Gaza is quite rightly a big news story these days, but events there are just the latest example of the centuries-old settlers' lust for conquest.
The 1994 massacre began at dawn in the capital city of Kigali and spread quickly across the Rwandan countryside. Armed with machetes, spears and clubs, throngs of Hutu militias sang cheerily as they hunted their Tutsi neighbors through banana groves, papyrus swamps and eucalyptus forests, slaughtering entire families and even whole villages as they huddled in churches, schoolhouses and grottos.
On and on it went for 100 days and when the bloodletting mercifully subsided, nearly 800,000 Rwandans lay dead, representing the 20th century’s fastest genocide, outpacing even the Holocaust. But more startling even than either the wanton killing or its breakneck speed was the indifference to it by an international community–most notably the United States–that was acutely aware of the horror as it unfolded, and yet did nothing to stop it.
In a report entitled Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, the Organization of African Unity wrote:
Indisputably, the most important truth that emerges from our investigation is that the Rwandan genocide could have been prevented by those in the international community who had the position and means to do so. ... The world failed Rwanda. ... [The United Nations] simply did not care enough about Rwanda to intervene appropriately.
Bill Clinton would later lament his administration’s inertia in the face of the Rwandan genocide as the biggest regret of his presidency although the gesture struck many as disingenuous.
Twenty-nine years later, and 2,300 miles due north of the central African country, another genocide is taking shape as Israel rains bombs down on 2 million Palestinians living in densely populated Gaza. A month into the siege, Israel has killed 9,770 Palestinians, including 4800 children and 2,550 women. But in what appears to be an attempt to establish a new global standard for barbarism, Israel has piled one war crime atop another atop yet another in a funeral pyre of horror befitting Dante’s 10th circle of hell, bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, ambulances, refugee camps and convoys of Palestinians fleeing the violence; forcibly relocating more than 1 million Palestinians from Gaza’s north, closing the ports to food, medicine and supplies, and shutting off the taps and electricity.
There is, in fact, no definition of either the word “genocide” nor the term “ethnic cleansing that wouldn’t apply to Israel’s bombardment and blockade of Gaza, a strip of land on the Mediterranean Sea occupied illegally by Israel. And yet, for all its talk of democratic values and human rights, and mea culpas for its role in the Rwandan massacre, the West is content to not only stand idly by while Israel transforms Gaza into an abbatoir, but this time the White House and its European allies are defending genocide, and in the case of the U.S., even financing it.
No matter your view of Hamas’ October 7th assault on Israelis, both the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Convention are unambiguous: as an occupier, Israel has no more right to defend itself than a burglar who breaks into your home in the dead of night, molests your daughter and steals everything that is not nailed down.
Conversely, Palestinians living under occupation have as much right to armed struggle as did Black South Africans living under white minority rule. And indeed, it is only by viewing Israel’s siege of Gaza through the lens of European settler colonialism that we can identify the pathogen responsible for the West’s failure to acknowledge—let alone sanction-- the worst genocide of the 21st century.
Ethnic cleansing is not a glitch of settler colonialism but a feature, or a tool, used intermittently by the West to violently extract resources from colonized people, to discipline their demands for justice, or to pit rival tribes against one another while capitalism–and the politicians in its employ–robs them blind.
Dust the surface of almost any genocide from the past 500 years and you will find that the fingerprints of the European settler enterprise are all over the place. Indeed, to the settler colonial project, genocide is an all-purpose tool, similar to a Swiss Army knife.
When the first European settlers arrived in the Americas, historians estimate that there were more than 10 million indigenous people living in the Western hemisphere; by 1900, there were no more than 300,000 as the result of the most robust ethnic cleansing campaign in recorded history, and included in its repertoire pogroms, forced removals and deliberately infecting Native Americans with diseases such as smallpox for which they had no immunity.
Similarly, historians believe that Belgian King Leopold II ordered the killing of 10 million Congolese between 1865 and 1908. Leopold effectively transformed an entire country into the largest slave plantation in world history, mandating that every adult Congolese meet quotas for rubber mining. In a cost-cutting measure, Belgian rubber traders hacked off the hands of Congolese slaves who did not meet their quota–bullets were deemed too expensive for such a quotidian task–and many bled to death.
In those two instances, genocide was a means of accumulation, but the settler colonial state also resorts to ethnic cleansing to police subjugated people demanding their liberation. On Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945, French soldiers, police and settler militias killed as many as 45,000 Arabs– throwing their bodies off cliffs and into rock quarries–for calling for an end to France’s occupation of the North African country in exchange for Algerians’ help in defeating the Nazis.
And while it may seem counterintuitive, European settler colonialism played a vital role in the Rwandan genocide. To control large populations of colonized people, white occupiers pitted tribes against one another in an effort to divide and conquer. This was especially true in Africa where the white settler class manipulated ancient rivalries– between the Tutsis and Hutus, Xhosa and Zulus, Shona and Ndebele–by privileging one tribe–usually the fairer-skinned or those with more phenotypically “white” physical traits– over another, and doling out special treatment in jobs, housing, and education, the logic being that if the workers are busy fighting each other they will have no time to fight the bosses.
