Before the January 26 interim judgment of the International Court of Justice, South Africa’s charge of genocide in Gaza was declared insulting by Israel and quickly dismissed as without merit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The UK followed along. The interim judgment finds that the case is ‘plausible’ and does not shy away from the genocidal dimensions of Israeli actions, statements and apparent intentions. But because it urgently seeks to alleviate the suffering the world sees in Gaza right now, it also obscures the larger genocidal dimensions of Israel’s policies.
Even more than the threatened expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, these policies have been instituted for decades in the occupied West Bank. While Hamas – or anyone drawing attention to the colonial reality – is abused for wanting Palestinian rule ‘from the river to the sea’, the Israeli right has quietly or loudly gone about creating a greater Israel from the sea to the river.
Every inch of land west of the river Jordan is claimed and proclaimed as ancient Jewish territory. The illegal program of Israeli settlements, creating a reality that will have to be defended, is simply the historic resettlement of ‘Judea’ and ‘Samaria’. Already, over 700,000 Jewish settlers dominate the 3.2 million Palestinians there.
Occupation and displacement as part of genocide
I am an historian of genocide, in both Europe and Australia. There is a pattern of Israeli conduct only too easy to recognise in the land where I write. As it happens, 26 January is ‘Australia Day’, the celebration of the European settlement which displaced the inhabitants settled here for millennia. They call it ‘Invasion Day’ and here in Melbourne poor Captain Cook has had to pay for his successors’ crimes. His bronze statue lies toppled, sawn through at the ankles overnight.
When I argued 40 years ago that colonial displacement of Aborigines was genocidal there was scant agreement. Now it is generally accepted. The genocide was not only in the terrible killings but in the displacement itself.
For many years now, we have seen the same policy, and the same method, in the Israeli occupation. We have become used to both, and to the colonialist language of ‘settlement’. An Australian reporter who visited the West Bank in October 2023 met a boy who said he was shot at by Israeli soldiers while picking olives with his family. A third-generation olive farmer told him, “This is a settler strategy to steal the lands. They are hunting us. They don’t want to see any Arabs in front of them”.
A CNN report of 17 January shows IDF soldiers posing with a banner that reads ‘Only settlement would be considered victory!’
Genocidal acts and intent
Just after I had read the 84 pages of the South African indictment, I heard one of the most highly qualified historians, Omer Bartov, tell German News that it had to be taken seriously. “There are many indications if not of genocide, of genocidal acts, and sadly of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Further, many Israeli statements confuse Hamas and the whole population. The war aim of eliminating Hamas, noted Bartov, can easily sound like eliminating a people, the very definition of genocide.
Intent is crucial in questions of genocide and some of those in power certainly tread very close to incitement, as the interim judgment warns. Actions speak loudest of all. We know that a huge majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants have been displaced and we hear of no plan to bring them back. Were ethnic cleansing of that scale carried out, Bartov warns, it would be genocide.
The comparison that dare not speak its name
Bartov, an Israeli teaching in America, made his name as a scholar of the German army doing Adolf Hitler’s work in the conquered east of Europe. His words to Germany’s international television channel are important. But he still took care not to break a powerful taboo: comparing Israel’s actions to those of Nazi Germany.
This is what I call ‘The comparison that dare not speak its name’. We don’t know whether any of the unashamedly genocidal rhetoric in Israel will result in more thoroughly genocidal policies. What we should know is that both the rhetoric and the current policies show a disturbingly familiar resemblance to Nazi policy in Poland and Ukraine.
When the Holocaust was almost beyond Heinrich Himmler’s imagining, he was tasked by Hitler with an important new responsibility: the replacement of Polish farmers with ethnic Germans resettled from far away in the east. Raphael Lemkin invented the concept of genocide not in direct response to the Holocaust, as is so often repeated, but from direct experience of Nazi policy in Poland. (His parents, exceptionally, were Jewish farmers.)
After his own escape from Poland, the only survivor of a large family, he would see Himmler expand his ambition to German settlements as fortified centres of ‘German civilisation’ among the ‘primitive’ Slavs of Ukraine.
Colonising policies
These colonising policies were carried out with terrible violence at the same time as the unprecedented genocide of Europe’s Jews gathered pace. Here is where the insult to Israel and its armed forces cannot be tolerated. There is no call to tar the most powerful military in the region, or its vaunted moral code, with a smear of Nazi-scale brutality and atrocity.
The shocking indifference of the Netanyahu government to the number of Palestinians killed, maimed, or made homeless is sadly not so exceptional. But the maps of Israel’s relentless colonising of conquered territories and peoples are another matter. They are evidence of a relentless push towards genocide, with the aim, as the Genocide Convention says, of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
Destruction – in whole or in part – of a unique human group
Genocide is not only a crime of mass murder. It aims at the destruction “in whole or in part” of a unique human group. Bartov has called some earlier Israeli propagandists Nazis. An earlier Israeli scholar, Yeshayhu Leibowitz, called the rule of Jews over conquered Arabs ‘Judeo-Nazi’ in tendency. Today a part of Israel’s government unashamedly promotes total – that is genocidal – displacement of Palestinians.
Benjamin Netanayu, fighting for his political life, knows what some followers want to hear. His stay in power depends on a national security minister who has been handing out rifles from the US to West Bank settlers. He has no fear of outrage among Israel’s allies when he says the solution “must promote the emigration of the residents of Gaza”. For the Palestinians, there and in the West Bank, it is another Nakba, as in 1948.
Do these politicians even care if they are compared to Nazis? This is a tragedy of the most painful historical and moral dimensions. It cries out for the tragic comparison to be heard and heeded.
Tony Barta is the author, most recently, of ‘A Very British Genocide: Acknowledgement of Indigenous Destruction in the Founding of Australia and New Zealand’ in The Cambridge World History of Genocide, published last year.
