the bomb, we must also include the history of Japanese imperialism, which is erased from Hiroshima’s state-sanctioned Peace Memorial Ceremony. The defeat of the Japanese Empire should be viewed as the liberation of Asian and Pacific peoples from Japan’s brutal colonial rule. The echo of Japanese imperialism continues in various neo-colonial ways throughout Asia via economic, land, and labor exploitation, tourism, and the sex industry, not to mention the continued occupations of Ainu lands in Hokkaido and Ryukyu lands in Okinawa. In fact, we see the Ceremony itself as a ritual reinforcement of Japanese national mythology and the nationalistic Emperor system that “necessitates” nuclear weapons. Even the way that “Peace” is enforced in Hiroshima through “silent prayer” is a fascistic manipulation of people’s expressions of grief and anger. The City of Hiroshima has convinced the public that folding paper cranes and giving children tours of the Peace Park is enough to bring about “peace.”

In 2024, with the genocide of Palestinians well under way, Hiroshima City shamefully invited an Israeli delegate to attend the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony, while not inviting a representative from Palestine. Officials of Nagasaki City, meanwhile, disinvited the Israeli delegate. This year, Hiroshima sent “notifications” instead of “invitations” to try to avoid controversy about which countries are invited and which are not. This “peacewashing” attitude is maintained by the majority of Japanese society, who are also generally uninformed of the atrocities committed by their ancestors in the name of the Emperor.

In The World After Gaza, Pankaj Mishra gives us an overview of the manner in which the Shoah, the genocide of European Jews by the Nazis, came to serve as ideological justification for the Zionist project of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and now, the final solution of genocide. Similarly, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the ultimate victimhood stories that Japanese nationalists use to justify militarization, tech and weapons development, and ongoing collaborations with the Israeli government. The Aichi-Israel Matching program, connecting Israeli arms tech startups with Japan’s manufacturing heartland, is the perfect example. The Japanese pension fund (the largest in the world!) is heavily invested in Israeli bonds as well as weapons manufacturers like Elbit Systems (Israel), Lockheed Martin (U.S.), and BAE Systems (U.K.). Japanese corporations like Kawasaki are buying drones from Israel, while Mitsubishi Heavy Industries manufactures parts in the F-35 supply chain.

Meanwhile in the most recent elections, the Trumpian Sanseito party won 14 seats in the government through their xenophobic rhetoric peddled on YouTube playing on Japanese fears of foreign contamination and loss of “pure” Japanese culture. This renewed interest in overt racism paired with rapid development of the artificial intelligence arms industry in collaboration with a genocidal state is what we would consider in Japanese “abunai” – dangerous!

Our most pressing point from ground-zero in Hiroshima is this: Palestine is a nuclear issue. Israel possesses some 90 nuclear weapons and is effectively a U.S. nuclear weapons depot in West Asia. Several of its government representatives have called for the use of nukes on Gaza. The recent demi-nuclear war with Iran destroyed nuclear fuel production facilities, undoubtedly causing chemical and radioactive contamination that no one is ready to even acknowledge, and demonstrated how willing Israel is–with U.S. support–to drag the region towards nuclear war. Hiroshima’s claims to be an “International City of Peace” committed to the abolition of nuclear weapons rings selfish and hollow as it remains completely silent on the nuclear realities of Palestine and continues to obscure Japan’s own war crimes. As an indigenous liberation struggle, Palestine is also connected to the #LandBack movement that intersects with the fight against nuclear colonialism — from the Marshall Islands, to Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, to the Navajo Nation, to the Shinkolobwe in the Congo, to the Aboriginal Australians, and more.

The pain of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and all the mass killings and atrocities of the past 80 years are real, and they still haunt us today. Both the anti-nuclear movement and Palestine liberation movements also emerged and developed during these same 80 years. Activists for Palestine in Japan see through the guise of Hiroshima’s 80th memorial to the reality that Japan’s imperial system, like that of the British, U.S., Germany, etc. – has not actually changed, it has merely shape-shifted. For nearly two years, we have been watching a genocide unfold in Gaza – one in which the perpetrators have vowed to eliminate the Amalek or the “human animals.” As if Israel is experimenting with a medley of methods of killing, we have watched children blown apart by bombs, shot by snipers, and now starved to death. We U.S. taxpayers fund this. Japanese pension plan participants fund this. Our governments and their corporate cronies supply the weapons and provide diplomatic cover. We must not allow our governments to co-opt our stories of pain and suffering in order to justify more pain and suffering. We must not wait until it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable. We must do everything we can to oppose apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. We must fight for the liberation of Palestine and the liberation of all people from domination, militarization, and economies of war.

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