Israel’s Slippery Slope to Genocide

Omar Bartov is a historian specializing in the history of genocides, particularly the Holocaust. He published a lengthy and complex article in the British newspaper The Guardian (with a circulation of 300,000 copies) on August 13, 2024, in which he acknowledged that Israeli military interventions in the Gaza Strip have all the appearances of a genocide[1].

However, this respected historian, an emeritus professor at Brown University with dual Israeli and American nationality, expressed a different viewpoint in an article published on November 10, 2023, in The New York Times (with a circulation of 5,000,000 copies). In that earlier piece, he questioned : “But are Israeli actions – as the nation’s opponents argue – verging on etnic cleansing or, most explosively, genocide ? “.  The wording of the title was ambiguous, as it used the term ‘actions‘ euphemistically to refer to Israel’s indiscriminate bombings, and implied that accusations of genocide or ethnic cleansing could only come from ‘Israel’s opponents‘.[2]

On that date—November 10, 2023—humanitarian workers, United Nations envoys, and journalists on the ground, including Palestinians correspondents from Reuters, CNN, Al Jazeera, and AFP, were alarmed by the extent of the destruction caused by Israeli bombings and the 8,500 civilian deaths, the majority of which were women and children. On October 30, the NGO Save the Children reported that 3,324 children had been killed in Gaza, noting that more children have been killed in Gaza in the past three weeks than in all conflicts around the world since 2019. Doctors were already reporting scenes that were almost unbearable, even for the most experienced war-zone medical professionals. On November 6, 2024, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres denounced: “Gaza has become a graveyard of children“. On October 13, Human Rights Watch accused the Israeli army of using white phosphorus munitions in its military operations in Gaza, a claim that was confirmed by CBS News on October 14. On November 7, South African Foreign Minister, Naledi Pandor, urges the International Court to issue an arrest warrant for Israel prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling on the Prosecutor to investigate war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide[3]. On December 6 in Gaza, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross declared: “The level of suffering is intolerable… Children are being amputated because they cannot receive treatment for their injuries, and many are orphaned“. According to UNICEF data, ten children were being amputated daily without anesthesia. Between October 7 and December , 2023 the  World Health Organization has reported at least 212 attacks on Gaza’s health sector[4].

International concern grew over the high death toll and Israel’s conduct of the war, which included ground assaults and air strikes targeting or hitting hospitals, schools, emergency shelters, and United Nations and other humanitarian operations, as well as areas previously designated as ‘safe zones’ in Gaza by the Israelis. These attacks resulted in the deaths of journalists, humanitarian workers, medics, and thousands of women and children. Many infants were killed on the day they were born.

The Israeli leaders made statements following the terrorist attack carried out by Hamas on October 7 that left no doubt about their intent to destroy Gaza and annihilate its population. President Isaac Herzog declared on October 9, “Hamas has built an infernal machine at our doorstep. The entire population of Gaza is responsible. It is not true to say that civilians are not involved. This is absolutely not true. They could have risen against this malevolent regime“. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated on October 1: “We are dealing with animals and will respond accordingly… We are sealing off Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel“. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett confirmed: “We are fighting Nazis“. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Israelis to “remember what Amalek has done to you“, alluding to the biblical call to exterminate Amalek’s “men and women, children and infants“. Benny Gantz, who commanded the Israeli forces during the 2014 offensive and later became Defense Minister, declared, “Gaza will burn. There is no other equation“. Benjamin Netanyahu, referring to Gaza as the “City of Evil“, stated in a televised address, “We will turn all the places where Hamas takes cover into ruins“.