This tradition of ethnic cleansing is not limited to nonwhite populations, however, at least in the way that we tend to conceptualize race in the postwar era. In the U.S. ethnic tensions between the Irish, Italians, Germans and Poles roiled big city politics for the first half of the 20th century, and the central European immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island were scapegoated and slandered by the media and politicians–think Sacco and Vanzetti–until they learned to be “white” often by joining the mob in violently attacking African Americans in pogroms such as the 1898 Wilmington massacre, Atlanta in 1906, Chicago, D.C., Omaha, Knoxville and elsewhere in 1919, Tulsa in 1921, and the Black separatist sect known as MOVE in Philadelphia in 1985.
This tactic was also used by the corrupt Russian tsars to govern the more than 100 nationalities –a "prison-house of nations," as pre-revolutionary Russia was often referred to – inhabiting a land mass accounting for nearly a sixth of the Earth’s surface. To cite one illustrative example, a Ku Klux Klan-like outfit known as the "Black Hundreds," was infamous for nighttime massacres targeting Jewish communities. (The Yiddish word "pogrom" was invented by Russian Jews to specifically describe these assaults by the Black Hundreds). Alexander III’s ascension to the throne in 1881 escalated anti-Semitic violence as a way of deflecting public attention from the tsars’ misrule, causing Russian Jews to flee in droves for enclaves such as Berlin and New York City.
In 1934, a Black Marxist organizer named Harry Haywood said to a mostly Black crowd in Detroit:
“Here we have the same sort of race-inciting propaganda which was carried out by the Czarist regime in old Russia against the Jewish people. The Jews are also branded by the Czarist reactionaries as killers of Christian children, the blood of whom was used in the ceremonies. This slander against Jews was calculated to inflame the minds of the Russian toilers and to justify mass murder of the Jewish people. In this way, the Czarist reactionaries attempted to divert the attention of the toilers from the struggle against their common oppressors."
It should be plainly obvious to any free thinker that Haywood’s remarks are no less true if you replace “Russian czars” with “Israeli government” and “Jews” with “Palestinians,” for both the Jewish Holocaust and the Palestinian Al Nakba are cut from the same cloth.
Germany’s Nationalist Socialist party demonized the Jews to steal their farms and their factories and pave the way for a herrenvolk–or master race–Republic, grounded in white supremacy and the capitalist ethos of accumulation by dispossession. Israel demonizes the Palestinians to steal their land and water and pave the way for a Zionist Republic from the river to the sea, grounded in white supremacy and the capitalist ethos of accumulation by dispossession.
This explains why Israel’s Defense Minister describes the Gaza blockade in dehumanizing language that is eerily redolent of the Nazis’ description of the Jews as vermin and cockroaches.
No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel...We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”
It explains Genocidin’ Joe Biden’s gaslighting of the Palestinians body count, and the U.S. ruling class’s longstanding fetishization of Nazism. The historian Michael Parenti has written that FDR’s administration was reticent to enter World War 2 because it privately hoped that the Nazis might destroy the Soviet Union, which was the biggest barrier to the United States’ plans of neocolonial expansion. Similarly, the Biden administration’s support of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is grounded in its ambitions to turn a quick profit.
Moreover, it should be noted that in a Western context, Jews were largely considered nonwhite before the Holocaust. Indeed, Hitler’s Aryan ideology explicitly assigned to Jews an ambiguous racial identity and many Jews themselves did not identify themselves as “white.” It was only after World War 2 that the West and settler projects extended to Jews membership in a club that would offer them protection if they agreed to collaborate with the settler enterprise in its dispossession of darker-skinned people across the world. As evidence, you need only consider that both apartheid South Africa and the state of Israel were born in the same year, 1948, and both pivoted on a classification of Jews as white; six years later, a Jewish economist named Milton Friedman made a name for himself by conjuring up the idea of school vouchers to help white parents escape the integrated schools mandated by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.
The irony however, is that it is a global Jewish community that is as vocal as any of the protesters in denouncing a genocide that is being carried out in their name. Similar to the videotaped lynching of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, Israel’s siege of Gaza is the first in human history to be livestreamed, if only in fits and starts, shining a light on the Zionists’ misappropriation of Jewish suffering to steal Palestinian wealth.
Israel’s attack is shaping up to be at best a Pyrrhic victory as the world increasingly rejects comparisons between Hamas’ October 7th operation and the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11th, 2001.
Instead, Hamas’ attack reminds many people, particularly in the global South, to another epic battle between good and evil:
The Warsaw Uprising
A former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, John Jeter is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the upcoming Class War in America: How the Elites Divided the Nation by Asking Are You a Worker or Are You White?
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