The genocide in Gaza is the beginning. Welcome to the new world order. The age
of technologically-advanced barbarism. There are no rules for the strong, only
for the weak. Oppose the strong, refuse to bow to its capricious demands and
you are showered with missiles and bombs. We watch this madness daily with the
war on Iran, the saturation bombing of southern Lebanon and the suffering in
Gaza.
International bodies such as the United Nations have been neutered, transformed
into useless appendages of another age. The sanctity of individual rights, open
borders and international law have vanished. The most psychopathic rulers of
human history, those who reduced cities to ashes, herded captive populations to
execution sites and littered lands they occupied with mass graves and corpses,
have returned with a vengeance, opening up a vast moral abyss.
The law, despite a few valiant efforts by a handful of judges — who will soon
be purged — domestically and in international bodies such as The International
Court of Justice is contemptuously violated. Savagery abroad. Savagery at home.
The BBC’s Lucy Williamson reports that Israel is destroying south Lebanon
“using Gaza as a model – a blueprint for destruction used again as a path to
peace”.
Over 1 million people have already been displaced in Lebanon — one-fifth of the
entire population of a country that already hosts the world’s highest number of
refugees per capita — in just a few weeks. Add to this 2 million displaced in
Gaza and 3 million displaced in Iran. 6 million people rendered homeless.
For four decades Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying
for the U.S. to go to war with Iran. Previous administrations, Republican and
Democrat, have refused, in no small part because of fierce opposition within
the Pentagon, which did not view Iran as an existential threat and did not
project a positive outcome for the U.S. or its regional allies.
But Donald Trump, encouraged by his inept negotiating team of his son-in-law
Jared Kushner and fellow real estate developer and golfing partner Steve
Witkoff, each fervent Zionists, took Israel’s bait. Britain’s national security
adviser, Jonathan Powell, who attended the final talks between the U.S. and
Iran, dismissed Kushner and Witkoff as “Israeli assets.”
Joseph Kent, who resigned from his position as director of the National
Counterterrorism Center to protest the war, wrote in his resignation letter
that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we
started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
The public rationale for the war on Iran since it began on February 28 has been
protean. Is it to shut down Iran’s nuclear program? Is it to thwart Iran’s
ballistic missile program? Is it because the U.S. carried out pre-emptive
attacks on Iran, as Marco Rubio said, to ensure the safety of U.S. assets once
Israel decided to strike? Is it because the Iranian government carried out
lethal repression, killing hundreds of anti-government protestors during
massive street protests? Is it regime change? Is it an attempt to shut down
Iran’s so-called state sponsored terrorism? Or are these subterfuges for
something else?
Certainly, Israel and the U.S. seek regime change. But here it appears the U.S.
and Israel diverge. Israel also apparently seeks, as in Iraq, Syria, Libya and
Lebanon, the physical disintegration of Iran, the breaking apart of the country
into warring ethnic and religious enclaves, the transformation of Iran into a
failed state.
Persians in Iran constitute roughly 61 percent of the population with various
minority groups, who often suffer state repression, making up the remaining 39
percent. These ethnic groups include Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Lurs, Balochs, Arabs
and Turkmens, along with religious minorities such as Sunnis, Christians,
Baha’i, Zoroastrians, and Jews. The shattering of Iran into antagonistic ethnic
and religious enclaves would leave Israel as the dominant power in the region,
giving it the ability to, if not occupy its neighbors directly, control and
subjugate them through proxies, part of a long-held desire for a Greater
Israel. It would also make it possible for foreign states to control Iranian
gas reserves, the second largest in the world, and its oil reserves, 12 percent
of the global total.
Israel’s crusade against the Palestinians, the Lebanese and now the Iranians is
justified by the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. But it
is not lost on the Global South, especially Palestinians, that nearly all
Holocaust scholars have refused to condemn the genocide in Gaza. Not one of the
institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have
drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter.
Holocaust scholars, with a handful of exceptions, have exposed their true
purpose, which is not to examine the dark side of human nature and the
frightening propensity we all have to commit evil, but to sanctify Jews as
eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of its crimes
of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide.
The hijacking of the Holocaust, the failure to defend Palestinian victims
because they are Palestinian, has imploded the moral authority of Holocaust
studies and Holocaust memorials. They have been exposed as vehicles not to
prevent genocide but to perpetrate it, not to explore the past, but manipulate
the present.