In his article in The Guardian, Omar Bartov quotes a 1956 speech by Moshe Dayan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army from 1955 to 1958, which states: “We are the generation of settlement; without a steel helmet and the muzzle of the cannon, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Our children will not have a life if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads and dig water wells“. This rhetoric follows a pattern of statements from Israeli leaders dating back to 1948, when two-thirds of the Palestinian population, around 750,000 people, were expelled from their lands, and 500 of their villages were destroyed and renamed, erasing their history. Israel has long sought to deny the existence of a Palestinian national movement, labeling it as a terrorist organization. The Palestinian issue has been avoided for too long, as illustrated by the misleading slogan, ‘a land without people for a people without land‘—a classic colonial concept viewing the desired territories as terra nullius (nobody’s land)[5]. In truth, Israeli leaders have consistently denied the existence of a Palestinian people. The destruction or expulsion of the Palestinian population is deeply rooted in the policies of Israeli leadership. Palestinian history is largely absent from Israeli school textbooks, where the biblical terms ‘Judea and Samaria’ are used instead.

General De Gaulle once lucidly observed: “Israel now organizes an occupation in the territories it has captured that can only be accompanied by oppression, repression and expulsion; and in turn it will qualify the resistance against it as terrorism. […] We witnessed the emergence of a warlike Israeli state resolute in its desire for expansion. And then the action it takes to double its population through immigration leads us to think that the territory acquired would not long suffice and it would be given to seizing every available opportunity to grow”[6]. Expansion of Israeli settlements : 5,000 Israeli settlers in 1981; 700,000 today in the occupied territories and 270,000 in East Jerusalem.

In February 2008, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai warned, “The more Qassam rocket fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger ‘Shoah‘ because we will use all our might to defend ourselves“[7]. In July 2014, Ayelet Shaked, a member of the Israeli parliament and Justice Minister, called for genocide against the mothers of ‘snakes’ during the Gaza conflict, following the brutal murder of Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khadeir by Israeli youths: “They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. This includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, and nothing would be more just. Their homes should also be destroyed, otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there“[8].In August 2014, Moshe Feiglin, a member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called for the destruction of Gaza and proposed a detailed plan to relocate Palestinians to camps in the Sinai Desert. He said, “The IDF will take control of all of Gaza, using any means necessary to minimize harm to our soldiers, without any other considerations“. Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai expressed a desire to “send Gaza back to the Middle Ages“and to destroy the enclave’s infrastructure[9].

Contrary to Omar Bartov’s perspective, these intentions have been clearly expressed long in advance. Even I, though not a specialist in genocides nor an opponent of Israel, published an article in Counterpunch as early as October 30, 2024, denouncing what I called the Israeli genocide: “How many orphans, how many widows, how many mourners will it take to recognize the current Israeli military’s intervention in Gaza as a genocide? “[10].

The study of genocides committed throughout history reveals two essential and associated elements necessary for their execution: military supremacy and the belief in a superior race.

To try to explain the indifference of Israeli society toward the plight of the Gazan population, Omar Bartov refers to indoctrination. Indoctrination is undoubtedly an aggravating factor. And Omar Bartov, who served four years in the Israeli army, obviously knows something about it. It is likely one of the milestones on the path leading to genocide, the “slippery slope”, echoing the phrase coined by Auschwitz survivor Hajo G. Meyer in his book The End of Judaism (2013). But the essential element that makes genocide possible is military supremacy.

THE MILITARY SUPREMACY

That is why, before a dispute or conflict escalates, it is essential to suspend all arms and ammunition sales as soon as possible. In the case of Israel, this has never been done. On the contrary, enshrined in U.S. law since 2008 is a requirement to ensure Israel’s ‘Qualitative Military Edge,’ which means “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or non-state actors“. The law also requires that U.S. arms supplies to other states in the Middle East should not compromise Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge. In 2016, the USA committed to providing $3.8 billion a year in financial military aid to Israel between 2019 and 2028, roughly the same level of support as in the preceding decade.

Over the past decade, Israel has significantly increased its arms imports. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimates that in the five-year period from 2019 to 2023, Israel was the world’s 15th largest importer of major arms, accounting for 2.1% of global arms imports during that time. In 2009–2013, it ranked only 47th. The lopsided ratio of casualties and injuries between Palestinian and Israeli victims is not due to the skill of Israeli soldiers and officers but rather to their vastly superior weaponry and its massive, indiscriminate use.

