Palestinians as “Human Dust”: Israel’s Genocide and Its Anglo-American Imperialist Patrons

Banner: Anti-war demonstrations with Palestinian flags in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Oct. 2023. Photo: Wikipedia Commons

 Israel Uses the Holocaust as its Cover for its Ongoing Genocide in Gaza  

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu will very likely be recorded in the annals of world’s genocidaires as a deceitful politician who never tired of instrumentalizing the narrative and memories of the Holocaust – to commission a Lemkinian textbook genocide of his own against the native people of Palestine in general and the residents of Gaza in particular.

On 6 May 2024, on the eve of Israel’s invasion in Rafah City where over 1 million Gazans are trapped, the Israeli demagogue, his signature Orwellian address at the Opening Ceremony for the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day.

In his words, “(t)omorrow, Yechiel Leiter, the bereaved father, will attend the March of the Living in Auschwitz-Birkenau. The message that he will send from there, Never Again, is also our message here today, from the hills of Jerusalem.

I wish to clarify: Never again is now”!

Because eighty years after the Holocaust, after the unspeakable genocide of six million Jews, a third of our people, the forces of evil rose up against us once again, driven by pure evil. They (Hamas) slaughtered, abused, raped, kidnapped.”

Apparently, the ICC-worthy Israeli criminal in power feels comfortable – and shameless – in making all-too-frequent references to the Nazi genocide towards his own sinister ends.

There is little wonder then that the International Criminal Court is reportedly considering the issuance of international arrest warrants to Netanyahu and his senior colleagues in the War Cabinet.

So, I for one feel perfectly moral and empirically accurate to contend that Israel has institutionalized a national policy of ethnic elimination of the native people of Palestine and progressively depopulating the land with people to establish the Jewish majority state, from its very inception in 1948.

Though not a victim or descendant of any genocide, as a concerned student of genocides and other state crimes, over the last 30 years, I have visited inter alia more than half-a-dozen Nazi death camps, purpose-built and adapted, in Poland, Germany and Austria, including 4 visits to Auschwitz. During the Covid-19 lock-down, co-produced an educational film about Auschwitz-Birkenau for the Burmese anti-genocide campaigners.

The Zionist founders of Israel, particularly David Ben-Gurion, were known to have dehumanized the Holocaust survivors as “human debris”, deemed unfit for their decades-old pre-Holocaust project to “colonize” Palestinian land, using their Zionist propaganda of “a land without people, for a people without land”.

Likewise, native Palestinians were framed as “human dust”.

That was the genocidal framing of Israel’s “most moral army” in an officially declassified document from the Israeli high command in 1948. It was brought to my attention from an old video I discovered of a then young Noam Chomsky.

The Forensic Architecture, a research group based at Goldsmith College, the University of London, has offered one “small piece” evidence of Israel’s “freedom fighters” of 1948, having turned one mass grave of their slaughtered Palestinians in a fishing village named Tantura into a parking lot. That’s one of 500+ villages erased by the leaders’ order to the ground, or dust.

It is one thing that post-Nazi Germany of the now defunct German Democratic Republic turned Hitler’s last residence – Reich Chancellery – into “a parking lot”. But it is altogether a different (immoral) matter when the Zionist state of Israel has, as a matter of policy, been “burying the Nakba in various ways – in archives, by planting forests, through erasure. It’s the same mechanism that reinforces the Zionist supremacy that time after time gazes upon the Nakba “from above,” as if it had nothing to do with it,” as observed by the Haartz’s Sheren Falah Saab in her 25 January 2022-dated article.

Seven-five years on, the facts of the Nakba or the Great Catastrophe have now been well-documented and accepted around the world. That is, except in Israel where the mass atrocities committed by Israel’s Zionist founders remain concealed.

As the Guardian reports, “approximately 700,000 people – about half the population – were expelled or fled from their homes in the war surrounding the creation of the Israeli state, and about 500 villages destroyed.”

Fast forward to the days following the Hamas’ attacks, which occurred in areas inside the present-day Jewish State of Israel where eleven Palestinian villages once stood but were turned into literal dust by the Zionist settlers. The retrograde notion that the native inhabitants of Palestine, are simply human dust to be swept away by 2,000 pound brooms has been with us from the beginning. Over the years the metaphorical language has shifted but the fundamental premise remains the same.

Israeli Defence Minister, the Ukraine-born settler who rose through Israeli’s military ranks, Yoav Gallant shocked the world with his threat to the entire Gaza’s 2.3 million people of “a total siege” involving cutting off what he openly called “human animals”, of life’s essentials such as “water, food supplied and electricity”. This policy of “collective punishment” of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people – half of whom are children and young people – under Israel’s siege of a quarter century was announced as Israel’s “self-defense”, before the full international press corps.

