Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 5, 2024

Another day, another deadly trap for the Palestinian people. The Gaza health ministry said more than 100 were killed when Israeli forces opened fire on a desperate crowd swarming a food aid convoy. The Israelis claimed their soldiers only killed a few, the rest died from the stampede or being rolled over by the aid trucks. But what were the soldiers doing with the trucks anyway? Helping to distribute flour?

More than 30,000 Palestinians have now been killed in little under five months. The Israeli government is deliberately starving the population, thus threatening a modern-day famine. At this point, I dont think there is any doubt that Israel is committing genocide, and any countries that enable it to continue, such as the United States and Germany, among others to a less degree, are complicit in this gravest of crimes. Political leaders from much of the West should just shut up and hang their heads in shame.

However, there is one significant point I fully agree with the Israelis and many Americans: the Palestinian genocide should never be compared with the Holocaust. That just confuses the issue and gives the Israelis the perfect excuse to charge critics with antisemitism and illegitimate comparison. Thats why Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was just being counterproductive by making that comparison recently.

One, its apples and oranges. Two, the scale or magnitude of the killings is also way off.

Rather, its the other German genocide, often unmentioned or just forgotten, that is much closer to whats happening in Palestine.

Between 1904 and 1907, the German military killed up to 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama in colonised southwestern Africa, or what is Namibia today.

Unified Germany was late to the Great Game of Western imperialism. Bismarck was not a big fan. But the Germans did formally colonise the African region in the mid-1880s. Once German rule was established, various native groups were forced into slave labour, their land and cattle confiscated or killed.

Biden says alarming Gaza aid deaths complicate ceasefire talks

The ill-treatment led to an uprising by the Herero at the start of 1904. Fewer than 200 German settlers and their families were murdered. Reprisals quickly followed. The indiscriminate violence by German forces came in waves. Inhumane tactics included poisoned wells and deliberate starvation.

Thousands were killed by the end of the year, by which time, concentration camps were set up for the Herero population. That was considered a more humane solution by the German government back in Berlin! Besides poor hygiene, starvation-level diets and slave labour, medical experiments were also recorded. The Germans might have learned from the much more practised British imperialists, who set up the first modern version of concentration camps during the second Boer war.

In 1905, about a year after the Herero insurrection, the Nama in turn took up arms against the German colonisers. Over two years, the same military and confinement tactics were used to pacify the Nama population.

Today, experts have no trouble calling the German treatment of the Herero and Nama a genocide. But one reason it is often overlooked is because it paled in comparison with what the Nazis did in the Holocaust, but also what Belgium did under King Leopold in the Congo where 10 million or more might have been killed between 1885 and 1908. The latter was the background to Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, which ironically because of its great literary fame and influence, often overshadowed the actual horrible events that inspired it.

We now know Israeli forces have razed crops in farmland; bombed water pipelines and wells, as well as bakeries and food storage facilities; and prevented repairs for desalination facilities.

Under the guise of flooding tunnels dug by Hamas terrorists, an ecological disaster is in the making across much of Gaza. Such actions will make the territory uninhabitable after the armed conflict ends, a goal openly professed by some Israeli politicians and pundits.

Palestine has been called the last settler-colonial project. It is what it is.

Continued here:

Palestinian genocide must not be compared with the Holocaust - South China Morning Post

Category: Holocaust
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