History cannot excuse the crimes of the present

Nov 5, 2024
Jerusalem, Israel - January 15, 2017: The chamber of deputies in the Israeli Parliament is arranged with desks in a semi-circle, and a computer screen for each member.

One of Mark Twain’s more celebrated aphorisms is that ‘history never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme’. Witty, no doubt, but it doesn’t seem quite adequate to Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza, its longstanding, settler-led expansion into the West Bank, or the implausible use of history to justify current policy.

If there is one people in the world we might expect to be sensitised to the impact of racialised mass murder, it’s the Jews. No doubt some are, as the continuing demonstrations against Netanyahu’s increasingly brutal and authoritarian rule demonstrate, but the net effect looks alarmingly reminiscent of what the Nazi’s did to the Jewish populations of Eastern Europe. Indeed, Hitler’s megalomaniacal pursuit of Lebensraum, or greater ‘living space’ for the German people, may have been on an epic scale, but the desire to eliminate people who are hindering the realisation of a sacred national destiny looks alarming familiar.

As Giora Eiland, one of the architects of Israel’s evolving military strategy put it, ‘Gaza must be completely destroyed: terrible chaos, severe humanitarian crisis, cries to heaven.’ Likewise, a senior minister, Bezalel Smotrich, suggested that starving 2 million people to death ‘might be justified and moral’ under certain circumstances. No doubt Heinrich Himmler would have sympathised with such sentiments. Perhaps an enthusiasm for genocide owes more to personality types than it does to ideology or race.

Either way, even the United Nations tireless but largely powerless leader, António Gutteres, has taken to describing Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank as ‘ethnic cleansing’. It is becoming increasingly clear that the overall goal is to drive Palestinians completely out of Gaza⎯or kill them where they are if that is not possible. How else can we explain the repeated, indiscriminate targeting of hospitals and housing as the entire area is reduced to uninhabitable rubble?

The equally inhumane decision to ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is the only effective aid agency in Gaza, is not simply callous in the extreme, but it seems entirely in keeping with the overall goal of either killing or expelling the Palestinian population from its traditional homeland.

True, Israel hasn’t started building extermination camps and sending in its version of the Einsatzgruppen, or the Nazi death squads who managed to murder an estimated 1.5 million Jews. But whether you’re killed by a bullet in the back of the head or a collapsing building is probably a moot point as far as the victims are concerned. At least the German method was instantaneous; better than lying painfully in the ruins of your home for a day or two before expiring.

No doubt drawing parallels between the Nazis and the current Israeli government’s policies will induce apoplexy amongst Netanyahu’s supporters, not to mention the all too predictable accusations of antisemitism. But do the unbelievable, inhuman horrors of World War 2 or October 7th mean that we must remain forever silent no matter what the state of Israel does?

Giving the Israeli government a free pass because of the tragic history of the Jewish diaspora is not a good precedent. Should we make similar allowances for Vladamir Putin because he’s busy restoring Russian greatness for a nation that was traumatised by Stalin killing millions of his own people? Should we take a more indulgent attitude toward Xi Jinping’s China when we remember that Mao’s Great leap forward resulted in the deaths of possibly 30 million people?

There is, of course, absolutely no possibility that the United States, or Australia for that matter, will take history into account when it comes to dealing with Russia or China and their not unreasonable sense of grievance about the way they have been treated. But it’s worth remembering that during the nineteenth century some 4-12 million Chinese people became addicted to opium thanks to Britain’s imperial trade policies, which were brutally enforced. If AUKUS goes ahead, the UK will be sending gunboats to the Far East once again.

Even now, double standards and hypocrisy are rife. The repeated expressions of American (and Australian) ‘concern’ and ‘regret’ about Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians stand in stark contrast to the fulminations about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example.

To be clear, Russian aggression is not a good thing, not least because it provides a painful reminder that delusional leaders remain capable of starting pointless conflicts at any historical juncture. One might have hoped by now that it had become clear that there are no ‘good’ wars, even when they are waged by people we regard as friends, allies, or politically and strategically important.

And yet Israel’s political importance, especially in the run up to a crucial election, means that American policy makers are reluctant to criticise its increasingly uncontrollable ally, much less cut off the flow of weapons that permit the continuing slaughter. Just as before and during World War 2, there always seems to be some compelling reason or other that allows the genocide to continue.

Perhaps that’s one thing Netanyahu at least has learned from history: moments of geopolitical paralysis and indecisiveness on the part of potentially pivotal powers really do provide an opportunity to get away with murder. While the US remains consumed with its own political crises, which threaten to undermine the foundations of its own and the world’s security, the Netanyahu government demonstrates that the opportunities for unprincipled, amoral authoritarians everywhere to act with relative impunity can only increase.

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