Much has been written about Israeli leaders’ post-7 October usage of incendiary language – typically found in genocides, from Hitler and Himmler’s speeches, diaries and writings to Pol Pot’s regime and Rwanda and Serbian genocides in the 1990’s. Gallant’s “human animals” is a variation of Adolf Hitler’s Untermenschen, a specific reference to the Slavic population in the East, where the Nazis wanted to expand German settlements for Lebensraum or living space. Living space for the chosen race of Germans, at the expense of the natives.

On 11 January 2024, before the 17-judges of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, the South African legal team presented pages of well-documented evidence to that effect in their case against Israel. My jaws dropped as I watched the lawyers for South Africa going through a list of such genocidal phrases – as “human animals” – on a giant screen set up across the street from the Palace of the Peace in the Hague, in the 1st day of the proceedings.

On her first visit to the Occupied West Bank in 1979, Ellen Cantarow, the American musician and feminist columnist for New York’s Village Voice, whose academic husband Louis Kampf was a colleague and friend of Professor Noam Chomsky at the MIT noted similar genocidal framing of Palestinians by Israelis – whom they refer to as “the Arabs”.

It is instructive to quote Cantarow at length:

I stayed in Kiryat Arba, thanks to a distant cousin of my husband’s who got me there in an undercover fashion. One of my interviewees assured me that she believed in “a great chain of being,” Jews on top, all other humans below, with Arabs at the very bottom, just before animals, vegetables, and minerals. Her husband referred to the Talmudic injunction to “rise and kill first.” Another settler assured me that the Arabs could stay on the West Bank only if they would “bow their heads.”

Quoting Christopher Browning, the author of The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution” (New York, 1992, p.22), the historian of Pol Pot’s genocide at Yale Ben Kiernan wrote, “’Hitler initially envisaged “three belts of population – German, Polish and Jewish – from west to east.’ Pragmatic considerations gave first priority to deporting rural Poles to make way for German settlers, before expelling or exterminating Jews.” In the same study, Browning made a direct strategic link between land grab for the Germans and the Final Solution to the Jewish Question and the Nazis’ military attacks in the East (Poland and the USSR (including the present-day Ukraine and Belarus).

[See Ben Kiernan, “Twentieth-Century Genocides: Underlying Ideological Themes from Armenia to East Timor.” In The Genocide Studies Reader, Samuel Totten and Paul R. Bartrop (Eds.), NY and London, Routledge, 2009, pp.243-256.]

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The Pre-Hitler Genesis of the German Genocide of the Jews

In January 1942, 15 elite Nazi officials, including Adolf Eichmann – six of whom held doctorates from German universities – hammered out the comprehensive strategy to address Germany’s long-standing problem of “racially un-hygienic Jews”.

Twenty years before, following Germany’s defeat and the crushing “peace treaty” at the end of the WWII, in his letter to one of his field marshals, the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm II metaphorically described the German Jews as “the (parasitical) mushroom” which grew on the (beautiful) “German oak tree”, just a few years before Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Fürth, Bavaria, Hitler’s stronghold, in 1923.

It wasn’t simply the Nazi’s desire for Lebensraum – or annexation – that pushed the Nazi leadership to switch gears from mass deportation of the Jews to mass extermination as the industrial method of depopulating the land of an un-wanted population.

A genocidal vision had obviously run through the German ruling class psyche at least four decades before Himmler’s SS Commandant Rudolf Hoess first operated Auschwitz’s first experimental gas chamber, known as “Little Red House”, located a few minutes-drive from Auschwitz-Birkenau. The SS were testing a prototype of their industrial killing technology on Polish partisans (or anti-Nazi resistance fighters) and the twenty thousand Soviet prisoners of war.

A few years later, the mass-extermination of the 1.1 million Jewish people transported from all across the Nazi-occupied Europe followed at Auschwitz.

While gas chambers at Auschwitz and other concentration camps became synonymous with the Nazi genocide, they were not the only method of choice by the SS. The scientifically calibrated “racial (under)feeding”, as Raphael Lemkin termed the act of starving “populations under occupation” to death, at various paces, depending on the economic/labour potentials of their victims, was another method widely used across death camps throughout the Nazi-occupied Europe.

I first visited Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum – now a UNESCO World Heritage-designated Polish state institution – in late March 2017 – to make a short 2-minute video-appeal to the European Union – European Commission External Affairs – using the New Europe’s pledge of “Never again!”, in order to sound the warning against what I was calling the slow-burning genocide of Rohingyas in my native Myanmar. The EC was reportedly to review its “Common Position” on Myanmar. It was two years after Aung San Suu Kyi had assumed State Counsellorship, in partnership with the country’s military leadership. The world was celebrating Suu Kyi’s “Mandela moment” with media hype about its “democratic flowering”.

On my visit, I tagged along a tourist group whose well-trained museum tour guide spoke excellent English and sounded extremely knowledgeable about the camps.