Any tepid recognition that the Holocaust may not be the exclusive property of
Israel and its Zionist supporters is swiftly shut down. The Holocaust Museum in
Los Angeles deleted an Instagram post that read: “NEVER AGAIN CAN’T ONLY MEAN
NEVER AGAIN FOR JEWS” after a backlash. In the hands of Zionists, “never again”
means precisely that, never again, only for Jews.
Aimé Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, writes that Hitler seemed
exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white
man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been
reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the
nègres d’Afrique.”
The near-annihilation of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population, the German slaughter
of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 —
then British prime minister Winston Churchill referred to Hindus as “a beastly
people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on
civilian targets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrates something fundamental
about “Western civilization.”
Genocide is not an anomaly, it is coded in the DNA of Western “civilization.”
“In America,” the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negroes do not have to be told
what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and
economic suppression have long been realities to us.”
The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modelled them on laws
designed to disenfranchise Blacks. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to
Native Americans and Filipinos — although they lived in the U.S. and U.S.
territories — was emulated by the German fascists who stripped citizenship from
Jews. American anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial
marriage, were the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans.
American jurisprudence classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry —
the so-called “one drop rule” — as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more
flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish.
The millions of indigenous victims of colonial projects in countries such as
Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo and Vietnam, for this reason, are
deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. They too
suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by
their Western perpetrators.
Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state our Christian fascists and the
far-right dream of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and
cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is
admired by the far right because it has turned its back on humanitarian law and
uses indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as
human contaminants.
It was this distortion of the Holocaust as unique that troubled Primo Levi, who
was imprisoned in Auschwitz from 1944 to 1945 and who wrote Survival in
Auschwitz. Levi was a fierce critic of the apartheid state of Israel and its
treatment of Palestinians. He saw the Shoah as “an inexhaustible source of
evil” that “is perpetuated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a
thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral
breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.”
Levi deplored the Manichaeanism of those who “shun nuance and complexity.” He
condemned those who “reduce the river of human events to conflicts, and
conflicts to duels, us and them.” He warned that the “network of human
relationships inside the concentration camps was not simple: It could not be
reduced to two blocs, victims and persecutors.” The enemy, he knew, “was
outside but also inside.”
Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, known as “King Chaim,” ruled the in the Łódź ghetto
on Poland on behalf of the Nazi occupiers. The ghetto became a slave labor camp
that enriched Rumkowski and his Nazi masters. Rumkowski deported opponents to
death camps. He raped and molested girls and women. He demanded unquestioned
obedience. He embodied the evil of his oppressors. For Levi, he was an example
of what many of us, under similar circumstances, are capable of becoming.
“[W]e are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second
nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit,” Levi wrote in The Drowned and
the Saved. “His fever is ours, the fever of our Western civilization that
‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are
the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.”
“Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our
essential fragility,” Levi continued. “Willingly or not we come to terms with
power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in,
that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train
is waiting.”
Levi understood that the line between the victim and victimizer is razor thin.
We can all become willing executioners. There is nothing intrinsically moral
about being Jewish or a survivor of the Holocaust. Levi, for this reason, was
persona non grata in Israel.
Zionists find in the Holocaust and the Jewish state a sense of purpose and
meaning, as well as a cloying moral superiority. After the 1967 war, when
Israel seized Gaza the West Bank including East Jerusalem, Syria’s Golan
Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Israel, as American sociologist Nathan
Glazer approvingly observed, became “the religion of the American Jews.” The
Holocaust became their “moral capital.”
“Jewish suffering is depicted as ineffable, uncommunicable, and yet always to
be proclaimed,” writes the European historian Charles S. Maier, in The
Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity:
It is intensely private, not to be diluted, but simultaneously public so
that gentile society will confirm the crimes. A very peculiar suffering must be
enshrined in public sites: Holocaust museums, memory gardens, deportation
sites, dedicated not as Jewish but civic memorials. But what is the role of a
museum in a country, such as the United States, far from the site of the
Holocaust? Is it to rally the people who suffered or to instruct non-Jews? Is
it supposed to serve as a reminder that “it can happen here?” Or is it a
statement that some special consideration is deserved? Under what circumstances
can a private sorrow serve simultaneously as a public grief? And if genocide is
certified as a public sorrow, then must we not accept the credentials of other
particular sorrows too? An American historian of Polish ancestry argues that,
with the German invasion of 1939, the Poles became the first people in Europe
to experience the Holocaust and that historians have so far “chosen to
interpret the tragedy in exclusivistic terms — namely as the most tragic period
in the history of the Jewish Diaspora.” If Polish Americans claim their own
“forgotten Holocaust,” what recognition should they enjoy? Do Armenians and
Cambodians also have a right to publicly funded holocaust museums? And do we
need memorials to Seventh-Day Adventists and homosexuals for their persecution
at the hands of the Third Reich?
