'At the end of the afternoon, the heat caused a light mist to arise: it was the blood of the five thousand victims, the ghost of the city, evaporating in the setting sun' - Aimé Césaire
Over two weeks have passed since the beginning of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, and the cutting off of water and electricity, of no food or medicine entering the world's largest concentration camp. Faced with the depletion of water, thousands of people have to drink seawater or contaminated water. Between lethal bombings, the destruction of hospitals, and a slow torture by starvation and thirst, almost half of the 2.3 million people in Gaza have already been forcibly displaced.
The Zionist armed forces also bombed the Al-Ahli hospital, killing hundreds of refugees in a single brutal blow.
The colonial power has ordered the eviction of the entire northern Gaza Strip, bombs those who try to go to the south and also bombs the south. Civilian casualties are more than 6,500 and keep rising. In the West Bank, over 100 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds arbitrarily detained.
Historian Raz Segal, who specializes in Genocide and Holocaust studies, has written that this is a "textbook case of genocide". Both the measures taken by the Israeli regime and the rhetoric of its officials correspond strongly to the legal definitions of genocide adopted by the UN. Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has effectively proposed a genocidal program: "No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly". Yet, why isn't the world listening?
But the world does hear and understand the meaning of Israeli actions and threats. The governments of the US, France, Italy, Germany and the UK are consciously supporting war crimes, providing Israel with all possible military, economic and political resources.
This naked fascism that outrages the world, driving thousands of people in dozens of countries to take to the streets, has the endorsement the “liberal” and “democratic” press of Europe and the US. Indeed, the media helps to create the political atmosphere favourable for the collective punishments inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians. But that's not all. In France, Macron initially banned marches in support of Palestine immediately after the 7 October (this has now been lifted) and, because of that peculiar obsession of French imperialism with the regulation of clothing, prohibited wearing the keffiyeh. The interior minister also launched an investigation against the New Anti-Capitalist Party for a statement in support of the Palestinian resistance and foisted alleged anti-Semitism on the France Unbowed party.
In the United Kingdom the Palestinian flag will be considered suspicious on a more or less discretionary basis, and in Australia it has been announced that police can arbitrarily stop and search people attending marches in support of Palestine.
Measures against solidarity with Palestine were also adopted in Austria and Germany as part of this anti-democratic wave, in the context of growing popular support for the Palestinian cause in Europe.
The current offensive comes on the heels of decades of apartheid and ethnic cleansing and over 16 years of blockade against Gaza, a policy characterised as incremental genocide by Jewish historian Ilan Pappé. Economist Sara Roy coined the term de-development to describe the process of destruction of Gaza's economy by the occupation regime two decades before its blockade, and in 2016 posited that the territory had been re-engineered into an "isolated and disposable enclave." It is in effect an open-air prison in which more than 80% of the population lives in poverty and 60% suffers from food insecurity. That was before October.
Before the walls of that prison were demolished by force, dozens of peaceful marches took place between 2018 and 2019, repressed by Israeli snipers. After 60 Palestinians were massacred and more than 1700 wounded in a single day.
Just as the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre prompted the Mississippi legislature to issue a statement of solidarity with the racist South African government, some 400 members of the US House of Representatives sponsored a draft resolution in support of Israel in the midst of the current genocidal offensive. It's only criticism of Israel is to have allowed Palestinians to have “rudimentary, civilian equipment, such as bulldozers, para-gliders and rubber boats... demonstrating the importance of fully enforcing tight controls on what materials go into the Gaza Strip”.
Open calls for genocide among Israeli journalists and public figures in social networks and the media have been documented by Israeli activists. Netanyahu, whose political career has been cemented on his war crimes, had already in 2018 formulated a classic fascist credo: "The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive." In this offensive he has threatened to turn Gaza into a "desert island" and on Monday in the Knesset he stated that "this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle".
A similar metaphor was used last year by EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, when describing Europe as a garden and the rest of the world as a jungle. Imperialists and colonialists are still today reminding us with their words and actions that they don't consider Palestinians, and most of humanity, to be fully human.
The topic of the fascistization or Nazification of the Israeli political regime and society has been raised time and again by Jewish and Israeli intellectuals, activists and artists. This has expanded from the warnings of Einstein and Arendt, among others, about the quasi-fascist and Nazi character of the Herut party, direct predecessor of Netanyahu's Likud, to the criticism of academics such as Yehuda Elkana and Yeshayahu Lebowitz, to films such as Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir. So much so that the Israeli state has seen the need to promote a definition that classifies this genre of criticism as an expression of anti-Semitism.
In this context, it's highly symbolic that Ezra Yachim, old war criminal who took part in the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, former member of the Zionist terrorist group Lehi, which offered to support Germany in World War II in exchange for support to expel the British from Palestine and impose its own totalitarian colony, has been sent to agitate Zionist troops in the current offensive. Yachim called on them to murder and "erase the memory of families, mothers and children".
The Martinican thinker Aimé Césaire in his seminal book Discourse on colonialism, written in 1950, had the penetrating insight that fascism had roots in the very history of European colonialism and imperialism. About the European and Christian bourgeois man of his time, he affirmed that "what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the niggers of Africa".
Césaire's writing seems to speak to us today about UN officials, liberal TV anchors and newspaper editors, imperialist politicians and reformist bureaucrats, whose pseudo-humanism is "narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist".
The writer’s work also respond’s the question about why the genocide of Palestinians is accepted by these “humanists” and “democrats”, representatives of the “rules based order”. Bush's war crimes went unpunished, Obama even received a Nobel Peace Prize vindicating the well-intentioned crimes of US imperialism. Even Russia's imperialist crimes were accepted and tolerated without consequences when he committed them in Syria or Chechnya. In Ukraine they are unacceptable because they are committed against Europeans. Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians is acceptable, not only because of the geopolitical interests to which it tributes, but because it is committed against non-Europeans, non-whites.
It's not enough to expose this ideological worldview that is at the core of the imperialist order today, to show it in all its monstrosity. We must do everything necessary to defeat it.
Simón Rodríguez Porras is a Venezuelan Socialist and writer. He is the author of "Why did Chavismo fail?" and editor at Venezuelanvoices.org.
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