Our Wednesday News Analysis | Israel’s Genocide in Gaza Is a World Historical Crime

A funeral ceremony is held for Palestine TV correspondent Mohammed Abu Hatab, who was killed along with his family members in an air strike on his home in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on November 3, 2023. (Abed Zagout / Anadolu via Getty Images)

Editor’s Note |

Before the turn of the century, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote that “nationalism, the exaggerated and unjustified tendency to emphasize national interests, has produced in our time the abominable curse of this century.” ⁸

After 1848 and all the way up to World War II, emotion-laden, militant, and self-centered ‘sacred’ collective egotism replaced the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Nationalism equated to superior race, cultural supremacy, blood dominance, obsessive possession of land rights, manifest destiny, chosen people, redemption, and power, together with arrogance stemming from ignorance and, disdain and condescension
against the other.

This vile, malicious, and criminal form of ‘patriotism’ became predatory and depraved. ⁹ ‘Jewish’ nationalism, cloaked as ‘Zionism,’ a thundering consequence of
the worst kind of European fascism exhorts:

“If the welfare of our Fatherland should require conquest, subjugation, dispossession, and extermination of foreign nations, we must not be deterred by humanitarian qualms,”

According to T. H. Tetens, author of ‘The New Germany and the Old Nazis,’ this is the code of Pan-German political nationalism. ¹⁰

van Kempen, Abraham. Christian Zionism ... Enraptured Around a Golden Calf, 2nd Edition (Kindle Locations 2068-2074).

Words can’t express the horrors of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To actually feel the nightmare, you would have to be there under the bombs, fleeing with Palestinians desperately seeking a safe place that doesn’t exist; seeing building after building destroyed; treading through blood in one of the few, only partially standing hospitals; and witnessing children and other patients sprawled on hospital floors, limbs amputated without anesthesia (Israel having blocked all medical supplies).

It has taken the Jewish state’s savagery to break decades of silence about its history of crimes against humanity. US military historian Robert Pape has called the onslaught against Gaza “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.” Former UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour has said that we are witnessing “probably the highest kill rate of any military…since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.”...

Read more: Israel’s Genocide in Gaza Is a World Historical Crime

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FROM NAMIBIA TO GAZA WITH LOVE

Source: Common Dreams
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/namibia-gaza-solidarity

By Ramzy Baroud
Published April 21, 2024

The Israeli brutality in Gaza, but also the Palestinian sumud, resilience and resistance, are inspiring the Global South to reclaim its centrality in anti-colonial liberation struggles.

The Afrikastein (formerly Hererostein) at the cemetery at Columbiadamm in Germany is marked with red paint; the stone commemorates seven German soldiers who died in the then colony (protectorate) of German Southwest Africa, but during the Herero and Nama War from 1904 to 1908, Germany committed mass murder, which is considered the first genocide of the 20th century. (Photo: Hauke Schröder/picture alliance via Getty Images)

The distance between Gaza and Namibia is measured in the thousands of kilometers. But the historical distance is much closer. This is precisely why Namibia was one of the first countries to take a strong stance against the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

"The German government’s support of the Israeli war on Gaza is not motivated by guilt but by a power paradigm that governs the relations among colonial countries. Many countries in the Global South understand this logic very well, thus the growing solidarity with Palestine.

The Israeli brutality in Gaza, but also the Palestinian sumud, resilience, and resistance, are inspiring the Global South to reclaim its centrality in anti-colonial liberation struggles."

Namibia was colonized by the Germans in 1884, while the British colonized Palestine in the 1920s, handing the territory to the Zionist colonizers in 1948.

Though the ethnic and religious fabric of both Palestine and Namibia are different, the historical experiences are similar.

Though intersectionality is a much-celebrated notion in Western academia, no academic theory is needed for oppressed, colonized nations in the Global South to exhibit solidarity with one another.

It is easy, however, to assume that the history that unifies many countries in the Global South is only that of Western exploitation and victimization. It is also a history of collective struggle and resistance...

Read more: From Namibia to Gaza With Love

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ZIONISM MUST BE EXPOSED AND DISCREDITED

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/zionism-must-be-exposed-and-discredited/

By Philip Weiss
Published April 20, 2024

Zionism threatens political freedom in the United States and international order. There is only one way to fight this ideology. Those who oppose it must explain the truth to Americans: Zionism is racist.

PALESTINIANS RETURN TO NUSEIRAT AFTER THE ISRAELI MILITARY PULLED OUT TROOPS FROM THE CENTRAL GAZA STRIP, APRIL 18, 2024. (PHOTO: OMAR ASHTAWY/ APA IMAGES)

"There is only one way to defeat Zionism.

It must be indicted and described as the racist antithesis of everything the American experiment has achieved.

Its support must be harried, hectored, and starved.

It must be defeated in the United States, Congress,
and the University of Southern California.

We will win because we must.”

Philip Weiss
Mondoweiss.net

You could not get a better picture of Zionism than from two recent events:

               Israel bombed a consulate in a foreign country – Syria – killing top Iranian military officers, among others,

and

               Israel supporters in the U.S. forced the cancelation of the valedictorian address at the University of Southern California because the speaker opposes Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Today, Zionism threatens political freedom
in the United States and international order.

These actions are consistent. They are expressions of a maximalist ideology that operates on a global level to support the Israeli regime. That ideology, of course, is Zionism, the belief that Jews need a state to be safe. Today Zionism threatens political freedom in the United States and international order. It threatens the political tradition of liberalism in the United States by compelling Democratic politicians to pay for more bombs to advance genocide.

After 150 years of struggle and practice, it is plain that Zionism is dedicated to the neverending subjugation of Palestinians, who resist their persecution...

Read more: Zionism must be exposed and discredited