Unique suffering confers unique entitlement.
Any crime Israel carries out in the name of its survival — its “right to exist”
— is justified in the name of this uniqueness. There are no limits. The world
is black and white, a never-ending battle against Nazism, which is protean,
depending on who Israel targets. To challenge this bloodlust is to be an
antisemite, facilitating another genocide of Jews.
This simplistic formula not only serves the interests of Israel, but also the
interests of colonial powers that carried out their own genocides, ones they
also seek to obscure.
The sacralization of the Nazi Holocaust offers a bizarre quid pro quo. Arming
and funding the state of Israel, blocking U.N. resolutions and sanctions that
would condemn its crimes and demonizing Palestinians, and their supporters
becomes proof of atonement and support for Jews. Israel, in return, absolves
the West of its indifference to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust, and
Germany for perpetrating it. Germany uses this unholy alliance to separate
Nazism from the rest of German history, including the genocide German colonists
carried out against the Nama and Herero in German South-West Africa, now
Namibia.
“[S]uch magic,” Israeli historian and genocide scholar, Raz Segal, writes,
“legitimizes racism against Palestinians at the very moment that Israel
perpetrates genocide against them. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness thus
reproduces rather than challenges the exclusionary nationalism and settler
colonialism that led to the Holocaust.”
Professor Segal, the director of the program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies
at Stockton University in New Jersey, wrote an article about the war on Gaza on
October 13, 2023, titled: “A Textbook Case of Genocide.”
This denunciation from an Israeli Holocaust scholar, whose family members
perished in the Holocaust, was a very lonely stance.
Professor Segal saw in the Israeli government’s immediate demand that
Palestinians evacuate the north of Gaza and the blood-curdling demonization of
the Palestinians by Israeli officials — the defense minister said Israel was
“fighting human animals” — the stench of genocide.
“The whole idea about prevention and ‘never again’ is that — as we teach our
students — there are red flags, that once we notice them, we’re supposed to
work in order to stop the process that could escalate to genocide,” Professor
Segal told me, “even if it’s not genocidal yet.”
Professor Segal paid for his honesty. The offer to lead the University of
Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which has issued no
condemnation of the genocide, was revoked.
When professor Segal and I testified at the state capital in Trenton in
opposition to the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
(IHRA) bill, which equates criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism,
we were jeered by Zionists and our microphones were cut by the committee
chairman. There we were, arguing that this bill would curtail free speech while
we were in real time being denied free speech.
Genocide is the next stage in what the anthropologist, Arjun Appadurai, calls
“a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world
for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”
The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations, as
it carries out genocide, has effectively imploded the post-World War II
international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West can no longer
lecture anyone about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western
civilization. The ruse, that somehow we as a nation promote democracy, equality
and human rights, is finished.
“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness,
it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political
and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century — just as the First World
War was for a generation in the West,” Pankaj Mishra writes.
None of us who reported from Israel and Palestine, where I worked as a reporter
for seven years, predicted this genocide. And yet, we were acutely aware of the
genocidal impulse that lay at the heart of the Zionist project — the desire by
large segments of Israeli society to eradicate and expel all Palestinians. This
genocidal impulse was there from the inception of Zionism.
Victor Klemperer, a professor of linguistics and the son of a Berlin rabbi
living under Nazi rule, noted in his diary, “To me the Zionists, who want to go
back to the Jewish state of A.D. 70 (destruction of Jerusalem by Titus), are
just as offensive as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient
‘cultural roots,’ their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world
they are altogether a match for the National Socialists.”
I covered the extremist rabbi, Meir Kahane, who claimed that violence was a
Jewish virtue and revenge, a divine commandment. He was, when I was based in
Israel, barred by the Israeli government from running for office.
