hankyoreh

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with US President Donald Trump as the two meet in the White House on Feb. 4, 2024. (Reuters/Yonhap)

By Jung E-gil, senior international affairs writer

Israel is currently committing a genocide in Gaza, following exactly in the footsteps of the German Nazis, who massacred millions of Jews during WWII.

Genocide can be defined as a mass murder of members of a specific group that occurs to prevent that group from being reconstituted as a political, social or cultural entity. The Nazis deprived Jews of their homes, shuffled them around in groups, and concentrated them in camps before massacring them. 

This is the same thing that Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza. After depriving them of their homes, Israel is forcing them to relocate in large groups and forcing them into camps in the south of Gaza and along the coast.

Now they have full control of food aid for Palestinians and are using that power to shoot at innocent, starving civilians who come to them in the hopes of grabbing a morsel to stave off their hunger. Shootings have been taking place at food aid shelters since May 27, leading to more than 1,000 deaths. Israel is trying to eradicate Palestinians from Gaza. By razing Gaza to the ground and cutting off food, it is trying to make Gaza a completely barren place where people cannot survive, so that residents have no choice but to leave. Currently, 70% of all buildings in Gaza (174,000) have been reduced to rubble.

From the very onset of the war, Israel has been sending people residing in the north of Gaza to the South. In May 2024, the IDF ordered 1 million refugees in the southern region of Rafah to move towards Al-Mawasi, which was completely barren. The IDF promptly began to destroy Rafah, resulting in its absolute ruin by August 2024. 

In May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right administration launched a major ground offensive, dubbed “Operation Gideon’s Chariots,” which is based on the principle that Israel will besiege the Gaza Strip and refuse to retreat. After occupying the Gaza Strip, Israel will refashion it as a military buffer zone and forcefully send Gaza residents southwards. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, backed by Israel and the US, was established and soon took over the distribution of food aid. This was when Palestinians started being shot at while trying to receive food aid.

On July 7, Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, ordered the establishment of a “humanitarian city” on the most southern part of Gaza bordering Egypt, to gradually relocate all 2.2 million Gaza residents. He claimed that Israel ought to prepare for the voluntary departure of Gaza residents to different countries. The plan is one that patently involves the expulsion of the people of Gaza.

Israelis have made no effort to hide their intent to carry out a genocide. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister who has been propagating for a complete takeover of Gaza and the expulsion of Palestinians since the outbreak of the war, stated, “Gaza will be totally destroyed. Palestinians will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

Netanyahu quoted the Old Testament — “Remember what Amalek did to you” — in order to make clear his intention to follow in the footsteps of the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible, who took revenge on the Amaleks, their enemy, through massacre. The Israeli government and military leaders claim that they are fighting a war against “human beasts,” and urging for a complete eradication of the Palestinians. Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli Knesset, stated that Israel’s mission was to “wipe Gaza off the face of the earth.”

Omer Bartov, a professor at Brown University and leading authority on genocide, wrote a guest essay for The New York Times titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It,” on July 15.

“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” he wrote, adding, “This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide.”

He continued, “In Israel’s case, that intent [to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group] has been publicly expressed by numerous officials and leaders. But intent can also be derived from a pattern of operations on the ground, and this pattern became clear by May 2024 and has since become ever clearer — as the IDF has systematically destroyed the Gaza Strip.”
 
Bartov is Jewish, lived the first half of his life in Israel and served in the IDF as a soldier. The conclusion he reached is a “painful [one] to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could.”

In response to politicians, scholars and experts who accused their colleagues of antisemitism for mentioning Israel’s crimes in Gaza, Bartov wrote, “[S]howing images of Palestinian children ripped apart by US-made bombs launched by Israeli pilots is, in this view, an antisemitic act.”

Jewish ghettoes, which housed masses of European Jews, existed in Europe even before Nazi Germany started to exert its power over the region. In 1943, an uprising against the Nazis occurred in the Warsaw ghetto in Poland.

Heinrich Himmler, a military leader of the Nazi Party, considered the uprising, which demonstrated “the immense threat posed by the Jews,” a pretext for destroying them once and for all. Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, is the ghetto of Palestinians. As the residents of this ghetto decided to protest, Israel deemed the only way to teach them a lesson was through a massacre. The international community is condoning Israel’s behavior by claiming that it has the “right to defend itself.”

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]