(The Conversation) – Germany was a significant – and often brutal – colonial power in Africa. But this colonial history is not told as often as that of other imperialist nations. A new book called The Long Shadow of German Colonialism: Amnesia, Denialism and Revisionism aims to bring the past into the light. It explores not just the history of German colonialism, but also how its legacy has played out in German society, politics and the media. We asked Henning Melber about his book.

What is the history of German colonialism in Africa?

Imperial Germany was a latecomer in the scramble for Africa. Shady deals marked the pseudo-legal entry point. South West Africa (today Namibia), Cameroon and Togo were euphemistically proclaimed to be possessions under “German protection” in 1884. East Africa (today’s Tanzania and parts of Rwanda and Burundi) followed in 1886.

German rule left a trail of destruction. The war against the Hehe people in east Africa (1890-1898) signalled what would come. It was the training ground for a generation of colonial German army officers. They would apply their merciless skills in other locations too. The mindset was one of extermination.

The war against the Ovaherero and Nama people in South West Africa (1904-1908) culminated in the first genocide of the 20th century. The warfare against the Maji Maji in east Africa (1905-1907) applied a scorched earth policy. In each case, the African fatalities amounted to an estimated 75,000.

“Punitive expeditions” were the order of the day in Cameroon and Togo too. The inhuman treatment included corporal punishment and executions, sexual abuse and forced labour as forms of “white violence”.

During a colonial rule of 30 years (1884-1914), Germans in the colonies numbered fewer than 50,000 – even at the peak of military deployment. But several hundred thousand Africans died as a direct consequence of German colonial violence.

Why do you think German debate is slow around this?

After its defeat in the first world war (1914-1918), the German empire was declared unfit to colonise. In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles allocated Germany’s territories to allied states (Great Britain, France and others). The colonial cake was redistributed, so to speak.

This did not end a humiliated Germany’s colonial ambitions. In the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) colonial propaganda flourished. It took new turns under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime (1933-1945). Lebensraum (living space) as a colonial project shifted towards eastern Europe.

The Aryan obsession of being a master race culminated in the Holocaust as mass extermination of the Jewish people. But victims were also Sinti and Roma people and other groups (Africans, gays, communists). The Holocaust has overshadowed earlier German crimes against humanity of the colonial era.

After the second world war (1939-1945), German colonialism became a footnote in history. Repression turned into colonial amnesia. But, as Jewish German-US historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt suggested in 1951 already, German colonial rule was a precursor to the Nazi regime. Such claims are often discredited as antisemitism for downplaying the singularity of the Holocaust. Such gatekeeping prevents exploration of how German colonialism marked the beginning of a trajectory of mass violence.

How does this colonial history manifest today in Germany?

Until the turn of the century, colonial relics such as monuments and names of buildings, places and streets were hardly questioned. Thanks to a new generation of scholars, local postcolonial agencies, and not least an active Afro-German community, public awareness is starting to change.

Various initiatives challenge colonial memory in the public sphere. The re-contextualisation of the Bremen elephant, a colonial monument, is a good example. What was once a tribute to fallen colonial German soldiers became an anticolonial monument memorialising the Namibian victims of the genocide. Colonial street names are today increasingly replaced with names of Africans resisting colonial rule.

Numerous skulls – including those of decapitated African leaders – were taken to Germany during colonialism. These were for pseudo scientific anthropological research that was obsessed with white and Aryan superiority. Descendants of the affected African communities are still in search of the remains of their ancestors and demand their restitution.

Similarly, cultural artefacts were looted. They have remained in the possession of German museums and private collections. Systematic provenance research to identify the origins of these objects has only just begun. Transactions such as the return of Benin bronzes in Germany remain a matter of negotiations.

The German government admitted, in 2015, that the war against the Ovaherero and Nama in today’s Namibia was tantamount to genocide. Since then, German-Namibian negotiations have been taking place, but Germany’s limited atonement is a matter of contestation and controversy.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

The pain and exploitation of colonialism lives on in African societies today in many ways. I hope that the descendants of colonisers take away an awareness that we are products of a past that remains alive in the present. That decolonisation is also a personal matter. That we, as the offspring of colonisers, need to critically scrutinise our mindset, our attitudes, and should not assume that colonial relations had no effect on us.

Remorse and atonement require more than symbolic gestures and tokenism. In official relations with formerly colonised societies, uneven power relations continue. This borders on a perpetuation of colonial mindsets and supremacist hierarchies.

No former colonial power is willing to compensate in any significant way for its exploitation, atrocities and injustices. There are no meaningful material reparations as credible efforts of apology.

The colonial era is not a closed chapter in history. It remains an unresolved present. As the US novelist William Faulkner wrote:

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Henning Melber, Extraordinary Professor, Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Namibia: The Price of Genocide | People and Power”

Layers of censorship imposed on Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices in corporate and social media seem to have blurred the judgment of some. They continue to speak of a “conflict”, calling on “both sides” to use “restraint” and, partly, blaming the Palestinian resistance for the ongoing Israeli massacres.

