As Israel’s attacks on Gaza continue, killing over 8,500 Palestinians, the West hasn’t ceased its support of the genocide. Aimé Césaire reminds us that this is accepted due to the dehumanization of non-white people, writes Simón Rodríguez Porras.
Article by: Simón Rodríguez Porras
Over three weeks have passed since the beginning of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and the cutting off of water, electricity, and Internet, of no food or medicine entering the world’s largest concentration camp.
Faced with the depletion of water, thousands of people have to drink seawater or contaminated water. Between lethal bombings, the destruction of hospitals, and a slow torture by starvation and thirst, more than half of the 2.3 million people in Gaza have already been forcibly displaced.
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Israel also bombed the Al-Ahli hospital, killing hundreds of refugees in a single brutal blow.
The colonial power has ordered the eviction of the entire northern Gaza Strip, bombs those who try to go to the south and also bombs the south. Civilian casualties are more than 8,500 and keep rising. In the West Bank, over 100 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds arbitrarily detained.
Genocide and Holocaust historian Raz Segal has described this as a “textbook case of genocide” in his writings. The actions implemented by the Israeli regime and the statements made by its representatives align closely with the United Nations’ legally recognized definitions of genocide.
Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant has essentially put forth a genocidal plan: “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly”. Yet, why isn’t the world listening?
The world, however, does perceive and comprehend the significance of Israeli threats and actions. The governments of the United States, France, Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom provide Israel with every available military, economic, and political resource in order to knowingly support war crimes.
This flagrant fascism, which provokes demonstrations by thousands of people in dozens of countries and infuriates the international community, is backed by the “liberal” and “democratic” press of the United States and Europe.
Undoubtedly, the media contributes to the cultivation of a political climate that is conducive to the collective punishments imposed by Israel against the Palestinian people. Still, that is not all. Macron initially prohibited marches in support of Palestine in France immediately following October 7 (this prohibition has since been lifted) and prohibited the keffiyeh due to the peculiar preoccupation of French imperialism with clothing regulation.
In addition, the interior minister instigated an inquiry into the New Anti-Capitalist Party regarding a statement it issued endorsing the Palestinian resistance. Furthermore, he imposed accusations of anti-Semitism on the France Unbowed party.
A degree of discretion will be applied to the presumption of people carrying the Palestinian flag in the United Kingdom. Similarly, in Australia, it has been declared that law enforcement may halt and search individuals attending pro-Palestine marches at will.
As an extension of this anti-democratic movement, Austria and Germany also implemented policies that were in opposition to Palestinian solidarity, despite the increasing backing of the Palestinian cause among European citizens.
The ongoing offensive follows decades of apartheid and ethnic cleansing, as well as more than sixteen years of blockade against Gaza, which Jewish historian Ilan Pappé has termed an incremental genocide policy. Sara Roy, an economist, introduced the phrase “de-development” in 2016 to delineate the occupation regime’s devastation of Gaza’s economy twenty years prior to the blockade. Roy further proposed that the territory had been transformed into a “isolated and disposable enclave.” The region can be likened to an open-air penitentiary, as over 80% of its inhabitants are impoverished and 60% are afflicted with food insecurity. That occurred in the pre-October period.
Prior to the forcible demolition of that prison’s walls in 2019, Israeli snipers repressed dozens of nonviolent marches that occurred between 2018 and 2019. Following that, over 1700 Palestinians were injured and sixty were killed in a single day.
Similar to how the Mississippi legislature issued a statement of solidarity with the racist South African government in response to the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre, approximately 400 members of the United States House of Representatives are sponsoring a draft resolution in support of Israel amid the ongoing genocidal offensive. The sole criticism leveled against Israel pertains to its provision of “rudimentary civilian equipment, including rubber boats, bulldozers, and paragliders” to the Palestinians. This oversight underscores the critical nature of strictly enforcing restrictions on the ingress of materials into the Gaza Strip.
Israeli activists have uncovered explicit appeals for genocide made by Israeli journalists and public figures via social networks and the media. Netanyahu, whose political trajectory has been defined by his war crimes, had already articulated a classic fascist credo in 2018: “Those who are weak perish, perish in slaughter, and are expunged from history, whereas those who are strong endure, whether for good or evil.” As part of this offensive, he threatened to transform Gaza into a “desert island,” and he stated in the Knesset on Monday, “This is a struggle between humanity and the law of the jungle; between the children of light and the children of darkness.”
Last year, Josep Borrell, the head of foreign policy for the European Union, employed a comparable metaphor when he described Europe as a garden and the rest of the world as a jungle. Through their words and deeds, imperialists and colonialists continue to remind us that they do not regard Palestinians, or the majority of humanity, as completely human.
Nazification or fascistization of the Israeli political regime and society has been a subject that Jewish and Israeli intellectuals, activists, and artists have repeatedly addressed. This has progressed from academics’ and celebrities’ (including Ari Folman and Yeshayahu Lebowitz) and observers’ (including Einstein and Arendt) apprehensions regarding the quasi-fascist and Nazi nature of the Herut party, which was the direct precursor to Netanyahu’s Likud, to films including Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir. To the extent that the Israeli government has deemed it necessary to propagate a definition that categorizes this form of criticism as anti-Semitic in nature.
It is highly symbolic that Ezra Yachim, a former member of the Zionist terrorist organization Lehi and a former war criminal who participated in the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, has been dispatched to incite Zionist troops in the current offensive. Lehi had offered Germany support in World War II in exchange for assistance in expelling the British from Palestine and establishing its own totalitarian colony. “Erase the memory of families, mothers, and children” was the command that Yachim issued to them in regards to homicide.
Aimé Césaire, a Martinican intellectual, discerned in his 1950 seminal work Discourse on colonialism that fascism originated in the very annals of European imperialism and colonialism. In regard to the European and Christian bourgeois man of his time, he maintained that “what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the 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 niggers of Africa” .
Regarding imperialist politicians and reformist bureaucrats UN officials, liberal TV anchors and newspaper editors, whose pseudo-humanism is “narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased, and, all things considered, sordidly racist,” Césaire’s writings appear to speak to us today.
In addition, the author addresses the inquiry into why proponents of the “rules-based order,” namely “humanists” and “democrats,” condone the Palestinian genocide. While Bush evaded punishment for his war crimes, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for denouncing the benevolent atrocities of American imperialism. Even Russia’s imperialist atrocities in Syria and Chechnya were approved and tolerated without repercussions. They are deemed abhorrent in Ukraine due to their actions being directed at Europeans. The justifiability of Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians stems not only from its allegiance to geopolitical interests, but also from the fact that it targets non-Europeans and non-whites.
Merely exposing the monstrous nature of this ideological worldview that underpins the contemporary imperialist order is insufficient. Everything that is necessary must be done to vanquish it.
Article originally published on the NewArab.com.
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