
“We must never forget, this must never happen again.”
Since the WW2 Holocaust, it is said genocide should ‘Never Happen Again’. But it is happening, again. Every genocide is different, yet the deliberate act of ethnic cleansing is devastating, every time. After the Red Army liberated Auschwitz Concentration Camp in January 1945, several thousand children’s shoes were found and are currently being conserved. Now, while Palestinians face the ruins of their homes and lives in Gaza during a ceasefire which follows 15 months of Israeli assault on the besieged strip, many of the shoes of Palestinian children lie under the rubble, along with untold members of their families.
On this Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January, King Charles attended the commemoration service at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial in Poland, marking 80 years since its liberation by the Russians – who were not invited. Even though the Red Army brought an end to WW2 with Germany, and Japan, and Russia lost ten million civilians to the Nazi genocide, including two million Soviet Jews; 27 million Russians in total.
We must remember how catastrophic it was for the six million Jews who perished, one million killed at Auschwitz, and that Germans also murdered POWs, Roma, Jehova’s Witnesses, Serbs, criminals, the disabled, homosexuals, and others considered ‘undesirables’ totalling millions. Two million non-Jewish Poles also lost their lives. And in Hungary, in 1944, 800,000 Jews were sent to the gas chambers.
King Charles shared in his speech, as did the remaining Jewish survivors in interviews, and the BBC news commentators, their concern for a future genocide, seemingly unaware of the current one in Palestine, and they showed surprise as to why a rise in anti-Semitism. Racists view a people, nation, flag, or colour of skin, through the lens of being triggered by something they deem unbearable and unforgivable. As was the anger towards Germans, and the Japanese, for a whole generation. Today, increasing anger is directed at the US, UK and Israel, and those allied countries complicit in enabling the current genocide, and the covering up of war crimes, past and present.
During WW2, Britain and the US did not accept Jewish refugees and would not allow them refuge in Palestine because acquiring oil from the Arab nations – and keeping peace with them – was more important. By 1948, they solved ‘the Jewish problem’ by creating a State where Jews could be relocated – even though this meant ongoing wars for the Zionist State with the Arabs, whose land it was and still is. During the current Nakba/catastrophe, it is more important for UK/US/Israel to have power over the Middle East and its rich resources, under the banner of security for Israel, than securing the lives of the Palestinian people whose home it is, and always was.
The denial by governments, the press, and citizens, of atrocities done to the Jews, and others, under the Third Reich, allowed the Holocaust to happen. The denial by governments, the press, and citizens, of atrocities committed under Israel’s occupation of and military assault on Palestine, is allowing genocide to happen again, now.
When the truth is not told by the powers, and people only hear propaganda; when governments have their own political and economic reasons for turning a blind eye, evil reigns supreme. The killing and imprisoning of journalists, and suppressing or banning a ‘free press’, and silencing dissident voices informing the world about this current extermination, aids those carrying out and supplying the means to commit genocide. The lies to cover up intent allow massacres and ecocide to happen. Instead of revealing the extent to which international humanitarian laws have been broken and ignored, anti-semitism has become the ‘newsworthy’ focus, and distraction. While it is right to end racism and vandalism, and quell fears, it is cruel to set one group of people against another for political advantage, and irresponsible to ignore the root cause.
German death squads, like the Israeli Occupation Force, persisted in their dominance and destruction of those they hated and wanted gone; their ideologies placed themselves as supreme beings over others who they set out to eradicate. In Gaza, and the West Bank, tens of thousands of men, women and children have been murdered, hundreds of thousands are severely injured, starved, and more than two million made homeless and threatened with forced expulsion. There are more than 10,000 imprisoned indefinitely without charge, where they suffer from terrible physical and mental abuse. Many of those released through the current prisoner swap deal, have had their homes and health care destroyed in the ongoing Israeli land grab. Many will be arrested again for resisting brutality, or for posting on social media, or for throwing stones at IOF machinery ripping up their neighbourhoods, leaving them without water, sanitation or power.
This is a genocide that is happening again. A ceasefire that requires UNRWA to be reinstated to provide aid. Israel is committing the longest apartheid rule and military occupation in history. We do not need to wait years to pay tribute to those who have resisted and survived, and are suffering unfathomable loss and hardship as their country, along with their pasts and futures, is stolen.
We need to bring an end to UK/US/Israeli colonisation of the Middle East and to terminate our dependency on fossil fuels. We need our allied Western governments to cease waging wars against defenceless peoples, and profiteering from the rape and pillage of their lands. We need our politicians and media to cease gaslighting and pretending and forgetting. To call genocide out. Put an end to violence. To act on the rule of law. Make the world safe for us all.