The guide stopped in front of a women’s barrack used by SS as the “Death Barrack”, where Hitler’s executioners would leave very seriously ill woman prisoners who had no more labour value for the SS’s joint ventures with German corporations. The guide proceeded to talk about how SS rationed a few teaspoonfuls of water per day for their victims to sip before death. He pointed to the snow-covered ground and told us the story of an exchange between an Auschwitz survivor and someone from the audience in a public talk. Apparently, the survivor was asked what the campground was like. Was it grassy? The survivor, according to my guide, responded by saying, “I would have eaten it if it was”.

I can’t help draw a parallel between Gaza’s Israel-made famine today, amidst media reports of Palestinians eating animal feed (after all, Gallant called them “human animals”) and the complete absence of potable water there, and the conditions for the 1.5 million Nazi prisoners at Auschwitz in 1940’s, which the Nazi SS deliberately created before their final extermination.

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Today’s Gaza as the Zionist’s Final Solution?

When Ellen Cantarow travelled to Palestine in 1979 she noted that Israeli settlements are a “cancer” in the lives of the Palestinians. As Cantarow recorded, Palestinians were deemed by the Israeli settlers in Kiryat Arba as “just above the animals and vegetables” and were treated accordingly.

She quotes Muhammad Milhem, the mayor of Palestinian village of Halhul.

“Well, ‘human dust’, ‘human debris’, ‘human animals’, same difference.”

Cantarow, who has been visiting the Occupied Territories (of Palestine), and reporting from it periodically over the last almost 25 years, offered the context of Israel’s genocidal use of induced acute malnutrition in Gaza. She wrote, “as lawyer Dov Weisglass, then an aide to the prime minister, said at the time, he wanted to keep Gazans just below starvation level—not enough to kill them, but not enough to fill them either.” That was in 2006, after the Palestinians in Gaza voted Hamas as their local government. Israel responded to the democratic will of the Gazans with a siege designed to create human conditions “just below starvation level”.

In such policy-induced conditions of extreme malnutrition, curable diseases and illness claim innumerable lives, be it Auschwitz of Primo Levi in the 1940’s, or Gaza of 2023/24.

Over the last 20 years since 2003, I have visited 6 major Nazi concentration camps in Hitler’s Europe including the 1st camp at Dachau on the outskirt of Hitler’s base city of Munich, all women’s camp Ravensbruck tucked away in a beautiful wooded area where former German Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up with her pastor father, then the Schindler’s List-immortalized Auschwitz-Birkenau which became coterminous with the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Himmler’s purpose-built Sachsenhausen about 45 minutes by train from Berlin, Mauthausen of Upper Austria, located on a hilltop with a wonderful panoramic view over the valley and River Danube, an hour train journey from Linz, where Hitler set up his Austrian Nazi headquarters, and Neuengamme outside of industrial port city of Hamburg.

While gas chambers became the best-known destroyer of human lives in the Nazi genocide, these “dark sites” were unique compared with other cases (such as the genocides in the Balkans and Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Myanmar genocide of Rohingyas), in that the Nazi planners integrated infirmaries into the camp complexes. After all, if the perpetrators were as a matter of policy radically under-feeding their victim populations, diseases were going to become ripe among this population, something the young Italian Jewish chemist from Turin, Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, constantly took notice of.

Israel’s use of “starvation” as a weapon of war” – has drawn global condemnation, so much so that even the child of Irish parents, Samantha Powers, famed genocide scholar and head of the United States Agency for International Development in the Biden cabinet, was compelled to break her 6-months-long silence and admitted that starvation was taking hold in Gaza.

The day after last Christmas (on 26 December 2023), the National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States, reported on the World Health Organization warning.

The transcript reads:

In Gaza, the World Health Organization warns that illness may ultimately kill more people than Israel’s offensive. Infectious diseases are “soaring,” says the WHO. Over 100,000 cases of diarrhoea have been reported, with rates among childlren 25 times higher than before the war.

War has shattered Gaza’s health-care system, including its disease surveillance capabilities.

Diarrhea was a killer in SS-run Auschwitz of Levi’s days, and it continues to play that role in Israel’s “concentration camp” of Gaza. “Concentration camp” is Chomsky’s characterization of the narrow strip in 2018, along the Red Sea which ex-US President Donald Trump’s advisor Jared Kushner has reportedly been discussing the post-genocide beach front property for re-development.

Just as its long-standing partner of my birth country Myanmar – which the late Golda Meir described as a partner in “love affair” with Israel in their formative decades of 1950’s and 1960’s – had destroyed any health care facilities for the Rohingyas on the eve of the country’s final genocidal assault in 2016 and 2017, Israel has, amidst carpet-bombing and droning, destroyed all health care facilities in Gaza, killed Palestinian health-workers, cut off medical supplies and even murdered white and western aid workers from the very countries that have armed, financed or otherwise supported Israel over these decades – such as USA, UK and Australia.

