As of October 29, 2023, nearly 3,500 Palestinian children had been murdered by Israeli military personnel and an additional 1,000 are missing, presumably buried in the rubble of Gaza during the preceding three weeks.  An additional 6,000 Palestinian adults were also liquidated and an unknown number are missing, while almost a million have been uprooted from their destroyed homes.  Of course, that is sort of traditional, immediately after its founding Israel expelled more than 800,000 Palestinians from their homes almost overnight during 1948 and “appropriated” (stole) their land and possessions, an event known as the Nakba.  One might call the past three weeks Nakba II, or more accurately, the Nakba^nth.  There have been too many Nakbas to accurately keep track.

While the past three weeks have involved a significant increase in indiscriminate extra judicial killing of Palestinians by Israelis, it was merely a continuation of official Israeli policy since 1948, with peaks and valleys to be sure, but such attempted annihilation of Palestinians, glossed over as merely “ethnic cleansing”, has been unabated.  The hunting of Palestinians by Israeli military personnel and settlers is a sick reality akin to the worst historical violations of human decency, let alone rights, actions akin not only to those of the Nazis but of the Huns and then the Mongols, and to United States’ soldiers and settlers with respect to the indigenous population of North America were bounties were paid for indigenous scalps without differentiation between age or gender. 

In the case of Israel, the justification for such inhumanity goes back millennia to old Hebrew genocidal traditions, traditions which are biblically recorded as far back as the genocide committed against the inhabitants of ancient Jericho, and involves a Hebraic version of the Nazi policy known as Lebensraum, one not only sanctioned, but commanded by the Hebrew deity, Yahweh, a deity who, ironically, is the same deity worshipped by Israel’s current Palestinian victims.  Perhaps the saddest irony is that Palestinians are much closer genetically to ancient Hebrews than are the Israelis.  They are the descendants of the Jewish people who stayed in the “Holy Land” instead of migrating away after the Roman destruction of the second Hebrew Temple, and who were, in large part, first forced by the Romans of the later Christianized Empire to convert to Christianity, and then, forced to convert to Islam by conquering Arab Muslims, a faith much closer to their original Judaism than was Christianity.  Current Israelis on the other hand are an amalgam, with Hebrew roots, to be sure, but primarily comprised of converts to Judaism from diverse European ethnic groups, primarily descendants of the ancient Eurasian Khazars but including many others. 

Still, murder is murder, genocide is genocide and impunity is impunity.  Hypocrisy reigns, seasoned with hubris, especially with reference to the phrase “Never Again” and to memorials remembering and honoring one segment of those who perished in the series of events during the first half of the twentieth century collectively referred to as the Holocaust, memorials that do not include remembrance of the Soviet citizens slaughtered, or the residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or of Dresden or Tokyo.  The height of such hypocrisy, of course, in addition to the creation of the embryonic State of Israel by the United Nations in 1948, in Palestine rather than say, in Bavaria, involves the decisions of the tribunals established by the victors in the second war to end all wars in the cities of Nuremburg and Tokyo which authorized selective additional murder and torture, in the name of justice and humanity and, of course, as deemed necessary to assure that what is happening in Palestine today, would never occur.  Not all that successful I’d say.

Odd how the term anti-Semitism has morphed from an attitude of unjustifiable actions and attitudes against members of the Jewish faith based on their religious beliefs into defense of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and opposition to truths concerning related realities.  Fortunately, a great many Jews refuse to accept the commission of genocide and ethnic cleansing in their names and are prominent among those protesting against Israel.  The same is true of the populations of many of the countries supporting and defending the Israeli annihilation of Palestine and the Palestinian people.  Perhaps they’ll remember the forgoing when next they vote in purportedly democratic elections.

Something to think about as the descendants of the victors in the second war to end all wars employ the same tactics and excuses as did the losers, and as a third “war to end all wars” becomes more and more likely.

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© 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/.