Though such language is expected from the “sensible” few of mainstream media, there are those who are counted as “pro-Palestine” intellectuals, journalists and activists who often use similar language.

Throughout the years, the common wisdom is that, for a pro-Palestine voice to be published in mainstream US-western newspapers, he or she would have to adhere to a certain set of rules and avoid certain adjectives to describe Israel – even if such vocabulary is consistent with good sense, international law or the judgment of leading human rights organisations.

By “watering down the language”, one supposedly gains greater credibility, thus space to be heard or published.

Equally true, it is also practically forbidden to defend the Palestinian people’s internationally recognised rights to use all forms of resistance, or to support their democratic choices, because the outcomes of which are, maybe, not consistent with mainstream western thinking.

Some are even afraid to use the term “resistance” altogether. But if Palestinians are denied their most basic right to resist, they become deprived of any human agency, let alone relevance as political actors. The notion would then suggest that Palestinians can only serve the role of victims, and nothing else. Not only is this untrue, and condescending, it is outright bigoted, as well.

All this tiptoeing around what should have been a clear language on Palestine, comes at a price. When the truth is masked or hidden, the space becomes open for lies, deceptions and quasi-truths.

In this alternative space, Israel is, at best, equally culpable for the ‘war’ in Palestine as the Palestinians themselves; and, at worst, the Israeli army is merely engaging in a state of self-defense.

Additionally, by tightly controlling the discourse on Palestine, the West has harmed its own interests. Indeed, by marginalising authentic Palestinian voices, the West has lost its ability to understand the context behind the current Israeli war on Gaza, to accept or navigate its share of responsibility in the genocide and to play any meaningful role in bringing the atrocities to an end.

The outcome is an unavoidable cognitive dissonance – where western governments are violating the very rules they had created, opposing the laws they enshrined and investing in an Israeli genocide in Gaza, while criticising war elsewhere.

76 years on, Palestinians are still living the Nakba – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

I doubt that the West will ever succeed in claiming any moral authority, retrieve its lost credibility or build lasting trust with Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims or the Global South. The extermination of one’s people entitles a person to some degree of cynicism.

To further expose western duplicity in Gaza, however, we must learn to speak with no reservations, no matter the restrictions on the pro-Palestine voice or the censorship on social media.

Naturally, not all Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices agree on everything. There are those willing to risk everything, and those who want to tell some kind of truth without risking the loss of their privileges, careers or standing in society.

It is those in the former group who deserve platforms and must be celebrated for their courage.

One of the most inspiring examples are young students in US and western universities who have risked their own futures – as in being expelled from universities or denied their degrees – for raising awareness about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Those students are the true leaders of justice-based solidarity movements, now and in the future.

They have understood that, due to the unprecedented censorship of authentic Palestinian voices in all media platforms, their actions on campuses, in the streets and every available venue are critical.

The risks they have taken by speaking out for Gaza’s genocide victims will serve as a new threshold of courage that will inspire the youth of this and future generations.

Equally important is that these students have refused to compromise on their language, their demands and their priorities to simply fit in, to get published or use a genocide as an opportunity to build careers.

As for those who exploited the Palestinian suffering for their own benefit, neither history nor the rest of us will forgive their opportunism and intellectual timidity.

Those who are well-intentioned, but “water down” their language to circumvent censorship, ultimately make little difference, because there are certain truths that cannot be softened or diluted.

Indeed, there is no other honest way of phrasing what is taking place in Gaza but as a genocide, one for which only Israel – a military occupier and apartheid state – can be blamed.

The only Palestinians who deserve blame or condemnation are those who are collaborating with Israel to ensure the outcome of the war remains consistent with their interests, financial status and false titles. No amount of money or prestige will ever redeem the credibility or honour of such people.

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act,” said George Orwell. Sadly, we live in these times. It is equally true that, in a time of genocide, not telling the truth is the most contemptible of all acts.

Please continue to speak out; be radical; be revolutionary and never equate between those carrying out the genocide and those resisting it – even if at the risk of not fitting in.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

(The Conversation) – As war continues to devastate Gaza and its people, we learnt last week that a variant of poliovirus has been detected in the region. The virus was isolated in six sewage samples collected in late June from Khan Younis and Deir al Balah.

Most infections with poliovirus don’t cause symptoms, but a minority of those who contract the virus develop paralysis (paralytic polio).

No cases of paralytic polio have been reported in Gaza. But detecting the virus in wastewater is concerning nonetheless.

There are different types of polio

The cases of polio we’ve seen historically have generally been caused by “wild poliovirus”. For centuries, wild poliovirus affected both poor and wealthy countries, including Australia. The deployment of effective vaccines in the 1960s led to a dramatic decrease in cases in the following decades among those countries that could afford the vaccines.

The introduction of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988 enabled more equitable vaccination. There were only 12 cases of paralysis caused by wild poliovirus in 2023, in just two countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan.