These acts speak volumes about Israel’s genocidal policies and practices in Gaza. Like the SS and its corporate joint ventures, Israel’s ongoing genocidal process has an element of corporate involvement. Many of the world’s leading corporations from the United States are in partnership with Israel’s security organizations, which in turn test their AI-generated surveillance and security systems in “The Palestine Laboratory”.

The name Dr Joseph Mengele springs to mind. On my repeated visits, I remember staring at the barracks at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz concentration camps where Mengele-led teams of SS doctors performed medical experiments on their victims, including young girls. Unlike the SS medical scientists, Israel is not interested in the development of life-saving medicine, but life-destroying “security sciences”.

Israeli weapons and surveillance systems, as well as its human resources (experts) are highly sought after by dodgy regimes worldwide. With the help of Israeli weapons technicians and engineers, Singapore, obsessed with its economic survivalism – survival under circumstances and by any means necessary – is reportedly developing one of the world’s fastest-growing niche arms industries. Amidst the Gaza genocide, the city-state was hosting an arms expo where Israeli’s weapons and security products were showcased.

The Australian scholar Antony Loewenstein’s brilliant book The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (23 May 2023) alerted the world to Israel’s fifty years of live human testing of surveillance and murder systems on Palestinians.

It is extraordinary that the SS doctors had only 5 years to do their inhuman experiments while Israel has been afforded more than 50 years to do similarly unethical, inhuman and illegal LIVE-testing of its human control tech on nearly 6 million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

As early as 2000, the London-based international Jewish Anti-Zionist Network founded by the Brooklyn-born Jewish American émigré Selma James, a feminist labour organizer and widow of Trinidadian intellectual giant CLR James, attempted to inform the activists of Israel’s nefarious arms trade with over 130 governments around the world.

As a professional student of genocide, I believe that Israel’s treatment of the Gazans may be far more sadistic, sinister and genocidal than anything I have studied over the last three decades.

However, Gazans are not the only population Israel has been targeting for physical destruction.

In his media interview with Prospect magazine editors Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber published on 18 April 2024 Gideon Levy called attention to the fact that Gaza is not the only site where Israel is perpetrating its crimes. The Occupied West Bank of 3 million Palestinian residents are increasingly subjected to an undeclared siege of sorts. Levy who has travelled to the West Bank almost weekly for the last 30 years noted that before October 7, Israel permitted 150,000 Palestinians to come to Israel and function as labourers in Israel’s “1st world” economy. With their wages in, each Palestinian worker could support a few families who live in the Occupied Territories.

But alas, using “security concerns” as the pretext, Israel no longer allowed these breadwinners to come and serve even as labour in the Israeli economy, practically cutting the economic lifeline of a vast majority of Palestinians under occupation in West Bank. This has caused a shortage of labour in Israel that India’s Hindutva government of Prime Minister Modi has promised to fix, sending Indian labourers to help Israel meet its labour needs.

Additionally, Levy told his British podcast hosts that many Palestinian olive farmers were barred from accessing their orchards during the olive cultivation season, which in turn resulted in the loss of 1/3 of olive cultivation last autumn, that is, loss of their principal income.

According to the Al Jazeera International report on 22 March 2024, since October 7 more than 7,350 Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank have been arrested by Israel. A month later the same news agency reports on 24 April, an estimated 487 Palestinians have also been killed by Israel security forces and settlers.

With time on their hands – since 1948 – generations of largely Eastern European Jewish settlers – from the Warsaw-born David Ben-Gurion and Kyiv-born Golda Meir to the present Brooklyn born Netanyahu and his coalition government dominated by Messianic Fascists, who use Judaism as their ideological smokescreen – have been pursuing the inherently genocidal annexation of the west bank.

One important thing to note is Israel did not turn genocidal only after Hamas’ deadly assault in today’s Israeli territories where the illegal settlements – and the settler population – have increased exponentially. According to the 1983 census, the settler population of the West Bank was 22,800. Today the estimates are at approximately 700,000.

Haim Bresheeth, the Jewish author of “Introducing the Holocaust: A Graphic Guide” and a professor of film studies at SOAS recently told Al Jazeera International, “We have people walking around with automatic weapons, and simply saying that you were afraid of a Palestinian gives you the legal justification to shoot them. SOAS academic continues, “I think, right now, Israeli society is somewhere between fascism and Nazism and no one seems to have noticed.” Professor Bresheeth whose parents were both killed at Auschwitz left Israel in the 1970s.

On my recent visit to Mauthausen, as I stepped out of my Austrian local train at Mauthausen station, I was greeted with the memorial plaque on which the rights of the child were engraved. The Austrian and German SS slaughtered 20,000 children, Jewish and other groups, deemed unworthy of life, between the camp’s inception in 1939 till it was shut down by the United States Armed Forces in May 1945. That’s 20,000 murdered children in 6 years. Israel’s rate is over 15,000 in 6 months (October 2023 to April 2024), and still counting.

