We are Israeli human rights activists. Our country is committing genocide | Yuli Novak

My generation was raised wondering how ordinary people could countenance an atrocity. In a grotesque twist, the question has circled back to us

The question keeps gnawing at me: Could this really be it? Could we be living through a genocide?

Outside Israel, millions already know the answer. But many of us here can't - or won't - say it aloud. Perhaps because the truth threatens to unmake everything we believed about who we are, and who we wanted to be. To name it is to admit that the future will require reckoning - not just with our leaders, but with ourselves. But the cost of refusing to see is even higher.

Yuli Novak is the executive director of B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories