Gaza genocide

July 4, 2025

Like Refaat Ibrahim, I am appalled by the way the “Western world” not only looks away, but enables Israel to commit genocide in Gaza. I have been passionately crusading on behalf of Palestine, my initial interest aroused by a founding member of the Israeli Air Force, a South African-born man, who left Israel in total disgust at the country’s behaviour. This was the in the late 1970s to early 1980s.

What irks me about Refaat’s article is his selectivity about previous genocides. My question is, why only mention what the Germans did in Namibia and Tanzania? Surely the Belgian genocide in Congo, the death toll of India under British rule — 120 million according to Shashi Tharoor — the genocide of Indigenous Australians, Northern Americans, France in Algeria, the Dutch in Indonesia may at least have been mentioned.

In other words, it reduces the notion of “genocide” to one foul nation, the Germans, as though European colonialism was not in effect one large escapade of genocide, a notion perpetuated in 1948 when European countries, to appease their guilt at their centuries of pogroms, created another European colonial outpost, at the expense of people who had lived in peace with Jews for centuries.