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 “Judeo-Nazi” Education for the Zionist Genocide

In one of her visits to the West Bank city of Hebron in the 1980’s, the American Jewish writer Ellen Cantarow recalled seeing graffiti on walls that proclaimed: “ARABS TO THE GAS CHAMBERS”. That was four decades ago. I shudder to think what Israelis demand and want today, given that even as staunch a Zionist as the famed New York Times editor Thomas Friedman is screaming foul of how far-right Israel governments of Netanyahu have moved to.

The Zionist state’s expansion of its “living space” in its race-world where the Jews are on top, and with Palestinians at the bottom via variously genocidal methods, has remained a constant theme in the development of the “only democracy” in the Middle East.

What has changed in Israel now is that not only IDF soldiers but also an overwhelming majority of its settler-citizens have metamorphosed into “Judaeo-Nazis”, as forewarned by the renowned Israel public intellectual Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 40 years ago. Leibowitz was prophetic in his warning to fellow Israeli that if the occupation (of Palestine) continues, Israeli Jews are going to turn into what he called, ‘Judeo-Nazis’.

In his 13 December 2023 op-ed in Al Jazeera International, Rifat Audeh, Palestinian-Canadian human rights activist, award-winning filmmaker, and freelance journalist, wrote: “​(i)t’s not shocking to see Israeli children celebrate the Gaza genocide. Israel has long been indoctrinating its children to believe Palestinians are less than human, and thus not worthy of empathy or compassion”.

While in post-Holocaust (West) Germany underwent a de-Nazification educational process the Zionist Israel has adopted as a matter of its educational policy the kind of racial supremacist indoctrination. In his AJE op-ed, Audeh cited an Israeli research study of Hebrew language children’s books for his AJE op-ed. ​It is instructive to quote him at length here:

“There is myriad evidence of Israel’s brainwashing of its citizens to erase the humanity of Palestinians spanning many decades.

Israeli scholar Adir Cohen, for example, analyzed for his book titled “An Ugly Face in the Mirror – National Stereotypes in Hebrew Children’s Literature” some 1700 Hebrew-language children’s books published in Israel between 1967 and 1985, and found that a whopping 520 of them contained humiliating, negative descriptions of the Palestinians.

He revealed that 66 percent of these 520 books refer to Arabs as violent; 52 percent as evil; 37 percent as liars; 31 percent as greedy; 28 percent as two-faced and 27 percent as traitors.”

It is then to be expected that Israeli children were seen on a national TV network celebrating the country’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, with lines such as “Within a year we will eliminate them all …”

With such thoroughly “educated” (Read indoctrinated) new generations of Israelis, thus “educated”, and creatively genocidal leaders and the IDF, which is technologically far-more-advanced-than-the-Nazis, in charge of the officially “Jewish State,” who needs gas chambers?!!

After all, today’s Judaeo-Nazi state of Israel has proven capable of carpet-bombing entire residential landscape of Gaza – irrespective of whatever building materials – into rubble and dust in 201 days.

As a brief detour, 25 years ago, I completed my PhD thesis in critical studies in curriculum on the ways in which the Burmese military dictatorship used the country’s education system, including curricula and pedagogy to indoctrinate the Burmese young along the lines of ethnic and faith supremacy of Burmese Burmese – I was a product of that neo-Fascist, militaristic education system. We all paid lip service to the philosophical Buddhist principles of compassion, truth and impermanence.

So I see a “blood-and-soil” Fascist when I hear their discourses.

In June 2018, the Israeli and Myanmar ministries of education of these two genocidal states even signed the Memorandum of Understanding ​to “mutually verify school textbooks, particularly … passages referring to the history of the other state and, where needed, introduce corrections.”

It is more than coincidental that Myanmar and Israel have become the 1st and 2nd state parties which the United Nation’s highest court of states, the International Court of Justice, have found to have plausibly breached their obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in January 2020 and January 2024 respectively.

In one of his recent talks the renowned Israel historian Ilan Peppe, referred to the verified existence of an official document #4000 – written in Hebrew – according to which Ben Gurion ordered what Albert Einstein in 1948 called “terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks” to “erase” any building – wood, brick, stones, what have you, that belonged to the native Palestinians in the 11 villages which fell outside the 1947-UN-partitioned territories of Israel.

As before, Gazan’s are being reduced to the “human dust” envisaged by the Israeli army high command in 1948 while in the West Bank 3 million people are kept in a state of complete terror. Ben-Gurion must be cheering on from his grave.