However, as the number of wild poliovirus cases decreased there was an increase in cases of vaccine-derived poliovirus causing paralysis.

There are two types of polio vaccines: one is given orally, and the other by injection (the type used in Australia). The oral polio vaccine is based on a weakened virus – so it doesn’t cause disease, but can still reproduce. Vaccine-derived poliovirus emerges when people vaccinated with the oral polio vaccine excrete the vaccine virus in their stool and it spreads to other people.

Over time, it may mutate to become a virus that circulates and causes paralysis in populations with low levels of immunity. In 2023, there were 524 polio cases in 32 countries caused by vaccine-derived poliovirus.

It’s a strain of vaccine-derived poliovirus that has been detected in the wastewater in Gaza – type 2.

High vaccination coverage is key, but not always enough

The most important indicator of eradicating polio, both wild and vaccine-derived, is vaccine coverage. This is usually measured as the percentage of children under five who have received at least four vaccine doses, ideally 95%.

High vaccination coverage has been achieved by a combination of routine immunisation in early childhood plus national or local catch-up vaccination campaigns, particularly in areas where the virus pops up.

However, high vaccination coverage is not always enough to eliminate the virus.

Early in the 21st century, India and Nigeria were reporting the highest number of polio cases in the world. After an accelerated immunisation campaign in India, vaccine coverage rates were high by 2007 and cases were decreasing. But many cases continued to be reported in impoverished districts of western Uttar Pradesh (a state in northern India), where access to clean water and sanitation was poor.

Research shows a high level of pathogens in children’s intestines can make the absorption of the oral vaccine less effective, while unsanitary conditions make it easier for the virus to spread. After a sanitation and hygiene project began in 2007, the last case of polio in Uttar Pradesh occurred in 2010, and the entire country eradicated polio in 2014.

Wild polio was eradicated from Gaza more than 25 years ago. But it’s possible the re-emergence of vaccine-derived poliovirus is due to a combination of poor hygiene and sanitation, as we saw in Uttar Pradesh, and reduced vaccine coverage.

Polio vaccination coverage in the Palestinian territories was 99% in 2022. By the end of 2023, coverage had dropped to 89%. However, the data were not separated by each of the territories (the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza), so coverage may be lower in Gaza.

Recent outbreaks

We saw the detection of a similar strain of poliovirus in wastewater in Jerusalem, London and New York in early 2022.

Parts of these cities have high concentrations of ultra-Orthodox Jews, which may have lower rates of vaccination than the overall population. In Rockland County, 65 kilometres north of New York City, a young, unimmunised Orthodox Jewish man became the first case of polio transmitted locally in the United States in 30 years.

There’s no evidence of vaccination hesitancy among Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Australia. However, there are other communities where vaccination rates are low, including some shires in the Northern Rivers district of New South Wales.

Communities with low vaccination rates, whatever the reason, are vulnerable to infectious diseases such as polio.

So where did this virus come from?

The oral vaccine used in Gaza has not contained type 2 since 2016, so it must have come from elsewhere.

In 2023, most outbreaks of type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus were in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia. There was also one case in Egypt, which borders on Gaza. Egypt could be the source of this virus, but we’ll need further investigation.

It’s unlikely to have come from Israel as there have been no detections of poliovirus in wastewater there since 2022.

What can the world learn?

First, we must not forget that poliovirus can cross borders and maintaining high vaccination rates in Australia and elsewhere is the most effective protective strategy. It’s also crucial to contain the virus inside Gaza. UNICEF and partners are preparing for a vaccination campaign focusing on young children.

Second, it’s important to maintain wastewater surveillance for polio, which is an early warning mechanism that can initiate public health action before symptomatic cases occur.

In 2022, Victoria was the only Australian state conducting routine polio wastewater surveillance until NSW adopted the practice when the outbreaks in Jerusalem, New York and London occurred. Wastewater surveillance is worthwhile in all states and territories.

Third, but not least, this should be a wake-up call highlighting the need to cease hostilities and provide unrestricted access by aid agencies to improve the provision of clean water, sanitation and effective health services throughout Gaza. This is an urgent global health priority.

Michael Toole, Associate Principal Research Fellow, Burnet Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Gaza: WHO warns of potential polio outbreak | DW News Video

The UN High Commissioner’s office gave several examples of these massive bombs being dropped when there was no sign of an obvious military target. It wasn’t that, as some Israel apologists suggest, “people get killed in war,” or that you can’t kill off Hamas without breaking a few eggs. The pilots weren’t always aiming for Hamas operatives. They were trying to destroy Palestinian society.

17,000 lost children. Jesus of Nazareth told a parable (Luke 15:3-7) to explain to the “Pharisees and tax collectors” why he hung out with sinners and the disreputable. It goes, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

Likewise, which parent with several kids who lost one would not drop everything, give the care of its siblings to a relative, and go frantically looking for the lost child?

In 2000, the US House of Representatives even encouraged communities to join the Amber Alert program for abducted children, so that alerts are sent out by the Emergency Alert System, Google, Facebook and other means. We do this as communities for a single child.

