Armed Palestinian resisters to Israeli occupation and imprisonment without trial of thousands and thousands of their brethren have shocked the “Western” world by breaking out of the Gaza Ghetto and daring to attack Israel, sort of like armed Jewish resisters once attacked Nazis in the Warsaw “ghetto”.  They dared to take prisoners to exchange for the thousands of Palestinians held without trial by the Israeli occupiers, the former but not the latter considered anathema.  After all, only Israelis have prisoners, those captured by Hamas are hostages.  As in the first war to end all wars, “Western” media has quickly demonized those it disdains, claiming, without evidence, all sorts of atrocities and brutalities involving women and infants.  Then, it was the “Huns” dining on babies; now it is Hamas purportedly raping women and beheading infants.  While atrocities are probable (the thirst for revenge tends to lead to inhumane reactions), these particular reports, like those from the first war to end all wars, are highly improbable or at least, extremely exaggerated.  On the other hand, the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children by the Israelis are well documented and credible.  But “that” was collateral damage so it doesn’t count.  And after all, the roughly forty to one ratio of Israeli to Palestinian casualties must be maintained, the score is important in this particular game.

The consequences of the Hamas led breakout were predictable, as predictable as reprisals by the Nazis during the second war to end all wars.  Collective punishment of innocent Palestinians, regardless of what “International law” prohibits or what the Nuremberg tribunals decided, is “necessary”.  And anyway, that’s not too much different than what has been happening every day, even before Hamas unexpectedly acted.  Hunting Palestinians has become similar to the extermination of the Buffalo by “sportsmen” in the United States during the nineteenth century.  Or to extermination of vermin whenever we fumigate for pests who have “invaded” our homes.  After all, as a prominent Israeli leader recently exclaimed, “Palestinians are subhuman animals”.

For three quarters of a century, European invaders have subjected the Palestinian people to the most brutal form of colonialist exploitation imaginable.  Exploitation coupled with a campaign of gradual genocide and constant pillaging and plundering.  It was necessary.  Unfortunately.  Zionists wanted the homes Palestinians had lived in for millennia, and modern Israel is beautiful and needs “lebensraum”.  And six million Jews were killed by the Nazis, which somehow justifies the annihilation of Palestinians.

The ex post facto rules applied to the losers in the second war to end all wars purportedly established an international legal structure that forbade the foregoing.  Instead, it continues unabated with the victims labeled “terrorists” and the victimizers treated as victims by a jaded and dishonest “press”.  In France and Germany, indicia of support for Palestinian rights is now officially illegal; elsewhere in the so called West, it is “unofficially” censored, the probable fate of this article.

Hypocrisy and deception “uber alles” are prevalent in everything, but especially in intercultural relations, both domestic and international.  Perhaps though, that’s not a modern phenomenon.  As I delve more and more deeply into history, it seems mined with little more than lies, obvious and verifiable falsehoods which make those aspects of history we’re forbidden from studying, like the causes and consequences of the second war to end all wars, very, very suspect.  Just how different were the Nazis (and perhaps the “allies” as well) from today’s Zionists in Palestine or the United States almost everywhere.  The perception from the Global South with reference to the foregoing seems very different from that among the populace in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and the European Union.  But then, there is seemingly a disconnect between the populations of the latter and their governments, with those purportedly “democratic” governments disdainful of the will and opinions of those they rule.  As Abraham Lincoln, that consummate politician reputedly once said, “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”.  Left unsaid, perhaps, was the corollary: “But you can at least try.”

I and those of my generation in the United States were once taught that restraints on liberty, restrains on the right to opine and to deliberate, where characteristics of totalitarian states, especially states such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Soviet allies, and that the second war to end all wars was fought to preserve our rights and freedoms, but today, the reverse seems true.  Perhaps it always has been.  The normative environment concerning opinions involving the current situation in the Middle East in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians it enslaves is illustrative, as is the situation with the conflict between the Ukraine and the Russian Federation.  In each case, “Western” populations are exposed consistently to a barrage of verifiably false information, but pointing out its fallacies is, “verboten”, verboten not only socially but legally.  And protests, the fundamental right of citizens in a free society, are also now “out of bounds”.

It is ironic that many Palestinians are descendants of Jews who refused to participate in the diaspora following the Jewish revolt against Imperial Rome, instead converting over the centuries to Christianity and Islam in order to remain in their homeland, while most of the Zionists who have stolen that homeland are descendants of converts to Judaism over the centuries who intermarried with the Jews who left.  It is also ironic that, but for the tolerance of Islam for Judaism during the millennium following Islam’s founding, there might well be no Jews at all today.  But those inconvenient truths are papered over.  Papered over with silence at best and outright deception at worst.  The past is irrelevant to Zionists and their apologist unless it’s convenient, like remembrance of Nazi atrocities.  The Nazis, of course, where not Muslims, but that makes no difference.  Their atrocities are now used to justify the similar atrocities of Israeli Zionists against the Palestinian people.  As in the Holocaust, the murder of women, children, the aged and infirm are necessary in order to implement a final solution to an inconvenient problem, and as in the former case, the “Western” world stands by with eyes tightly shut, not only rationalizing its inaction, but this time, making genocide viable (albeit better hidden behind a curtain of better managed public relations).

It is to the credit of the best ethical and moral standards of Judaism that many Jews stand among the most vocal critics of the foregoing while fundamentalist Christians in large numbers have decided that acceleration of “the end times” and the return of Yeshua the Nazarene to lead them to paradise justifies all such atrocities.  Incoherence rules, as it seemingly always has.  And what passes for history will likely clean the mess up, will package it in tidy narratives full of quotes and citations to what passes for journalism.

“Never again” is an empty slogan and the rulings of the Nuremberg tribunals following the second war to end all wars are hollow.  Genocide is, in fact, celebrated annually during Chanukah (the exterminations of the Canaanite residents of Jericho) and Passover (the massacre of the first born of Egypt).  Of course, genocide and ethnic cleansing are not an exclusively Israeli phenomenon.  They are the hallmark of European colonialism, perpetuated against indigenous populations in the Americas, Africa, the Far East, Oceania and elsewhere. 

Still, one wonders how the current Israeli genocide and ethnic cleansing will be celebrated in the future, … and by whom.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.