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The Imperialist Patronage of the United Kingdom and the United States

No analysis of the institutionalized genocide in the Occupied Territories by the Judaeo-Nazi state of Israel will be complete without a mention of the role of Western imperialist powers, specifically the United Kingdom, with its Palestine Mandate in the early days of the creation of the state of Israel in “the land of Israel”, and most significantly the United States over the last 75 years.

Following their Declaration of Conscience and Concern of Global Intellectuals over Gaza, Richard Falk and Ahmet Davutoğlu, hosted the London Emergency Meeting in January 2024, bringing together some of the signatories from around the world, as well as Palestinian opinion leaders such as the Jerusalem native Dr Mustafa Barghouti from Ramallah. There I heard first-hand Avi Shlaim, the eminent Baghdadi-born Israeli historian and international relations scholar at Oxford University publicly denounce political Zionism and US Imperialism in the same breath. In his words, “(a)s a Jew and an Israeli, I feel that I have a moral duty to denounce Zionist-settler colonialism and American imperialism and to stand by the Palestinians in the anti-colonial struggle, in the just struggle to live in peace and dignity in their own land.”

There is nothing really “complex” or hard to understand as to why the Jews with conscience the world over would oppose such inherently genocidal colonizing ideology and project.

Why would Shlaim, a scholar of international affairs at the establishment institution of Oxford University, openly denounce the US imperialism?

Here is my short answer:

(political) Zionism and its colonizing project of the land with a large residential population were parasitical in both essence and strategy. For the Zionists have long attempted to grow their Jewish Supremacy nation on “the land with (other) people”, with the support of external imperialist powers or “mother colony (ies).”

[ Along with 130+ Oxford scholars, Professor Shlaim also endorsed the 6th May statement On the Oxford Action for Palestine Solidarity Encampment.]

From the get-go, political Zionists starting with their ideological father Theodore Herzl, in effect, decided that for their project to succeed they needed a “mother colony” – to incubate, foster, assist, support and protect its execution. Because Britain was the preeminent power about the time the Zionists gathered in places like Basel, Switzerland and Baltimore, USA, Britain was to be the Zionists’ adopted “mother colony”.

In her 470-page autobiography, My Life, Golda Meir, Israel’s Only Female Prime Minister (first published in 1975, 2023 edition), the late Golda Meir made no bones about the twofold parasitical nature of Zionism and its execution, albeit in self-congratulatory and un-reflective tone and narrative. The project first needed British patronage, hence the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (as a fatal mistake in history), the British Mandate of 1922 (and British crimes during the mandate period), and the UN Partition of 1947 (without consultations with the overwhelming majority of the native Arab Palestinians and despite strong objections from the Arab states).

As a matter of fact, as early as the summer of 1921, Britain was already involved in the Zionists’ formulation of the establishment of the Jewish homeland, where, despite the Zionist spin of “the land without people, [for the (Jewish) people without the land] – there was a significant population with overwhelming majority of Arabs – including those who had their distinct group identity as Palestinians.

In the conference of the Federation of American Zionists in Baltimore, Maryland, USA in 20 June 1899, the delegates declared, “(We) WILL COLONIZE PALESTINE”. That was 4-decades before Hitler-Goering-Himmler’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question was set into motion at Wansee, an hour by train from Berlin on 20 January 1942.

Words such as “colonization” “exploitation” “(overseas) possessions” were perfectly in sync with the immoral sentiments of the day in the hallowed halls of the British Houses of Parliament, or US Congress. Only an era ago, the Triangular Slave Trade (Europe, Africa and the Americas) and the slavery were considered both moral and legal in God-fearing Christian nations of the West, as Eric Williams, Oxford scholar and the founding Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, observed in his classic Capitalism and Slavery (originally published in 1944;1994).

Emphatically, the rise of colonialism, (racialized) capitalism and their inter-linked ideological European Supremacy were firmly anchored in the ignoble economic and ideological foundations of the Slave Trade.

Fighting the wars for the colonial acquisition of other peoples’ land and “pacification” (i.e., violent subjugation) of residential populations who resisted invading European colonizers, was presented as the White Man discharging his Burden, as Kipling, Britain’s imperial apologist par excellence, would poetically put it.

Roger Adelson, professor of history at the Arizona State University and the author of London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power and War, 1902-1922 (Yale University Press, 1995), noted that in the summer of 1921, Britain was hosting the Imperial Conference in London. He writes, it was “then the world’s greatest metropolis and the financial and political centre” where the policy of (limited) Zionist immigration to Palestine under the British control (post the collapse of the Ottoman Empire) was approved. It was in agreement with the Zionists’ expansionist objectives in land and population. According to Adelson, Winston Churchill, in his capacity as Colonial Secretary and the conference’s central figure, was asked by the delegates from New Zealand and Canada, the two white settler nations, if the British conception of a Jewish homeland meant giving the settler Jews control of the government. Churchill replied, “If, in the course of many years, they become the majority of the country, they naturally would take it over (p.202).”