Kahane was assassinated on November 5, 1990, in New York City. His Kach Party
in Israel was outlawed four years later after Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born
doctor and Kach member, entered Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque and opened fire on
worshippers, killing 29 Palestinians. Goldstein, dressed in his army captain’s
uniform, was overpowered by worshippers and beaten to death. I was sent by my
editors in New York to interview the survivors. When they received the copy,
they insisted I do more interviews with Jewish colonists who justified
Goldstein’s grievances with Palestinians, part of the game of balance, but
really part of the effort to obscure the truth.
Kach, following its statements of support for the massacre, was declared a
terrorist organization by the United States.
But Kahanism did not die. It was nurtured by Jewish extremists and colonists.
Kach’s racial intolerance and calls for mass violence against Palestinians
infected larger and larger segments of Israeli society. It found near universal
acceptance after the attacks of October 7.
I saw this intolerance at political rallies held by Netanyahu, who received
lavish funding from right-wing Americans associated with AIPAC, when he ran
against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the
Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted Kahane-inspired slogans such as
“Death to Arabs” and “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed
in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish fanatic on November 4, 1995.
Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political
career nurturing these Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, who hung a
portrait of Goldstein on the wall of his living room, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor
Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett.
Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, who worked as an assistant to the founder of
Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was referred to by Benito
Mussolini as “a good fascist,” was a leader in the Herut Party that called on
Israel to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed
the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that
established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook
and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement
published in The New York Times as a party “closely akin in its organization,
methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”
There has always been a virulent strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist
project, mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately,
for us and the Palestinians, these fascistic strains are ascendant.
The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists,
heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the
Zionist versions of the Nazis’ blood-and-soil ideology. Jewish supremacy is
sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu
compared to the Biblical Amalekites who were massacred by the Israelites.
Europeans and Euro-Americans in the American colonies used the same Biblical
passage to justify their genocide against Native Americans.
Enemies — usually Muslims — who are slated for extinction are subhumans who
embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of
communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand.
Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish
extremists call for the Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of three of the most sacred sites
for Muslims, supposedly built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple which
was destroyed in A.D. 70 by the Roman army, to be demolished. These extremists
call for it to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set
the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which zealots refer to as “Judea and
Samaria,” is being annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by religious laws
imposed by the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will soon
mirror the despotic theocracy in Iran.
James Baldwin presciently saw this regression to our innate barbarism. He
warned that there was a “terrible probability” that “Western populations,
struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable
to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which,
if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial
war such as the world has never seen, and for which generations yet unborn will
curse our names forever.”
The savagery in Iran, Lebanon and Gaza is the same savagery we face at home.
Those carrying out the genocide, mass slaughter and unprovoked war on Iran are
the same people dismantling our democratic institutions.
The Iranians, Lebanese and Palestinians know there is no appeasing these
monsters. The global elites believe nothing. They feel nothing. They cannot be
trusted. They exhibit the core traits of all psychopaths — superficial charm,
grandiosity and self-importance, a need for constant stimulation, a penchant
for lying, deception, manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.
They disdain as weakness the virtues of empathy, honesty, compassion and
self-sacrifice. They live by the creed of Me. Me. Me.
“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these
vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors
to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of
mental pathology does not make these people sane,” Erich Fromm writes in “The
Sane Society.”
We have witnessed evil for nearly three years in Gaza. We watch it now in Iran.
We watch it in Lebanon. We see this evil excused or masked by political leaders
and the media.
The New York Times, in a page out of Orwell, sent an internal memo telling
reporters and editors to eschew the terms “refugee camps, “occupied territory,”
“ethnic cleansing” and, of course, “genocide” when writing about Gaza.
Those who name and denounce this evil, including the heroic students who set up
encampments on campuses here and abroad, are smeared, blacklisted and purged.
They are arrested and deported. A deadening silence is descending upon us, the
silence of all authoritarian states. We know where this ends. Fail to do your
duty, fail to cheerlead the war on Iran, speak out against the crime of
genocide, and see your broadcasting license revoked, as Trump’s Chair of the
F.C.C. Brendan Carr has proposed.
We have enemies. They are not in Palestine. They are not in Lebanon. They are
not in Iran. They are here. Among us. They dictate our lives. They are traitors
to our ideals. They are traitors to our country. They envision a world of
slaves and masters. Gaza is only the start. There are no internal mechanisms
for reform. We can obstruct or surrender.
Those are the only choices left.
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