The Coming Genocide

Starving Palestinian children wait to receive food from a dwindling supply (source: aljazeera.com).

Part of the Imperialist Wars topic

The genocide of Native Americans is viewed by most Americans as a black mark on their history. Reactionaries will do their best to minimize the atrocities committed by their ancestors, while progressive liberals acknowledge the extreme scale of the crimes against the indigenous peoples. Between both groups is a collective belief that the US has moved away from its genocidal roots and has embraced a more complete form of democracy. In reality, it was not the consolidation of democracy that ended the genocide, but the consolidation of the settler-colonial state. Once all of the indigenous lands had been stolen, the goal of the genocide was completed. Any survivors were allowed to live on tiny reservations in order to bring some consolation to the "radical progressives" of the era, but were otherwise inconsequential to the new state. The settlers had won.

A century later, a similar process began to take place within Palestine. Early on, Zionist settlers came to Palestine with the goal of supplanting the native population. From 1948 onwards, they waged a brutal settler-colonial war against the native peoples, killing or displacing most of the Palestinian population. The massive Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War allowed Israel to occupy the remainder of Palestinian territory. The Palestinians became prisoners in their own land and were gradually replaced by the encroaching settler militants. Ever since the events of October 7th, the genocide has intensified. As I am writing this post, over a million Palestinians are on the brink of starvation as Israel cuts them off from any outside supplies. Nearly the entire world stand complicit in Israel's campaign of extermination, with only a handful taking action against the rogue state.

It is important to understand that "Israel" is not a real state, but a controlled experiment in fascism. The United States was an early template for fascistic expansionism that succeeded in creating a white supremist state. The Nazi regime in Germany borrowed many ideas from the American example, including a desire to incorporate vast new living space by killing or displacing peoples who they saw as inferior. During the Second World War, Nazi Germany sought to subjugate Eastern Europe the same way that the US subjugated the West. The American experiment was successfully carried out under a global system that normalized the horrors of colonialism. The Nazi experiment, fortunately, was stopped by the progressive forces led by the Soviet Union.

White supremacy and antisemitism were rampant in the West during Hitler's rise to power. Many politicians in the US and Europe viewed Nazi Germany in a positive light. They saw in Hitler a possible ally against Bolshevism in the east. Pogroms against Jews and other marginalized groups were tolerated within this political climate. Had the Western states worked with the USSR from the beginning, the Nazi Holocaust could have been avoided entirely. It was only later in the war that the Nazi experiment was deemed too "extreme" even for the genocidal colonial powers of the West. For a time, fascism was banished from mainstream politics and became a fringe ideology. Colonialism was then gradually dismantled by the politically-awakened peoples of the Global South.

In the present day, the Zionist experiment of Israel represents the most extreme version of settler-colonialism ever seen in the world. Under the cover of a growing global far-right nationalist trend, Israel is completely unrestrained in its genocidal project. When the Nazis were conducting their mass executions of civilians, they took significant steps to keep the deaths out of sight for political and diplomatic reasons. To this day, Nazi apologists attempt to dismiss the Nazi Holocaust as a hoax. Israeli apologists, however, acknowledge the mass killings of Palestinians and merely argue that such actions are necessary to ensure Israel's security. The current holocaust is being livestreamed before our very eyes, and it is nonetheless allowed to continue.

The fact that President Trump and the Western media has cast mild criticism of Israel in recent days is concerning. It means that their sources have informed them that many Palestinians are on the brink of starvation. Trump and the media wish to get ahead of the final stages of the holocaust so that they can distance themselves from the vile deed. For all the liberal claims that Trump would be worse than Biden on Palestine, we have seen him use the exact same playbook. Like Biden, Trump falsely attempted to broker a ceasefire, tried to find ways to forcibly evict the Palestinians, and then leaked to the public his supposed frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. All of these moves serve the purpose of buying Israel time to complete its grim task.

Those who supported Biden proudly wash their hands of any involvement in the genocide now that the opposing candidate has taken over the operation. Angered by the open pillaging of their welfare state, these social fascists have put the blame for the genocide on progressives who refused to vote for Biden, on the nearly non-existent Western left-wing, and on the Palestinians themselves. As always, the social fascist supporters of liberal parties has done their part to excuse and normalize genocide. They were more than willing to sacrifice the Palestinians in exchange for retaining their own social privilege in the First World, but got fewer political concessions than they had hoped for. Thanks to the Biden supporters, people's senses have become dulled to the extreme suffering of others.

In the past, the Soviet Union curbed the genocidal ambitions of the West and progressive Pan-Arab states advocated for the dispossessed Palestinian people. There is no longer a Soviet Union present to stop the new holocaust. Global South solidarity has been systematically broken up and replaced with Western-backed comprador governments. Any state that has the ability to stop the genocide refuses to use their political or economic leverage against Israel. In this new "world order", we will likely see Israel succeed in its ultimate goal to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza.

If this genocide is fully carried out, it will blacken the future of the next several generations. The genocide will not stop within Gaza. Once normalized, the same experiment will be repeated in many other areas of the world. Numerous different groups will be targeted. The scale will be considerably larger. Devastating wars will be fought. All due to the collective sin of allowing Israel to carry out its terrible genocide. If not stopped, the deaths of the Palestinian people will haunt all of humanity for years to come.