Like its policies elsewhere, Britain’s colonial policies in the Middle East involved dividing and pitting populations against one another.

Quoting Martin Gilbert, the author of Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship (Henry and Co,1997), the London-based International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN)’s “Briefing: Labour Zionism and the Histadrut” (published in London, UK on 13 April 2010) reads, “(Trotsky’s) …schemes of a world-wide communistic state under Jewish domination” would be “directly thwarted and hindered by this new ideal [Zionism]…. The struggle which is now beginning between the Zionists and Bolshevik Jews is little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.”

The IJAN makes the link between the Balfour Declaration (issued on 2 November 1917) and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which took place 5 days after the declaration. The IJAN brief argues that (t)he British government was particularly anxious to weaken Jewish support for the Bolsheviks, who vowed to take Russia, a key British ally, out of the war. When the revolution took place just five days later, Britain enlisted Zionists to undermine the radical Jews it blamed for Bolshevism.”

On his part, Adelson explored and explained British priorities before and after the first world war, “the protection of the Suez Canal and Persian Gulf; the fear of the German drive to the East and the subjugation of the Turks; the discovery of oil; the post-war suppression of nationalist aspirations and the establishment of collaborative regimes more in tune with London than with the Middle East itself.”

To understand the post-WWII United States policy towards Israel and the Middle East, just copy, cut and paste the above passage as Washington has dislodged UK from the commanding heights of international affairs and reduced the former Raj into its USA-Right or -Wrong poodle.

Much ink has been spilt on the foundational role of colonial Britain when Britain still ruled the waves. (On this subject of the historical role of the empire (s) in Palestine, the best analysis, offered from a Fernand Braudelian perspective of the longue durée or “the long duration”, is Lund University ecologist Andreas Malm’s “The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth” (Verso blog, 8 April 2024).

Here it suffices to say that out of its own geopolitical and economic interests Britain has long been directly involved in the Zionist’s genocidal project of creating the Jewish homeland, with the Jewish majority, at the tremendous expense of the native Palestinian majority.

Just as Britain, the then pre-eminent global power on the eve of the World War I, was utterly indifferent to the Ottoman Turks’ genocide of the Armenians in the early decades of the 20th century, the USA couldn’t have cared less about the Zionists’ land acquisition via terroristic and genocidal methodologies, or for that matter, any genocide, really.

Before joining first the Obama Administration and currently the Biden cabinet, Samantha Power wrote the Pulitzer-winning “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (2002), a scathing indictment of half-century of the US inaction or indifference to post-Holocaust genocides in the 20th century. (Powers also kept studied silence on Rohingya genocide, which coincided with her first political appointment as the US Ambassador to the United Nations, and again, as a member of the Biden Administration, on Israel’s genocide in Gaza).

Earlier this winter, I visited my Palestinian host and friend Nada Tarbush and her Kashmir British husband Ousman Noor in Geneva where Nada works as a senior diplomat at the Palestinian Mission.

She showed me the original copy of the land deed which her late father had passed on to her. Her father (1 year old baby at the time of the Nakba) – and her grand-parents – were amongst the expelled Palestinians – or “collateral damage” – in the establishment of the Jewish national homeland. She recounted a story of her taking the deed to a copy shop in downtown Geneva. Obviously oblivious to the Zionist land-theft, the shop-owner looked at the deed, and advised her to have it notarized, just in case she needed to produce, in a court of law, as evidence of her ownership. When she, as-a-matter-of-factly, told me, “I didn’t tell him that that land is now Israel,” my heart sank.

Her late father’s autobiography is being published by Hause this month (see below)

After the Nakba, her father’s family became refugees in the West Bank.

I imagined that her ancestors were from the villages which were turned into “dust”, by the order of David Ben Gurion, the architect of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

David Ben-Gurion, a Polish Jew from Warsaw, had already settled in Palestine in 1905, to pursue the Zionist project. His junior colleague Golda Meir noted that “no one felt close (emotionally) to Ben-Gurion”. Ben-Gurion reportedly labelled the Holocaust survivors “human debris” – weak, broken and bad. Not kind of strong Jews that the new state of Israel needed for its settler expansionist project. Accordingly, not a single survivor was given any cabinet position in the post-Holocaust governments while Israel (and its Western allies such as US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Schof) continue, to this day, to manipulate and milk, with no shame or conscience, the Jewish sufferings and deaths during the Shoah for their own sinister ends.

(For a short educational film, Vox’s 12 minutes documentary “How Palestinians were expelled from their homes” (15 May 2023) explains succinctly the Nakba of 1948.)

As if Ben-Gurion took a leaf off Himmler’s playbook, the founder of Israel was known to have ordered his armed gangs of “Jewish Freedom Fighters” to line up innocent and unarmed Arab civilians in certain villages and mass-execute them with machine guns – and spread the news in order to drive terror down the spines of the native people. The year was 1948. The singular purpose was to terrorise the Zionists’ victims not to even think about returning to their homes and villages. Why would the state of Israel, thus founded, extend the right of return to the 7 million Palestinians in 2024.

