Gaza, Israel and the Politics of Genocide

In relation to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, perpetrated with total premeditation and impunity by Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu and his accomplices in Washington and the European Union, it is appropriate to recall what Noam Chomsky wrote in "Fateful Triangle. The United States, Israel and the Palestinians".

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In this remarkable book, which was first published in 1983 and updated in 1999, the American linguist asserts that:

“The military doctrine of attacking defenseless civilians derives from David Ben Gurion, who was quite explicit about it, though not in public of course. In a January 1, 1948 entry in his Independence War Diary, he writes:

There is no question as to whether a reaction is necessary or not. The question is only time and place. Blowing up a house is not enough. What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time, place and casualties.

If we know the family, [we must] strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent. Where there was no attack, we should not strike.

The latter qualification was not observed, frequently, in the pre-state period and increasingly in later years (as, for example, at Qibya)”

In short: the tragedy we are witnessing today in Gaza is nothing new: ‘blowing up’ houses, murdering relatives of supposed or real Hamas militants, not having the slightest compassion for children, women and the elderly, was what the founder of the Israeli state recommended without any remorse.

The unspeakable suffering to which the Palestinian people are subjected is the umpteenth reiteration of a policy of "ethnic cleansing" that offends the democratic conscience of humanity and causes untold suffering to the Palestinian people.

The Netanyahu government is committing a war crime that will not go unpunished -although it now seems unlikely that such a thing will happen- but will certainly cause tremendous suffering for those who carried out or acquiesced in this genocide.

The world cannot remain indifferent to the cold execution of a policy of extermination that is inscribed in the birth certificate of the Israeli state, as is attested to by the passage quoted by David Ben Gurion.

By a cruel irony of history, this policy reproduces the one suffered by the Jewish people at the hands of their Nazi executioners.

The circumstances of the historical and geopolitical context have changed; the actors and their methods , are not the same; and yesterday's victims have become today's victimizers, but the quintessence of the policy is the same: the annihilation of a people denied their human condition by their oppressors and the theft of their territory.

It is essential and urgent to put an end to such barbarism. No government or any political and social force can remain indifferent to this new version of the holocaust.