THE ROOTS OF GENOCIDE

Israel’s colonization of Palestine has been going on for more than a hundred years. 7. October 2023 is not the beginning of all evil, as Zionist propaganda claims, but it is certainly the beginning of a new chapter in the plan of conquest, which is now being carried out with outrageous brutality. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine, Francesca Albanese, in her reports and two books (J’Accuse and Quando il mondo dorme (When the World Sleeps), clearly defined the concept of settlement colonization: it is the conquest of territory by systematically and violently displacing another people living there.

Such a colonization plan already hides the danger of genocidal violence, when another nation refuses to submit to the domination of the conquerors. This is evident from the history of these hundred years. First, during the British Mandate over Palestine, colonization was carried out through political and economic supremacy, but also through the terror of the Jewish armed militias of the Haganah, Irgun and Leki, which had passed into its regular army after the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948. After that year, systematic ethnic cleansing, wars of conquest, military occupation of Palestinian territory, apartheid, and other atrocities continued. Until October 7, 2023, a horrific outbreak of irrational violence by decades of oppressed victims of the occupation, which is not the beginning of a story but a new, even more cruel chapter of it.

The original sin of Zionism, the Jewish nationalist ideology, lies in the fact that at the end of the 19th century it took shape in Europe on the model of the then dominant nationalist currents of thought. European nationalisms led to the collapse of multinational empires in World War I, and then by World War II had unleashed all potential for evil, culminating in Italian and other fascisms and in German Nazism. The tragic paradox of the Jewish nation is that it has become the main victim of the delusion of European nationalisms, while at the same time, in its aspiration for its own nation-state, it has taken on the very ethnocentric ideas that were at the heart of the Holocaust. And these ideas have led to genocidal violence against the Palestinians today.

The tragedy of the Palestinian people is that they have fallen victim to former victims, Palestinian academic Edward W. Said wrote 30 years ago. After European nationalisms, Zionism has taken on an ethnocentric exclusivism, in which there is no place for the coexistence of differences.

Before the Balfour Declaration of 1917, by which the British promised the Zionist movement a state in Palestine also because of their own colonial interests, some 10 percent of Jews were already living there. Coexistence with the Palestinians was not a problem, anti-Semitism was completely unknown, even because it would be absurd, since both peoples come from the same Semitic roots. Anti-Semitism was a European phenomenon, as was ethnocentrism, from which Zionist ideology was fed to the point of denying the existence of another nation. “A land without a nation for a nation without a land,” was the motto of the colonizers.

This is the crux of the problem, the core of the ideological deception that does not allow two peoples to coexist equally and peacefully on the same earth. Unfortunately, this ideological vision was also supported by the victors of the Second World War, from the United States, France and Great Britain to the Soviet Union, where Stalin saw in the Zionist conquest of Palestine an opportunity to fulfill anti-Zionist plans for the expulsion of Jews, dating back to the time of Tsarist Russia.

Hence the plan for the partition of Palestine, which was adopted by the United Nations in November 1947. The idea of an ethnically exclusive Jewish state contained the seeds of all subsequent evils, as it assumed ethnic cleansing and the expulsion of the vast majority of Palestinians living there. The division of the territory was unfair. Despite intensive settlement during the British administration, Jews were barely a third of the total population at the time, and the UN partition plan allocated them 55 percent of the total territory, all the most fertile and water-rich areas, the coastal strip and the port cities of Jaffa and Haifa.

An unjust partition was not acceptable to the Palestinians, and a war ensued, after which the militarily stronger Israel occupied 78% of the territory, and after the Six-Day War in 1967, all the remaining territories: Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan.

There is little talk about it, but the partition of Palestine was not the only option on the table. The UN commission also developed an alternative proposal for a single binational state with international guarantees for the coexistence of the two peoples. This solution was advocated by Tito’s Yugoslavia, India and Iran. It was far-sighted and more just than the division of territory, mass massacres and the forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians. Today, when the Israeli occupation is so suffocating and colonization is so widespread throughout Palestinian territory that the idea of two states for two peoples seems unrealistic, many are once again thinking about a long-term plan for equal coexistence in a multi-ethnic state.

