With the resumption of mass-scale bombings of Gaza by Israel, the genocide of the Palestinian people is again entering an active phase. The “ceasefire” that comes to an end, however, was dominated by other genocidal ideas, from cutting off electricity and aid deliveries to forced population transfers.
Voiced for decades by the extreme right in Israel, proposals to transfer the Palestinian population of Gaza elsewhere have now been endorsed in an unprecedented manner by the US president Donald Trump. The genocidal undercurrent of such plans is glaring, keeping in mind that genocide is defined not only as the mass murder of members of a certain nation or group with the view to the group’s destruction, but also population transfers.
In our age of the ever-shortening historical memory, however, few will recall the events preceding the Shoah, or the attempted genocide of the Jewish people in Nazi Europe. Before the formulation of “the Final Solution” at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, there were plenty of suggestions for a massive relocation of Jews from Europe to other parts of the world.
The Zionist movement, led by Theodor Herzl, collaborated with the Nazi authorities as early as in 1933 in the so-called Haavara Agreement, according to which German Jews and their property could be transferred rather easily to British Mandate Palestine. In 1938, after Western countries refused to accept large numbers of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, the Uganda Plan was unveiled at a conference in Evian. The idea was that a Jewish state could be created on the territory of what is now Uganda, reiterating the initial suggestions made by Herzl to the Joseph Chamberlain in 1903.
Already this brief overview is striking in the parallels it presents between the current plight of the Palestinian people and the predicament of European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. Aren’t the schemes of resettling Gazan Palestinians in Jordan and Egypt, in Saudi Arabia or Spain and Ireland eerily reminiscent of the 1930s scramble to transfer European Jews en masse to other parts of the world? Especially disturbing are the recent comments made by Israel’s defense minister Israel Katz for Gazans to be deported to the two European countries, notably Spain and Ireland, that have been most vocal when it comes to their rights and the recognition of the Palestinian state. Himself a son of Holocaust survivors, Katz repeated nearly word-for-word, with respect to Palestinian people, the Nazi rhetoric of “offering Jews to the world.”
The current unraveling of any and all protections for Palestinian civilian populations both in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza is taking place against the backdrop of the crumbling of international law and institutions established after World War II with the express intent to prevent the atrocities of that war from happening ever again. It is not an isolated event, but one that should be examined in light of the revived colonial and imperial mentality in Russia, with its aggressive war of territorial conquest in Ukraine, as well as, more recently, in the US, with Trump’s stated desire to annex Canada, to purchase or otherwise occupy Greenland, and to gain control over the Panama Canal. Land grabs and annexations are the logical extensions of this changed mentality, bearing upon what’s acceptable on the international stage.
Nevertheless, the singularity of the situation of Gaza has to do with the nearly symmetrical historical reversal, in which the descendants of the victims of genocide perpetuate another genocide against their neighbors. In what is likely to be a temporary lull in the bombings of Gaza, which will come to an end once the last Israeli hostages (whether alive or dead) come home, the time is that of a suspension, with the announcement of what’s to come already made: once the Israeli military campaign continues, Gaza will be totally demolished. It is not by chance that Trump has already referred to the territory as a “demolition site” and has, in the meantime, made heavier bombs available to Israel, the same bombs put on pause by the Biden administration.
Fast-forwarding the uncanny replay of twentieth-century history in the twenty-first, the next in the sequence of events in the murderous “Final Solution,” which, with regard to Europe’s Jews, was officially adopted in the early days of 1942. Except that, of course, such a terrible “Final Solution” to “the Palestinian Question” is already underway, as the indiscriminate bombings of Gaza, as well as sieges and atrocities in the West Bank, demonstrate. The not-so-hidden intent of the Netanyahu government is to create conditions on the ground that would make it impossible for Palestinian people to continue living on their lands. And this corresponds to Article II.3 from the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
Trump’s executive order imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court for its investigation of Israel is meant to ensure that in the new world dis-order, political leaders can act with absolute impunity. Every state is now given official license to be a rogue state, “an authoritarian state that flouts international norms and threatens global security by sponsoring terrorism and seeking nuclear weapons.” Needless to say, “the term is no longer used officially, though American politicians often apply it to countries including Afghanistan, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela.”
An urgent redesign of international institutions, laws, and especially of enforcement mechanism is needed at this historical point of no-return—which is to say, of the perpetual return of extreme, genocidal violence and of lawlessness in international relations. For the masters of the new world dis-order, Gaza is the test case of their ability to reshape the map very much in keeping with the Nazi foreign policy of the Lebensraum. In the Israeli-Palestinian case, this policy is replicated nearly to the letter; in the case of larger imperial endeavors, such as those of Russia and the US under Trump, the coveted space is not one meant for “life” and settlement but for the extraction and exploitation of the natural resources it contains. That is why, in Gaza as much as in Ukraine, genocide goes hand-in-hand with ecocide, accelerating the planet’s becoming unlivable for all.