No wonder Albert Einstein, in his public and private letters, called them “terrorists” and “bad people” as early 1948.

When I visited Ravensbruck, all women’s concentration camp and now a UNESCO World Heritage site, a 2-hour drive from Berlin in former East Germany, in the summer of 2007, I remember standing at the narrow end of a dark and narrow death alley where SS officers were said to have ordered their female prisoners marked for execution in a straight line, before they shot them. A single bullet would penetrate a number of victims pressed next to one another, until it lost its velocity.

So, when today’s “moderate” President of the Jewish State Isaac Herzog reportedly said, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” – never mind that half of the 2.3 million Gazans are infants, children and young people – I am reminded of David Ben-Gurion’s order for indiscriminate and summary executions of civilians in villages to serve political, ideological and psychological purposes – to terrorise the population into submission. In 2023 and 2024, the Palestinians who descended from the parents and grandparents violently displaced in 1948, must vacate their native land, again.

The Zionists’ vision of their genocidal land grab was indeed in keeping with the glorious Western imperialist thought and policies of the United States, itself a settler colonial project. After all, the American Declaration of Independence (4 July 1776) drafted by Thomas Jefferson, a celebrated renaissance man from Virginia, officially characterized the residential population of the native Americans to be “savages”.

In his interview with the US National Public Radio, the American ​historian Donald Grinde Jr., a professor at the University at Buffalo and a member of the Yamasee Nation, told the NPR host Ari Shapiro, ​”(t)his is part of the political rhetoric to justify, you know, wars along the frontier and take land. And so this is part of the politics (and genocide) that’s going on at the time.”

The Jeffersonian narrative of 1776 certainly rhymed with Hitler’s Hitler’s Untermenschen or sub-humans or Yoav Gallant’s “human animals”.

So, the Zionists were not wrong in thinking that they needed “a mother colony” for their land grab, the one whose genocidal ideology is aligned with theirs.

As a matter of fact, at the start of Israel’s latest genocidal onslaught on Gaza after 7 October, a clipped videotaped speech of the then US Senator Joe Biden, a member of the US Senate Foreign Relations committee in 1986, went viral in the social media. The freshly minted Senator from Delaware was extolling the virtues of the existence of Israel in the Middle East. In his own words, “were there not an Israel, the United States would have to go out and invent one, to protect her interests in the region.”

He proclaimed that the US financial support for Israel was “the best $3 billion (per year) investment” that the US has ever made. Apparently, Biden sees the other side of the Zionist coin: the US needs a surrogate child in the Middle East, and Israel fits the bill.

Washington’s financing is just one of numerous ways the United States has enabled Zionist Israel to carry on with its genocidal settler colonial project. It will take only a cursory glance at the history of the vetoes used by the so-called Perm-5 (5 veto-wielding member states) to see how iron-clad the United States’ backing of Israel is. Against the overwhelming global consensus, the US as the preeminent imperialist power has long assured its parasite in the Middle East that “we have your back”, as the self-proclaimed Catholic Zionist President has repeatedly and publicly told Netanyahu’s coalition government of Messianic Fascists of various hues.

Last week, the Associated Press headline reads, US vetoes widely supported resolution backing full UN membership for Palestine . Yesterday, the United States Senate passed with a overwhelming majority a bill that will give Israel $26.3bn additional funding ($60.8 bn for Ukraine – against Russia and $8.1 bn for Taiwan against China).

The Council on Foreign Relations published a research article “U.S. Aid to Israel in Four Charts” (dated 11 April 2024) which estimated at $300 billion as the total amount of US funding to Israel since the latter’s founding in 1948. That didn’t include the latest round of aid – $26.3 billions allocated in the newly passed bill, which the Zionist President of USA is expected to sign into law soonest.

The opening paragraph of the article reads, “the United States was the first country to recognize the provisional government of the state of Israel upon its founding in 1948, and it has for many decades been a strong and steady supporter of the Jewish state. Israel has received hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid in the post–World War II era, a level of support that reflects many factors, including a U.S. commitment to Israel’s security and the countries’ shared foreign policy interests in a volatile and strategically important part of the world.”

Genocide or not, popular at home or worldwide or not, the imperial mother-country of Pax Americana, both the incumbent Democratic President and the Republican minority, have fully and unconditionally backed Israel and its Zionist genocidal landgrab over 75 consecutive years.

As antithetical to the Jewish values of truth, peace and love, the non-practicing Jewish forefathers of the early Zionist movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries got their strategy right: adopt a mother colony, if your biblical nation-building is envisaged as the one involving colonial genocide, crimes against humanity and land theft.

Maung Zarni