It is clear that this vision did not sit well with the Zionists. They demanded their own exclusive state, where Jews and Jews alone would be their own masters, even at the cost of the negation of the Palestinian people and their inalienable right to self-determination. Ethnic exclusivism does not allow for coexistence. His logic is “mors tua vita mea”, there is no intermediate path. Today in Gaza, we are seeing the extreme consequences of the deception that has enabled the supremacist supremacy of one nation over another.

This supremacy rests on two foundations: unattainable military power through the ruthless use of the most brutal violence, and a false narrative about whose existence is truly threatened in Palestine today. In both respects, Israel has the full support of the West, the United States and their European appendage.

There is no need to waste words on military superiority, because it is before everyone’s eyes. The second foundation of Israeli domination lies in the falsification of reality. For years, Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy has been pointing out the narrative masterpiece that a nuclear-armed state that has been carrying out a brutal military occupation for more than half a century knows how to show itself to the world as a threatened victim. Edward Said also pointed out the crucial importance of narrative. Israel has a special word “hasbara” for a narrative intended for the outside world – in short, propaganda.

After October 7, we hear a narrative of Israel’s legitimate self-defense. Even the writer David Grossman admitted that the massacre in Gaza no longer had anything to do with October 7. Nor are they hostages. As much as they wanted to save them, they did it through negotiations, not bombs. They have another purpose: to make life impossible for the two million people in Gaza, to exterminate and expel as many of them as possible. This is done by deliberately starving the population, deliberately killing health workers and journalists in order to hide from the world as much as possible what is really happening there.

The world has been silent so far. The Western media system almost unanimously summed up only the Israeli narrative, even when it contradicted the facts. And thanks to heroic Palestinian journalists and civilians, we are still receiving horrific footage from hell on social media. The Western public, all of us, took too long to wake up from the stupor and take to the streets. Something has been moving lately. European capitals are flooded with mass demonstrations. The horrors of Gaza, however, touched the hearts of the people. No one will be able to claim that they did not know what was going on there.

And we need to name exactly what is happening. Genocide is happening. The International Court of Justice in The Hague found a reasonable suspicion of genocide in the first assessment of the lawsuit filed by South Africa and ordered Israel to immediately cease potentially genocidal acts. In vain, as the cruelty of the massacre only intensified.

As enshrined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocideadopted on 9 December 1948, ‘genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such:

(a) killing members of the group;

(b) causing serious physical or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) intentionally inflicting on a group conditions of life which are intended to destroy it in whole or in part;

(d) measures aimed at preventing intra-group births;

(e) the forcible transfer of children from a group to another group.’

The 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, which was only recognised as such by the International Court of Justice 12 years later, is near. Much more serious crimes are taking place in Gaza, as identified in points (a), (b), (c) and (d) of the aforementioned declaration. It is the duty of the international community to recognise them and stop them immediately. Israel’s far-right cannot be left free for another 12 years to finally exterminate the Palestinians from Gaza, while in the meantime it is also taking on Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Enough of misrepresentation and searching for mitigating synonyms. The selective massacre of civilians with infants is not a conflict, nor is it a humanitarian crisis. An unspeakable word must be spoken: genocide. Because only the recognition that genocide is underway, about the intentionality of which there is already a long list of statements by Israeli government representatives, can force the international community to take action and prevent the irreversible. Most European governments are misguided, issuing vague condemnations, appeals for moderation, and Israel has yet to be sanctioned, nor has it been stopped from supplying weapons.

If governments are deaf, then it is up to all of us to loudly demand respect for international legality. Because if we renounce international law and allow the brutal logic of military superiority to prevail, what is happening to the Palestinians today will sooner or later affect all of us.