In August 2014, when the Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip was facing increasing international criticism due to the high number of women and children being killed, out of 495 members of Congress (both the House and Senate), only eight voted against an emergency supplementary military aid package of 225 million dollars to Israel. On that occasion, Pentagon spokesman Vice Admiral John Kirby disclosed the existence of a permanent stockpile of American weapons in Israel, worth approximately one billion dollars[11]. Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, on August 12, 2024, marked the 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions and subsequently approved a $20 billion weapons sale to Israel. In 2019–2023, the USA accounted for 69% of Israel’s arms imports. Only  the perception of a risk of noticeable change in the United States’ support for Israel could lead Tel Aviv to the negociating table and thus make posible a “Solomonic judgment” on the Palestinian issue.

All the genocides of the 19th century that our school textbooks have often overlooked, influenced by the political agendas of various colonial powers, were driven by military interventions armed with a significant technological advantage in weaponry, unfamiliar to Indigenous populations. This disparity in arms largely accounts for the low casualty rates among French, British, German, and Dutch colonial forces during their military “conquests”.

During the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, which took place in the capital of the Mahdist kingdom in Sudan, General Herbert Kitchener, leading Anglo-Egyptian forces, annihilated 12,000 soldiers (dervishes) of the Caliph Abdullah al-Taashi. They employed naval artillery, the newly invented Maxim machine guns from 1884 by Hiram Maxim, and new expanding bullets (hollow-point bullets) produced in the British arsenal in Dum Dum, India. Nearly 5,000 wounded soldiers were executed or left behind, a practice that was condemned by journalist Ernest Bernett, who witnessed the battle and published an account in 1899[12]. The British lost 42 men. During the wars to establish French protectorate in the kingdom of Dahomey (modern-day Benin) from 1892 to 1894, thousands of Fon warriors were killed, and the royal guard, composed of women known as the Mino (meaning “our mothers” in the Fon language), the famous Amazons, was annihilated[13]. The rebellious king, Behanzin, the twelfth king of Dahomey, was first exiled to Martinique and then to Algeria with fetters on his feet. France lost about ten soldiers despite engaging over 3,000 men. The Lebel rifle, the Kropatschek repeating rifle, the 80mm mountain cannon, and melinite shells wreak havoc. The repression by British forces and colonial militias during the Mau Mau uprising of the Kikuyu people in Kenya (March 1952 – October 1956) resulted in tens of thousands of deaths (200 on the British side) and the cold-blooded executions of key military and spiritual leaders. During popular uprisings in the Algerian cities of Sétif, Guelma, and Kherrata (May 1945) and on the island of Madagascar (1946-1947), more than 100,000 opponents or protesters were killed. It is now known that the conquest of Algeria (1830-1871) resulted in more than 825,000 deaths, which was approximately one-third of the total population. In the Dutch East Indies, also known as the Netherlands East Indies, around 10,000 Chinese people were executed within a few days in October 1740 in Batavia (now Jakarta) by Dutch troops assisted by Enfield firearms and repeating Winchesters. This massacre is known as the “chinezenmoord” (Chinese Massacre).The Italian occupation of the provinces of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, with a force of 500,000 men, made extensive use of yperite (mustard gas) and phosphorus in indiscriminate aerial bombings, killing more than 100,000 people. Nearly 400,000 British soldiers were mobilized against the Boers, equal in number to all the Boer populations combined. The detainees, whose homes were plundered and burned, were starved and mistreated on the orders of Lord Kitchener to force the Boer generals to surrender. In 2017, Indian parliamentarian and former United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Shashi Tharoor published a damning account of British colonialism, citing 35 million deaths solely due to the repression of major uprisings[14]. In New Caledonia, the violence of French colonization after the Kanak revolt in 1878 decimated 80% of the Indigenous population. The Maji Maji Rebellion, also known as the Maji-Maji-Aufstand in German, took place from 1905 to 1907 in the eastern part of the German colonial territories in East Africa, which is present-day Tanzania. It resulted in around 200,000 deaths (with less than a hundred on the European side), the devastation of villages, and a catastrophic famine due to the scorched earth strategy implemented by the Germans. The person responsible for the repression, Governor Gustav Adolf von Götzen, wrote in 1909, “As in all wars against savage peoples, be it in Morocco, Natal, Java, or tropical Africa, it is essential to systematically destroy all property of the enemy population“[15].