How frantic would we be at the news of 17,000 lost little children?

The 17,000 separated from their families are scavenging for food and forced to drink dirty water. Many of them have chronic diarrhea and are developing diseases like hepatitis. They are frightened and grieving, and deeply traumatized. Some are suffering from malnutrition and will suffer permanent cognitive and affective damage from which they will never recover. Some are wounded or amputees.

This little girl describes her life:

Middle East Eye Video: “Gaza Child Separated from Family”

“All the people died. Everyone. Two homes were levelled on our street. We got scared, and stopped going home. We want to go back to our homes. They struck our houses and we had to flee, uncle. We were scared. We want to go home. We want a ceasefire. We are tired of sheltering in these schools while the bombing is ongoing. We get scared.”

Play it with the sound turned up so you can hear it in her voice.

Then there are the children who have lost the adults in their family, and have formed tiny bands to fend for themselves, the tweens taking care of the infants and toddlers.

NBC News: “A story of survival: 13-year-old takes care of seven siblings amid the war in Gaza “

Here is the YouTube transcript of this tale of children in Rafah, translated from Arabic:

The little boy, Mohammad Ali Yazji says, “This is Mayar, and this is Tulin, and this is Youssef, and this is Zaher, and this is Suwar. And this is Ward, and this is Fatima, and this is Mays.”

The little girl says. “I’m with my little sister, who keeps crying while I wash her clothes. Her clothes are dirty and my mother has been martyred, and my father is in Gaza [City], not able to get the message to us. We don’t know what to do.

Mohammad Ali says, “I’m sitting here, making milk for my little sister. trying to feed her since I haven’t fed her milk since the morning. She’s crying because she’s hungry and there’s no one to nurse her.

“I mean, I feel it. I mean, no one understands her. My mother used to, you know, when she got hungry she would feed her. She knew how to quieten her when she cried.

“I don’t know how to do any of this. I mean, this is my little sister, and when I see her, I feel so sorry for her. I don’t know what to do for her. At least bring us milk and Pampers. Where should I get this stuff.

“Ah, from this hunger… she cries out of hunger.

“Go pigeon, don’t take too long, go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep.

“To sleep.

“I’m not sure if there’s anyone left in our family alive except for my uncle. When I saw the international aid, I mean, people know that our father is missing and our mother has been martyred, but they bring us little help or not at all. At most, we get light aid locally.

“Every day we get a can of beans or a can of chickpeas, maybe, or we get a few vegetables, a little financial aid

“I go to bring them something so they forget the war and do not get bored — a toy to play with, and, I mean, to bring them something to forget the hurt.

“We are supposed to have a father and a mother, but now there’s nobody, and when we sleep, all my siblings, they sit there, and every time there’s a noise, they start crying and screaming. There’s nobody to make them feel safe.”

Six month old Tulin, whose name means “moonbeam,” fell ill with gastroenteritis.

This video report was from NBC News Digital. It was produced by Ala’a Ibrahim, edited by Jacob Condon, with Jonathan Rinkerman the production manager, Marshall Crook the senior producer, and Rachel Morehouse the executive producer. God bless their souls. I’m not sure it was ever aired. The major networks haven’t covered the Palestinian side of the Gaza War for the most part.

As for the children dead under rubble, it should be remembered that the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights has found instances where the Israeli Air Force (IAF) dropped 2,000-pound bombs on residential apartment buildings, flattening them and spreading destruction all along their quarter mile blast radius. It takes most adults about 5 minutes to walk a quarter of a mile. Imagine your neighborhood. If you walked for five minutes, how many houses or apartment buildings would you pass? Imagine them all blown to smithereens.

Children and others trapped under the rubble of destroyed buildings could not be rescued in Gaza, as they might be in most cities in the United States. The Israelis have limited the import of earth moving equipment since they slapped an extensive economic siege on Gaza in 2007. And the IAF has targeted such equipment in its air raids over the past eight months.

Children who were alive under the rubble couldn’t be gotten out, no matter how frantic their parents or relatives or neighbor were. They died slowly of lack of water. After about three days of not drinking anything, most people die of renal failure. They would have been parched, whimpering, head hammering, in the dark, alone. Some of the 4,000 who were not immediately turned into red mist by the Israeli bombs died like that.

Saddam Hussein’s apparent defiance of UNSC resolutions was given as a legitimate causus belli by the George W. Bush administration, bolstering its case for invading Iraq in 2003.

To underline this defiance of the will of the world community, between June 10 when the UNSC order came down and June 14, the Israeli armed forces killed 142 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 396. According to the professionals at the Gaza Ministry of Health, since October 7 the Israelis have killed 37,266 Palestinians in Gaza and injured 85,102, the vast majority of them women and children, with many of the rest elderly and other noncombatant men.

Doctors without Borders (French acronym MSF) points to the casualties since the start of this month as further proof of the “complete dehumanization of the Palestinians,” saying that “since the beginning of June, more than 800 people have been killed and over 2,400 wounded in intense bombing and ground offensives by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, Palestine.”

