A Choice of Lessons

As the genocide in Gaza becomes ever more apparent and irrefutable, we must ask ourselves, “What lessons have been learned from history?”

When considering the Holocaust, we have a choice of lessons to learn. We can either look at it for what it is – one of the greatest crimes against humanity – or we can elect to use it as a model that needs perfecting. There are, of course, many more nuanced lessons to be learned or appropriated from this inhuman stain on our collective history. However, the range of lessons sit somewhere in the space between two poles with the “never again” stance on one end of the spectrum and “how to get away with it” on the other.

The current Israeli government has elected to leverage history in the worst ways imaginable when it comes to dealing with the “Palestinian problem”. I will not offer clemency by suggesting the choices they made were anything less than conscious. There is none of the unconscious bias we may have discussed during DEI sessions – those suppressed in the US by the Trump regime – and it would be far too lenient to suggest they’re only doing as their culture conditioned them to do. There are Israelis who defy Zionist indoctrination and call out the Apartheid system being operated by their government. Sadly, there also those who exceed the expectations of their indoctrinators and these are the members of the current Israeli government who have consciously chosen to do unto others what was done unto their ancestors.

The notion of “a land without a people for a people without a land” never held up to scrutiny. There were people living on the land well before the arrival of the Jewish exodus from post-war Europe. We can call the preexisting population Palestinians, but they were never a single, homogenous society. Palestine had been under British colonial rule since 1918, and it was populated by a rich ethnic and religious mix of people. Some were what the Israeli government often refer to as “Arabs” but there were also sizeable Jewish and Christian communities as well as others who fall outside those broader groups.

Land grabbing and what we now commonly refer to as ethnic cleansing has always been part of the Israeli agenda. The land had a people, but they were at best considered an inconvenience and at worst perceived as a threat by the emerging Israeli state. The history of Palestine includes interfaith violence but there is no evidence that antisemitism or fighting between Jews and Muslims was an intractable, widespread problem … not before the Israeli state was established. After the forced displacement of 750,000 indigenous people in 1948 – known by Palestinians as the Nakba – antisemitism became far more widespread and entrenched. Resistance movements formed to fight the occupation of the historic land of Palestine were often fuelled by racial hatred directed at those occupying their land.

The land now taken by a “people without a land” has forced ever larger groups of Palestinians into smaller, concentrated, highly controlled pockets of land. The Israeli population has steadily grown and is projected to continue growing, thus increasing the need for more land for more “people without a land”. The inevitable solution to attaining more land is derived from a terrible model from the past. The lesson learned, however, is the need for keeping key governments – notably the US, UK and Europe – onside and actively supporting the barely disguised land-grab program. What is being done in Gaza and the West Bank is in many ways identical to what happened in Europe between 1941 and 1945. The smaller scale of this genocide cannot be used to refute the comparison. The approach is much the same: remove the “undesirables” from the land required – in this instance for “a people without a land” – and concentrate them elsewhere. If they refuse to be expelled, you must kill them by all available means.

On 9th October 2023, Yoav Gallant the Israeli Defence Minister at the time, called for the “complete siege” of Gaza and referred to the inhabitants of the Strip as “human animals”. The Gaza Strip was already classifiable as a ghetto before the atrocities of October 7th, those committed by Hamas and others. The collective punishment for that terrible act of resistance would be incalculably worse and it would target all Palestinians; women, children, babies, the elderly and young men, including doctors, first responders, aid workers and the press. Gallant announced, “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” This statement of intent was widely condemned by many as collective punishment, but we’ve all watched as the genocide developed, how the infrastructure in Gaza has been systematically destroyed, the people starved, deprived of water, medicine and every essential for a civilised existence. The Palestinian people have been dehumanised and IDF soldiers have documented their war crimes just as members of the Israeli government have repeatedly flagged their intent.

The longer our governments allow Netanyahu and his right-wing cronies to behave in this way, the more impunity they will assume and act upon. We’re onside this time, we’re not fighting the crimes of far-right extremists, we’re enabling them. This gradual build of diplomatic immunity is the greatest defence of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide the world has ever witnessed. And we have witnessed it because it has been so meticulously recorded. The Orwellian propaganda may be dizzying but more people are seeing through the lies, the fog of misinformation and media management by not only a very media savvy Israeli government, but by our own purveyors of “news”. From BBC, to SKY, CNN to MSNBC – all mainstream media – we have been force fed a skewed version of events that aligns with the public stance of the Israeli government and the IDF. The lesson chosen by the Israeli government is to make friends not enemies of the US and Europe and draw them into an ongoing, seventy-year program of ethnic cleansing, a gradual genocide, one the world can digest … but we haven’t the stomach for it any longer.

Even right-wing media rags like the Daily Express are now running “For Pity Sake Stop This Now” as a headline alongside an image of an emaciated child in Gaza. When this happens, we know the media’s tolerance threshold in the West has been breached. But lessons have been learned and implemented. The erosion of public support was, no doubt, cynically built into the larger plan for a “Greater Israel”, a program designed to provide land for the increasing population of “people without a land”. As long as tangible support – arms, parts, funding – continues, the toothless condemnation of European governments and their media allies is easily managed by the Israeli government.

No meaningful sanctions or arms embargos have been imposed under our own Labour government here in the UK. We continue to do business with a state who operate a system of Apartheid. Israel starves and otherwise kills the innocent people of Gaza, they allow settlers to build more illegal settlements in the West Bank, displacing thousands of people and stealing their land. Fanatic Israeli settlers, supported by the IDF have killed over a thousand innocent Palestinians in the West Bank since 7th October 2023. I haven’t included here Israel’s imprisonment of civilians without charge, people – including minors – held in prisons where serious criminal allegations have been made by Amnesty International, B’Tselem and other human rights organisations. In 2011, B’Tselem “interviewed 50 minors, who described the events from the moment they were arrested to the time they were released from jail. Their testimonies indicate numerous serious violations of their rights”.

Control the media, manage the message, distort facts, misinform and distract.

These are not new lessons, but they have been learned and implemented by not only the Israeli government but by the US and other staunch European allies, including the UK. The “lessons” are criminal and those using them as a model must be held accountable if we are ever to reassemble a “rules-based international order”. Civil liberty abuses perpetrated by ICE under the Trump administration also draw on “lessons learned” from the same tragic and shameful period of human history. Political parties like Reform UK, RN in France or AfD in Germany also model their policies from one of our darkest historic periods. This is not what we ought to have learned but it seems those with actual power are, as a bare minimum, willing to collude with leaders who have based their governing approach on the fascist model of the 1930s and 40s, updating them with the chilling frivolity of reality TV. The grotesque nature of these leadership models is to varying extents mirrored by the people they govern.

I can only hope there will always be more voices speaking out against genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity than those prepared to condone or support these evil regimes.