Is Israel doing something different in Gaza? What is the ratio of fatalities between Palestinians and Israelis since October 7 in Gaza and the West Bank? Is it similar to the “U.S. ratio” observed during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? In response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which resulted in the deaths of 2,977 people in the United States, it is estimated that 200,000 Afghans and 500,000 Iraqis were killed during the wars in Afghanistan (2001–2021) and Iraq (2003–2011) : 6,910 American military personnel lost their lives in these conflicts, along with 633 British soldiers and 159 Canadian soldiers..

THE DEHUMANIZATION OF THE PALESTINIANS

Humiliation, contempt and oppression are the corollaries of military supremacy. “No people can achieve full maturity as long as they carry the weight of an inherited sense of inferiority“, wrote Anton De Kom, a Surinamese native and author of the anti-colonial work We Slaves of Suriname, published in 1934 and now considered a classic. De Kom joined the resistance against the Nazis but was arrested again by Dutch police in August 1944. He was subsequently held in the concentration camps of Bois-Le-Duc, Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme, while his two children were deported to Germany. After the war, upon their return, they were forced to serve in the Dutch East Indies military to restore law and order. It wasn’t until 1950 that the family was officially informed of Anton De Kom’s death in Stammlager XB (Neuengamme) on April 24, 1945. His work was rediscovered in the late 1960s by Surinamese students in the Netherlands, who adopted it as the manifesto of their political awakening.

The history of colonization, marked by European powers through repression, massacres, plunder, and the destruction of cultural and religious heritage, logically continues with the advent of Nazism in Europe. Just as it was once necessary to “dehumanize” Black, Yellow, Indian, and Kanak peoples to appropriate their physical and spiritual wealth, Nazism and its collaborators sought to “dehumanize” Jews, appropriating their wealth and aiming to annihilate their faith by exterminating their people.

Nazi jurists crafted the Nuremberg Laws (1935) based on American legislation. German historian Heinrich Krieger, drawing from his research, recommended implementing similar policies towards Jews as those the United States had enacted against Blacks and Indians. Adolf Hitler, in his speeches, referenced the extermination and forced relocation of Native Americans, declaring, “The Volga will be our Mississippi” in October 1941, alluding to the Slavic and Jewish populations[16]. Heinrich Goering, the first governor of German colonies, was the father of Hermann Goering, the Nazi Reichsmarschall. The racist ideology that strongly emerged during the Weimar Republic asserted the superiority of the Aryan race and the duty to eliminate the “vermin” (weltparasit) and sub-humans (untermeschen) in the colonies. General Lothar von Trotha even spoke of a “war of races“.The treaties of ‘protection’ (schutzgebiet) imposed on Togo and Cameroon in 1884 are inspired by the same cynicism as the ‘protection for their well-being’ (schutzhaft) claimed by the Nazis for the deportation of Jews. The Italian historian Enzo Traverso writes in his work “Nazi Violence: A European Genealogy” (2002): “Nazism realized the meeting and fusion between two paradigmatic figures: the Jew, ‘the other‘ of the Western world, and the subhuman ‘the other‘ of the colonized world“.

The brutal depopulation of colonized regions between 1880 and 1920 reinforces the racial theses of the inevitable disappearance of inferior races. From the exclusion of non-Whites to the exclusion of non-Aryans and the massacres of Palestinian populations, several centuries have passed, characterized by policies of repression and humiliation stemming from a Western culture convinced of its racial superiority (the Herrenvolk, the Master Race). Nazi barbarism, in its European variant, was an excessive prolongation of colonial barbarities. Israeli militarism and hegemony is part of their continuity.