These are physicians at the few hospitals still partially functioning, so they see the influx of the wounded and dead bodies.

Brice de le Vingne, Head of MSF Emergency Unit, asked, “how can the killing of more than 800 people in a single week, including small children, plus the maiming of hundreds more, be considered a military operation adhering to international humanitarian law? We can no longer accept the statement that Israel is taking ‘all precautions’ – this is just propaganda.”

De le Vingne added, ““Catch-all phrases like ‘war is ugly’ act as blinders to the fact that children too young to walk are being dismembered, eviscerated, and killed.”

Children too young to walk. Some children begin walking as early as 10 to 11 months old.

It reminds me of when President Joe Biden dismissed Palestinian deaths, saying “people get killed in war,” or words to that effect.

MSF rejects Israeli propaganda that they are letting in aid. They’ve seen with their own eyes that it isn’t happening. Plus, they note, “Israel repeatedly bombed so-called safe zones, refugee camps, a school and multiple humanitarian warehouses, which were formally registered as ‘deconflicted’ by Israeli forces.”

Al Jazeera English Video: “Israel has ‘systematic strategy’ of making Gaza uninhabitable”

In the past month and a half, the UN’s OCHA reminds us, a million Palestinians were again displaced from the south, and 100,000 were displaced from the north. Displaced means made homeless and likely sleeping rough with few toilets or potable water or food. Most of the domiciles in Gaza have been made into rubble by the Israelis, though 16% of the displaced have tried to go home. Some erect tents over their former homes. Some 31% go to new shelters.

At “informal displacement sites” (tent cities?) in Deir al-Balah, “families reported irregular food distributions, overcrowded and dilapidated shelters with an average of eight to 10 persons per shelter, lack of sanitation infrastructure, and a range of health issues such as skin diseases, hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, and respiratory illnesses.”

Water shortages are severe among these refugees in Deir al-Balah: “average water availability per person per day was less than two litres [half a gallon] at Abo Dalal displacement site and only 0.7 litres [less than a quart] at Ard Al Ghusain displacement site. This is less than the internationally recognized minimum requirement for survival of three litres [3 quarts] per day and significantly lower than the minimum amount of 15 litres [4 gallons] per day needed in an emergency for drinking, washing and cooking.”

As for food, some 8,000 children in Gaza have been formally diagnosed with malnutrition and another 3,000 have been identified as in imminent danger of it. Given the poor state of medicine in the Strip, these figures are only the tip of the iceberg.

Israeli airstrikes have taken out water pipes, wells, and sewage treatment plants. There is only 28% the potable water in Gaza that existed on October 6. This is not an accident, as MSF pointed out. People are forced to collect surface water that is tainted with sewage, causing a range of diseases of the intestinal tract and liver.

Apparently the Israeli military has expelled all but about 90,000 people from Rafah, which had had a pre-war population of 300,000 and had swollen to 1.2 million before the Israeli invasion of early May.

Those 90,000 people have no functioning hospital, since Israel has destroyed the medical facilities there, according to the World Health Organization.

OCHA finds that “over 76 per cent of schools in Gaza are now assessed as requiring full reconstruction or major rehabilitation to be functional again.” The Israeli Air Force continues to directly target schools; this week it smashed a UN school functioning as a shelter, killing 30 refugees.

The children of Gaza have lost a school year. If they lose two more, studies suggest that they will never get back on track. Palestinians are the most educated people in the Middle East, but Israel is depriving those in Gaza of a basic education. Those who suffer malnutrition will suffer permanent cognitive losses as well as emotional problems. Others have PTSD and are traumatized, and may never be right in the head again.

Sanders is right to be outraged. But there is a long history of the US Congress asking war criminals, and criminals of other sorts, to address it. Not to mention the war crimes that Congress itself has committed, such as the illegal authorization it issued in 2002 to George W. Bush to invade Iraq, an invasion that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced 4 million people, and left the country a basket case to this day.

In 1959 Congress invited the king of Belgium, Baudouin, to address it. He had been the sovereign over the Congo in the 1950s. Under his rule thousands of mixed-race children were kidnapped by Belgian authorities and transported to Belgium for adoption. Belgian rule in Congo was brutal and heavy-handed. Baudouin later accepted Congolese independence in 1960, but was complicit (a year after he addressed Congress) in overthrowing and murdering its first post-Belgian leader, Patrice Lumumba. The US CIA helped.

In 1978 Congress was addressed by Anwar El Sadat and Menachem Begin. Begin was a war criminal and in some ways the inventor of modern Middle Eastern terrorism.. In the 1940s he commanded the Irgun Zvai Leumi terrorist group in British Mandate Palestine. He instigated the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 to hit out at British Intelligence, which had an office in the hotel. The bombing killed dozens of innocent civilians. Begin’s Irgun was also responsible for the massacre of over a hundred innocent Palestinian villagers at Deir Yassin in 1948, an action which he justified and boasted about in his autobiography: “Our men were compelled to fight for every house; to overcome the enemy they used large numbers of hand grenades. And the civilians who had disregarded our warnings suffered inevitable casualties.” There is a long history of Israeli terrorists threatening to attack people and attempting to force them from their homes, and then blaming them for being massacred because they didn’t allow themselves to be expelled.

