Israel’s holocaust-in-the-making against the Palestinians

By Khalid Amayreh

"“I didn’t know that in order to protect a few people, farmland had to be confiscated and crops had to be destroyed; I didn’t know that in order to provide security for a few people, hundreds had to be kept waiting at checkpoints and roadblocks before being allowed to return home exhausted, that is if they are not killed.” Portuguese Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, March 28, 2002, during a visit to the West Bank......

And in case a murder is not committed, a home is demolished, a school child is crippled by a Jewish sniper’s indifferent bullets, a farm is bulldozed, a grain field is torched, or a new colony is started on stolen Arab land seized at gunpoint from its lawful proprietors, all in the name of Jewish nationalism.

It is more than the wide Wild West here; it is actually very much like pre-war Germany when the Third Reich effectively encouraged Germans to have a free season on Jews, on their lives, homes and businesses.

Let us have just a few examples of what the so-called “chosen people” did in the West Bank in the past 48 hours.....

True, these crimes don’t yet constitute a fully-fledged holocaust. However, the collective accumulative effect of these crimes which have been going on for nearly sixty years and are continuing unabated will ultimately have the effect of a holocaust. Yes, the brutal ugliness of the Israeli occupation, despite its all its criminal manifestations, may not be exactly identical to what the Third Reich did more than sixty years ago.

But the Israeli occupation is not a static phenomenon or a one-time episode, but an ongoing process the ultimate purpose of which is to obliterate the Palestinian people, either through physical genocide, or at least a partial physical genocide, or by making the daily life of ordinary Palestinians unbearable (as a result of the brutal persecution meted out to them), so much so that Palestinians would either immigrate or succumb to Israel’s genocidal designs.....

However, it is abundantly clear that Israel’s undeclared strategy is to uproot every single Palestinian from Palestine in order to fulfill Zionism. And if genocide, or at least a partial genocide, is what it takes to achieve this criminal goal, there is no doubt whatsoever that Israel will, when the time allows, resort to the wildest possible scenarios to achieve its goals. After all, genocide is part and parcel of the Zionist ideology which is based on East European fascist traditions.....

I am saying this because when one listens to Zionist leaders, such as Elie Wiesel and Benyamin Netanyahu, for example, one will easily get a feeling that Zionism, which is drifting menacingly to right-wing religious and jingoistic fascism, are effectively asking the world, especially the west, to compensate Jews for the holocaust by allowing them to commit a holocaust against the Palestinians.

Indeed, there are a number of European countries, such as Germany, that are already effectively consenting to this macabre equation, which explains European complicity in starving millions of Palestinians by blocking their access to food and work, and by saying next to nothing about the unlawful and immoral seizure by Israel of Palestinian tax revenue money.

In conclusion, I believe that what Israel is doing to the Palestinians should be treated at least as a holocaust-in-the-making, if only to forestall the possibility of it evolving into a fully-fledged holocaust. I know and the world knows that the holocaust didn’t begin with Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen and the ovens. It began with the enactment of racist laws against Jews, with a book, a kristlnacht and similar acts, the kind of which Israel and her terrorist soldiers and Gestapo-like settlers have been doing to the Palestinians."