Basic errors in genocide

Israelis don't see Palestinians as human. Western publics do.

A first blog post for 2024 and still on Palestine. I make no apologies for this – whether it’s a question of borders, racism, being human, what it means to live in a democracy, or how we make human life more valued than machines and political systems (a challenge no less central to responding to climate change), it’s my belief there will be no issue more important than Palestine for a long time.

Equally, in a time when immediacy is important, and in a world where video clips and tweets feed us instant brain-morsels of the current situation, I have found it helpful to orientate myself by reading longer pieces that people have taken time to write. It also gives me heart to know that they are still willing and able to give it that time, and to realise that so too am I.

Often, in fact — as the Israelis scale-back vague but overblown targets for victory, as Lebanese resistance groups restrict Israeli military operations across northern Palestine, as South Africa – with Malaysian and Turkish backing – take the Israelis to the International Court of Justice on deserved charges of genocide — the broader picture of where we are at does show the weakness of the Israeli-US war machine against the steadfastness of Palestinian resistance and free people all over the world. Despite the horrendous suffering in Gaza and clear Israeli attempts to tip us into a bigger war that will draw-in the US, there is, in short, still cause for hope.

But whatever the urgency of the present, I wanted again to write about the current moment in terms of history, because standing on a solid history has the capacity to make us stronger in the present.

This is a continuation of my previous blog post, arguing that the idea, nation and geography of Palestine has a long, inclusive history that will outlast and outdo the claims made upon it by Zionism. Similarly and equally, I believe that the Jewish faith has an inclusivity and a history that will outlast, and indeed be obliged to throw-off, the claims made upon it by Zionism.

(almost) Never compare

Alongside this optimistic view of history is another that I feel is more stark but also important: a comparison of the holocaust carried out by the Nazis – against gypsies, Jews, leftists, the disabled and so many more – and the genocidal policy currently prosecuted by the Israelis in Gaza, with a viciousness that now advances against Palestinians elsewhere in Palestine.

People often make comparisons between what the Israelis are doing in Palestine and what the Nazis did in Europe. I mostly avoid the comparison. I avoid it because I find comparisons are often unhelpful, and while I do think there are valid grounds for comparing elements of Nazi and Zionist policy, not to mention the causative overlap in the occurrence of each, I never go out of my way to cause offence and some clearly find the comparison offensive.

This doesn’t mean that comparisons can’t be made, and it doesn’t mean that comparisons might not sometimes be helpful. Most comparisons of Zionism and Nazism centre around ideas of Jews as persecuted becoming persecutor – perhaps a valid observation, but not one that I feel is in need of further repetition.

Since the genocidal campaign in Gaza escalated to its current horror, the comparison I cannot stop thinking of is that the Israelis are — persecution aside — making the same strategic error as the Nazis.

This comparison rests on the (fair) understanding of the Holocaust as only the most recent of the many European genocides. After Europeans had already genocided so far and wide throughout their history, none could credibly claim that the practice of genocide was in the 1940s new to them. Rather, it is argued that the cardinal and – from a European perspective – only sin of Hitler was to do in Europe what it had been understood should be done only in the colonies. In forced labour, extermination and mass killing, the Nazis did – if we’re to racialise it, which may or not be helpful or necessary – to white bodies what it had been understood should only be done to black and brown bodies.

This isn’t a particularly controversial reading of history, but it helps to put such a large claim in words greater than my own. On this point, none have made the case more clearly than the liberationist theorist from Martinique, Aimé Césaire, who wrote of the European:

“at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.

And that is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been — and still is — narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist.”

I do not think geography or race is necessarily the most salient feature in today’s Western world. For all the progress still needed, Western society has become more multiracial than it was in the 1940s. Geography has been shrunk by both travel but, even more than by travel, the internet and smartphone. In this (and this is a big claim worth more exploration) I think— and certainly I hope— that we have moved towards a global consciousness, so that what the Israelis are doing in Palestine is committing a genocide firmly inside Western consciousness. It is this that is their most glaring repetition of the Nazi sin and error.

None of this is to lessen the loss and suffering of Rwandans, Rohingya or many other victims of state violence, but for reasons of either the technology available at the time, or a lower level of Western integration, those recent mass killings of genocidal proportions did not penetrate the Western consciousness in the way Palestine does. They had not, if nothing else, spent 75 years being placed into Western consciousness through media, NGOs, successive wars, and awareness of the underlying land theft carried out by Zionism in Palestine.

As a result of both this prominent story but also basic integration, we now have Palestinians as representatives at think-tanks, Palestinian as friends and family and romances, Palestinian astrophysicists at NASA, Palestinian restaurants, Palestinian artists and writers. There is a worldwide legion of people in solidarity with Palestine meeting with a tide of evidence that shows the horrors by which the Israelis are right now committing a genocide not only in Gaza but also inside Western consciousness.

Racism makes mistakes

The Israelis are making this error for many reasons— strategic and otherwise— but principally because of racism. Israeli society is quite literally founded on not only the dispossession but more importantly the denial of Palestinian existence. The crimes of dispossession were made possible by the practice of the dehumanisation that in turn stems from the sickness of racism.

Because Israeli society has dehumanised Palestinians and so does not see them as human, it is to them at least a surprise and at worst an affront to discover that the Western world not only sees Palestinians as humans, but also in many cases admires and respects Palestinians, has made efforts to understand the history of Zionism in Palestine, and that Palestinians (and also Arabs and Muslims more generally) are – quite simply – part of our world. As a result, again put simply, the Israelis are trying with unbearable violence to remove a part of our world.

This is why the Israeli effort at genocide in Palestine (and let us be serious, it does not stop at Gaza) will not pass. Because each Palestinian the Israelis kill is killing a part of us all. It is killing a part of those of us who have visited Palestine, who have Palestinian friends, who have participated in Western so-called democracies, advocating for justice in Palestine, only to come up against the smears of Israeli lobbyists. It kills a part of everyone who ever advocated justice or international law or truly believed that humanity or democracy meant something.

For all that Western society might have grown shamefully cynical as an antidote to its rising outrage or sense of impotence, that is a lot of people to kill. You cannot kill this many people without resistance, and — more than that — killing this many people will wake others from their slumber.

With each passing week, with each boycott campaign that persists, with each protest that still draws crowds well into the thousands and tens of thousands, a global movement for a free Palestine grows and grows. In each crowd, in each refusal to be silent, there forms a growing evidence that the Israelis are making a decisive mistake.