In 1989 Congress in its wisdom decided to be addressed by South Korean strongman Roh Tae-woo, who had engineered the 1979 coup in that country. In 1980 he had been complicit in ordering the crushing of pro-democracy protests in Gwangju. He went on to steal hundreds of million of dollars from campaign funds. Roh Tae-woo was sort of a South Korean Donald Trump and that he was so popular with Congress was maybe a sign that in 1989 the country was already heading in a bad direction.

In 2016 and again in 2023, Congress let the odious Narendra Modi of India soil its halls. Genocide Watch explains, “In 2002, anti-Muslim carnage engulfed the Indian state of Gujarat, killing at least 1,000 people. Most of the victims were Muslims. The Chief Minister of Gujarat was Narendra Modi, a lifelong member of the Hindu extremist RSS. He ordered police not to stop the massacres.” The BBC did a fine documentary on the massacre, which India banned.

Lots of other unsavory people have traipsed through the national legislature’s halls. I’m not sure any of them has killed as many innocents as Netanyahu, the Butcher of Gaza.

“I was muttering to myself, ‘I hope I die,’” she recalled.

Though gut-wrenching, Amal’s story is not unlike those of so many other young mothers in Gaza today. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 50,000 pregnant women are barely surviving there, while having babies at the rate of 180 births a day. Many of those women (especially in the north) are acutely malnourished and few received any medical attention before their labor pains began, often weeks ahead of schedule.

According to a bleak report released in March by UNICEF, the thousands of infants born in Gaza over the previous two months (and ever since) are at great risk of dying. Many already have, although numbers are hard to come by.

“There are babies who died in their mothers’ wombs and surgeries were performed to remove the dead fetuses,” said Dr. Muhammad Salha, acting director of Al-Awda Hospital, where the situation couldn’t be more dire. “Mothers are not eating because of the conditions we are living in, and this affects the infants… There are [cases] of many children suffering from dehydration and malnutrition, leading to death.”

Western healthcare providers who have returned from Gaza describe genuinely horrific scenes. Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, a Philadelphia-based doctor and the medical director of the humanitarian aid group MedGlobal, left Gaza in late March, her second time on the frontlines since Israel launched its assault nearly eight months ago. What she witnessed has changed her forever.

“There’s not enough space for us to work closely with the mothers to help them start lactating again. We can’t even access them. And to be able to do that, you have to have day-to-day activities with those women, and that is not something that’s possible for us right now. Those children need to be breastfed. If they can’t be breastfed, they need formula,” Dr. Ahmed told Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. “What we’re talking about is women who are squeezing fruits, dates into handkerchiefs, into tissues, and feeding — drip-feeding their children with some sort of sugary substance to nourish them.”

Being born amid the rubble, amid a horrifying offensive, will undoubtedly scar future generations — if, that is, they’re lucky enough to survive the constant bombings and the denial of basic necessities like food, fuel, and medical aid. And as yet, despite mounting international pressure, threats of war crimes charges, and claims of genocide, Israel has shown no signs of relenting.

Onslaught of Revenge

From early on, Israeli leaders have been remarkably clear about their intentions in the Palestinian enclave. Israeli Colonel Yogez BarSheshet, speaking from Gaza in late 2023, put it bluntly: “Whoever returns here… will find scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, no nothing. They have no future.”

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It’s as if Israel’s leaders knew that, while it was impossible to actually destroy Hamas, they could at least obliterate Gaza’s infrastructure and slaughter civilians under the guise of hunting down terrorists. After seven long months of Israel’s onslaught of revenge, it’s clear that this has never been about freeing the hostages taken on October 7th. Along the way, Israel could easily have accepted multiple proposals to do so, including a ceasefire resolution brokered by Egypt, Qatar, and the U.S. in early May. Instead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and crew shot down that plan, in which Hamas had agreed to release all living hostages taken in its October 7th assault on Israel in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. The sticking point, however, had nothing to do with the release of those captives rotting in Gaza under who knows what kind of stressful conditions, but Israel’s refusal to accept any resolution that includes a permanent ceasefire.

Immediately after nixing Hamas’s offer to release the hostages, Israel began bombing Rafah, home to more than a million refugees. Hundreds of thousands of them have since fled the city, displaced yet again. And despite Netanyahu’s now-discredited claim that he only had to destroy Hamas’s last four “battalions” in Rafah, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soon found themselves back at it in the north as well, attacking areas where Hamas was once again said to be operating.

In response to protests that spread quickly on college campuses in the U.S., President Biden paid lip service to the outrage and paused shipments of U.S. military aid to Israel, only to reverse course a week later with a new $1-billion arms deal for that country.

