Genocide and holocaust

Feb 26, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

Hard Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – It was the South Africans who took the initiative, demonstrated the boldness, to escalate what was and is happening in Gaza to the International Court of Justice. The South Africans unfurled their concerns under the banner of “genocide” by the Israelis against the captive Palestinians. If there are any people on the face of God’s green earth, who have earned the right to speak about genocide, it is Black South Africans. They were forced to exist under what were the harrowing conditions that accompany economic genocide, plain and simple.

Now the South Africans have upped the stakes again: “We as South Africans sense, see, hear, and feel to our core, the inhumane discriminatory policies and practices of the Israeli regime as an even more extreme form of the apartheid that was institutionalized against Black people in my country,” said South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands, as part of a statement made before the ICJ. If there is one people that can speak with authority on apartheid and genocide (economic), as meted out by white people against Black people, then South Africans can claim that distinction.

Those (apartheid and genocide) are not terms of art. They represent the ghastly reality inflicted on one race by another. I assert that what is occurring in Gaza today has gone, in some respects, beyond the South African experience.

To this point, a judicial victory of some limited value has been achieved, but the one-sided battle rages on. It is gruesome, what is exemplary in the bloody, with Israelis bent on extracting maximum vengeance in ongoing orgies of destruction. Where is America, as known?

It is at times like these that I have to take a deep breath at the America that means so much to me can be so willfully blind, so unapologetically biased. Where have all the ideals gone? Surely, campaign money, and media assaults, and agency pressures, cannot make men who lay claim to principle forget what is decent, what is honorable, what is human. The pounding that helpless men, women, and children are subjected to has to the epitome of what is inhuman, ghastly, and beastly.

How many Palestinian deaths are needed to satiate the bloodlust of the embarrassed and humiliated Israelis? With defenses breached on October 7, and some 1200 Israelis dead, and over 30,000 Palestinians dead, does it require the round total of 120,000 Gazans to be killed before the bloodthirstiness of the rampaging Israelis cools?

It seems that killing Palestinians at the rate of over 25 for every Israeli life lost is not enough, and that 100 of them for each Israeli victim may be the ultimate objective in the continuing human wreckage. Having been caught flatfooted and out of commission again some 50 years later, in their high, sacred season, vengeance has no limit, and conventions have met with nothing but scorn and dismissal.

Again, I ask where are the civilized worlds of Americans, Englishmen, and Europeans? How is it that they come out limply, barely circle around for a pathetic show of meaningless platitudes, before they all retreat into their shells. They dread to arouse the wrath of the people with reach and influence, and the longest of memories.

The world of Jewry spares no change, leaves no stone unturned, and cultivates every opportunity to remind again and again of the unimaginable horrors of Auschwitz and Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen. In a word that could still make harrowing images stream into the consciousness: it that one that speaks in aprofane whisper: holocaust.

Never again! But here we are today, with the descendants of those victims inflicting their own holocaust on the people of the Gaza, the old Biblical places of Judea and Samaria. In a part of the Promised Land, a region of prophets and many holy men and women, there is this abomination of abominations, and from the now bloodstained hands of the ‘Chosen people.’ President Lula of Brazil was unsparingly blunt in calling out the Israelis for engaging in both the genocidal and holocaustic in Gaza, and turning that congested strip into a killing field. There is no choice but to agree.

The difference between this genocide and holocaust, unlike the Rwandan and German ones, is that it is committed in the plain sight of the whole world. Thus, the world cannot plead ignorance. And the Israelis have no grounds on which to mount any kind of denial, any defense, other than specious and vacuous ones.

If the shoe was on the other foot, with Arabs or Palestinians as the depraved and heinous aggressors, one has to wonder what would have been the reaction in the West. Meanwhile, I stand flabbergasted at the crimes being committed at will by the Israelis against the Palestinian people.

There is unending astonishment at the self-serving impotence of the Americans, British, French, and all those other hypocrites and frauds, who have lost their voices, pretend at no strength. Who is there among civilized men in modern society to stay the lethal hand of the Israeli war machine? One that is continually being replenished.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

Gaza, genocide, hard truths, ICJ, Palestinians, South Africans

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