There is no difference in horror between these  moments in human history. And their kinship with the destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of its “animals” as termed by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, is evident only to those willing to see it. Watching the documentaries and photographs from Al Jazeera’s team in Gaza, and listening to the testimonies of United Nations envoys and doctors returning from the region about the pain, suffering, mutilations, and massacres inflicted on entire families by Israeli armed forces, after having also shared the pain, grief, and suffering of Israeli families who were victims of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, is unbearable, even for the most seasoned observer. What heritage will survive after the devastating destruction of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army since Hamas’s deadly attack on October 7, 2023? “They have obliterated both individual and collective memory, compounding our grief“, states Ehab Balso, former Minister of Culture of the Palestinian Authority, who was born in Gaza.

It is understandable that Omar Bartov, a former soldier of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) who has studied the Holocaust in depth, finds it difficult to come to terms with the fact that the Jewish people—once victims of Nazism and the regimes that collaborated with it during the immense tragedy of the Holocaust—could today, within the institutional framework of the State of Israel, harbor such hatred and resort to such violence in a messianic pursuit to eradicate Gaza and its population. After centuries marked by migrations, expulsions, prohibitions, inquisitions, massacres, burnings, pogroms, and the suffering of ghettos and torture, how could history have led yesterday’s victims to become today’s oppressors?

In the realm of genocide, history has taught us that the same causes produce the same effects. Listening to the statements of Israeli leaders, reading the Israeli press, and enduring the comments made by Israeli friends and colleagues, one cannot help but think of Aimé Césaire’s words: “And I say that from colonization to civilization, the distance is infinite; that, of all the accumulated colonial expeditions, of all the devised colonial statutes, of all the ministerial circulars dispatched, one cannot succeed in uprooting a single human value“[17]./.

Notes.

[1] (https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov)

[2] (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/opinion/israel-gaza-genocide-war.html).

[3] Felix Jason, News 24, November 7, 2023.

[4] From CNN’s Kareem El Damanhoury, Lina El Wardani and Ibrahim Dahman; “Gaza’s health system “on its knees” and nearing total collapse, WHO says”, December 7, 2023.

[5] Mur Diana, “A land without a People for a People without a land”, Middle East Quaterly, Spring 2008, Vol.15, N°2.

[6] Charles de Gaulle, Discours et messages, Volume 5, January 1966-April 1969, Plon Paris, 1970.

[7] “Israel Minister Warns Palestinians of Shoah”, Times, February 29, 2008.

[8]  Mira Bar Hilel, Why I am on the brink of burning my Israeli passport”,  Independent, July 11, 2014 (www.independent.co.uk).

[9] “Israel Minister of Incitement”, Haaretz, editorial, November 20, 2020.

[10] https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/30/the-children-of-gaza-2/.

[11] “U.S. Restocks Israel’s Ammunition Supplies Hours After Condemning Attack  on a UN School in Gaza”, AFP, July 30, 2014.

[12] Ernest Bernett, The Downfall of the Dervishes, London, 1899.

[13] Hélène Almeida-Topor, Les Amazones, une armée de femmes dans l’Afrique précoloniale (The Amazons: A Women’s Army in Precolonial Africa), Éditions Rochevignes, 1984.

[14] Sashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire What the British did to India, Hurst, 2017.

[15] Gustav Adolf von Götzen Deutsche-Ostafrika im Aufstand 1905-1906, Dietrich Riemer, Berlin, 1909. English edition (trad. John East), The History of the Maji Maji Rebellion in Tanzania, 2019 (www.archive.org).

[16] Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography, Norton & Co., 2008; Adolf Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen,1925-1933 (Adolf Hitler, Writings, Speeches, Instructions), Institut für Zeitgeschichte, De Gruyter, 1994.

[17] Aimé Césaire : “Et je dis que de la colonisation à la civilisation, la distance est infinie ; que, de toutes les expéditions coloniales accumulées, de tous les statuts coloniaux élaborés, de toutes les circulaires ministérielles expédiées, on ne saurait réussir à extirper une seule valeur humaine”, Discours sur le colonialisme, Ed. Réclame, Paris, 1950.

The post Israel’s Slippery Slope to Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.