Depending on how Israel’s post-October 7th blood-soaked incursion into Gaza is evaluated, the military operation has either been a complete disaster or a monumental success. If the destruction of Gaza and the slaughtering of Palestinians was the intent, then Israel has certainly succeeded. If the return of the hostages and the destruction of Hamas was the goal, then it failed miserably. Either way, Israel has quickly become a pariah of its own making, something that never had to happen, and from which there may be no turning back.

The Damage Done

The specter of death in Gaza is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp. At a distance, our understanding of the situation often relies on somber statistics, especially in the establishment media. The official count, consistently cited by mainstream outlets, comes in at around 35,000 deaths.

In May, the New York Times and other outlets jumped on a report from the United Nations, which had apparently revised Gaza’s death count. But the U.N. did not, in fact, halve its total of women and children who had died, as the Jerusalem Post claimed. It simply altered its classification system in terms of those estimated to have died and those it could definitively confirm to be deceased. The totals, however, remained the same. Nonetheless, even those numbers, based on information provided by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, end up blurring the cruel reality on the ground. U.N. officials also fear that at least 10,000 more Gazans lie buried under the rubble in that 25-mile strip of land.

But death figures can also impart meaning, as the long-time consumer-rights activist Ralph Nader recently pointed out. He happens to believe that Israel could have killed at least 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a mind-boggling figure, but worth examining. So, I called on him to elaborate.

“The undercount is staggering,” said Nader, whose Lebanese parents emigrated to the United States before he was born. “The U.S. and Israel want a low number, so they look around. Instead of themselves estimating — which they don’t want to do — they cling to Hamas’s [figures], and Hamas doesn’t want a realistic number because they don’t want to be seen as unable to protect their own people. So, they developed these criteria: to be counted, the dead must first be certified by hospitals and morgues [which barely exist].”

He has made it a habit to reach out to writers and editors. Like so many others, I have a bit of a phone affair with that 90-year-old thinker and activist. We discuss politics, baseball, and journalism’s rapid, insidious decline. I’ve certainly heard him animated in the past, but never more indignant than when he addresses the situation in Gaza. “The whole thing is one death camp now. It’s easily 200,000 deaths in Gaza,” he insisted, citing the number of bombs dropped, which have, by some estimates, exceeded 100,000. We know that at least 45,000 missiles and bombs had been used in Gaza within three months of the beginning of Israel’s military campaign. As a result, as many as 175,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed by Israel. So, he seems to be on to something.

“Eventually [the real number of the dead] will come out,” he adds. “They’ll do a census, whoever takes over. The one thing the extended families in Gaza know is who’s been killed in their families.”

Of course, his assertion is circumstantial and he knows it, but he’s making a point. With so much of the Gaza Strip facing imminent starvation, nearly all hospitals out of commission, just about no medicine left, and very little clean water or food, 35,000 deaths are likely, in the end, to prove a drastic undercount.

“Not in Our Name”

The Holocaust, in which Nazis murdered 11 million people, six million of whom were Jews, was quite literally the textbook genocide. Yet, as ghastly and systematic as it was, at least one other genocide may have claimed a larger death toll. In her latest book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explains that the largest genocide was inflicted on Indigenous peoples in the Americas at the hands of European settlers. Hitler’s Holocaust, Klein writes, actually took a page from colonialists in the Americas and was deeply influenced by the Western frontier myth.

“I think it is important to say that every genocide is different,” was how Klein put it to Arielle Angel of the Jewish Currents podcast On the Nose. “There are particularities to every holocaust, and there absolutely were particularities to the Nazi Holocaust. This was a Fordist Holocaust. It was quicker and on a much larger scale and more industrialized than had ever been seen before or since.”

Klein is correct that the Nazi Holocaust was born out of Hitler’s colonialist aspirations and ought to be framed as such. It’s also worth noting that the 1948 Genocide Convention, which was a response to that atrocity, makes clear that classifying an event as a genocide is dependent neither on the number of victims killed nor even on the percentage of a given population slaughtered. This means that the number of people killed in Gaza makes little difference in the court of international law; legally speaking, that is, Israel is already committing genocide.

In one of the saddest twists of modern history, in the wake of the October 7th Hamas assault, the trauma of the Holocaust is being used to exploit Jewish suffering and fear for safety and so to justify the slow evisceration of Palestinians. It’s this tragic irony that’s turned so many young American Jews against Israel’s policies.

Amid a mounting international backlash, support for Israel among Jewish Americans has never faced such intense division. Many of the protests against the war in Gaza here have, in fact, been led by young Jews fed up with Israel’s claim on their Judaism and cultural history. In response, the ranks of the Jewish-run IfNotNow and the Jewish Voice for Peace have swelled, helping to spawn a newly invigorated antiwar movement in this country.

The threat this poses to Zionism’s future is unlike anything the movement has faced since the Six-Day War, according to the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “We have a major, major, major generational problem,” ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt said in a panicked donor call last November. “All the polling I’ve seen… suggests this is not a left/right gap, folks. The issue of [the] United States’ support for Israel is not left and right. It is young and old.”

Greenblatt is correct. Gen Z and Millenials, Jewish or otherwise, are much less likely to accept Israel’s rationale for the slaughter of Palestinians than the generations that came before them. Poll after poll shows that ever more young Jews in the United States are distancing themselves from the tenets of Zionism. Why wouldn’t they? They’ve seen the dead bodies on social media, the screams, the bloodshed, the flattened cities, and they want no part of it. Support for Israel among the young is now at a nadir.

And that, as polls already suggest, could affect the coming election. “Biden’s going to lose the election just by people staying home,” Ralph Nader predicted. “He thinks properly that Trump is worse on this issue and everything else, so he’s got this attitude, so does the entire Democratic Party, ‘Hey you protestors, grow up, you’ve got nowhere else to go.’ Yeah, they’ve got somewhere to go. They can just stay home.”

We’re still months away from the November election and things could change drastically, but you can’t resurrect the dead or turn back the clock on genocide. Thanks, in part, to those American bombs and missiles, the damage is already done. Israel’s collective punishment is now simply a fact of life and President Biden remains culpable for those deaths in Gaza, too, whether the human toll is now 35,000 or 200,000. The White House’s continued denial that Israel is committing genocide means very little when there’s a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Back in the desperate and overcrowded Nuseirat refugee camp, Amal Nassar held her three-month-old as an April spring day arrived early in Gaza. She wondered what the future would hold for her little baby girl.

“I looked at Mira and thought: Did I make the right decision to have this baby in a war?“

It’s a painful question without an answer, but the outlook remains grim. In mid-May, an Israeli fighter jet launched missiles at residential buildings in Nuseirat, killing 40 Palestinians, including women and children. Many more were injured. The rockets missed Amal’s family this time, but the longer Israel’s callousness endures, the closer death creeps.

Copyright 2024 Joshua Frank

Tomdispatch.com

That result is a little over the tolerance of the sadistic “Daddy’s Home” program, but it is ballpark. The individual whom the Israelis call Crime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to claim it was all a horrible accident, but it wasn’t. That is how Israel’s military operation is set up. Two Hamas operatives dead, about 40 civilians. Those are the Israeli rules of engagement. That ROE would get you court-martialed in the US military, and it is producing results that the International Court of Justice called plausibly genocidal. Based on these ROE, it may be that Netanyahu has killed 36,000 people to get at 2,400 fighters. Apparently thousands of previously unaffiliated young men have joined Hamas, horrified at Israel’s total war, so it is possible that the Israeli army has not reduced the number of fighters at all.

Burning the tents of the indigenous population has a long history in colonialism. When the Dutch ruled “New Amsterdam,” the capital of the New Netherlands, they brought in more and more settlers who were hungry for land and wanted to displace the Mohawks and Mohicans, who did not take kindly to being pushed around. The Dutch governor, Willem Krieft, became very nervous about the Native Americans, explains Walt Giersbach at Military History Online. At one point some 500 members of a small tribe, the Wappinger, moved to what is now Jersey City essentially to escape being taxed by the larger confederations. The paranoid Krieft took the movement of this small band as menacing and attacked them out of the blue in February 1643.

Historian Jon Romats Broadhead wrote of the “Pavonia Massacre,” “Warrior and squaw, sachem and child, mother and babe were alike massacred. Daybreak scarcely ended the furious slaughter. Mangled victims, seeking safety in the thickets, were driven into the river, and parents rushing to save their children, whom the soldiery had thrown into the stream, were driven back into the waters and drowned before the eyes of their unrelenting murderers.”

The snow turned red with blood and “the sky, it was reported, was lit with the fires from their tents.” The Dutch beheaded people and played kickball with the heads.

For the colonizers to burn the tents of the colonized is to declare them without domicile or connection to the land on which they were used to camping. It is to erase them from the earth.

Some 224 years later, two thousand miles to the west, the scene was repeated. The National Park Service explains that Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, a victor at Gettysburg, went out to Kansas in 1867, completely inexperienced in dealing with American Indians. He tried to bully the local Cheyenne, who grew afraid of him and abandoned one of their large and well-appointed villages. Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry couldn’t find the absconding locals.

Hancock had something wrong with him and took offense. He said, “I am satisfied that the Indian village was a nest of conspirators.” He, accompanied by Custer, ordered the village burned to the ground. If locals show signs of being unhappy to be colonized and of not being satisfied with their new lot, that is itself a reason to further oppress them.

Hancock started a summer of constant battles. The Federal government finally figured out what was going on and reassigned Hancock elsewhere. A new treaty was concluded in October of 1867, though the colonizer’s treaties are worth less than toilet paper. As for Custer, less than a decade later he would overreach in his notorious viciousness and meet his demise at the hands of his intended victims.

Here is an engraving of the destruction of the Cheyenne-Lakota village from Harper’s Weekly. You will notice that the tents are burning.

Burning tents has for centuries been a signal of aggressive colonization and of genocide.