On social media this past week or so, in discussions about Israel’s stepping-up of its atrocities against the civilian population of north Gaza, there has been some talk of how genocides are allowed to happen. It has been suggested that the Holocaust happened because ordinary Germans stood by and let it happen, and that there were ample signs apparent to the general population, such as the trains rolling across the country (and people driving them, knowing that they were carrying a human cargo). Likewise, the genocide raging in Gaza and now the massacres of civilians across Lebanon (not targeted at Hizbullah, as Christian communities and churches have been attacked as well) have been put down to the ‘fact’ that nobody is doing anything. I am sceptical about this notion: genocides do not abate because of popular protest but because they are arrested militarily.
Nazi Germany was a police state. The term ‘Gestapo’ is often used to refer to secret police forces, or to other spying entities, but it was the actual name of the German secret police (it was short for Geheime Staatspolizei or “Secret State Police”). As with any dictatorship, there were elements of the population that actively supported the regime, some who were apolitical and those who were opposed to it and of those, some more courageous than others. While it is easy to blame ordinary Germans for “just letting it happen”, it is less easy to think of ways they could have prevented the bits of it they saw other than, say, by refusing to inform on Jews that were hiding from the police, that would not put them individually or their families in grave danger. A lot of the people saying this have never spent longer in a dictatorship than a couple of weeks’ holiday in Egypt. As it happens, an earlier programme of Nazi mass murder — the T4 programme of ‘euthanasia’ of disabled people — was scaled back after protests from people of influence, such as doctors and bishops, but something like a street protest could have easily been beaten down and its organisers imprisoned.
When it comes to Gaza, it’s not true that nobody is doing anything: there have been major protests throughout the western world, occupations on university campuses in the US and some courageous acts of sabotage against companies in the UK that make or service military hardware destined for Israel. It is the political class that remains committed to allowing the genocide to go ahead, accusing every entity that offers any military resistance to Israel’s genocide of “continuing to destabilise peace in the Middle East”. Likewise, during the Bosnian genocide of the 1990s, there was widespread popular support for military action to stop it, but it was met with contempt from the political class who told people not to be silly: it was a civil war and everyone knows you don’t interfere in a civil war. We now know that European politicians were unwilling to intervene because they regarded Bosnia as a Muslim country to be alien to Europe. The Rwandan genocide would have been difficult to arrest because of its location, but Bosnia is Europe, and we knew what was going on in 1992, and our political class let it continue for three more years.
At least then, nobody was openly and gleefully cheering the genocide on, as we see in the case of Gaza, and few people openly denying it despite copious evidence. The western political class and its servile commentariat repeat taunts such as “it’s war, and if you don’t like it, don’t start wars” (Brianna Wu is particularly fond of this kind of taunt). All the genocides mentioned in this article happened during a war. “Israel has the right to defend itself,” they remind us endlessly. Defending oneself happens when under attack; reprisal massacres against a civilian population more than a year after the event are not self-defence, especially when that population are not citizens of a foreign power but disenfranchised natives in the same country. Israel offers ‘evidence’ of Hamas, Hizbullah or whoever using tunnels, or hiding weapons in civilian infrastructure or near homes, and the servile commentariat repeat it eagerly, regardless of it being obviously fabricated or not actually showing what is claimed (tunnels, underground bunkers and the like are a common means of defence — our Cold War bunkers are now a tourist attraction and have been used as film sets — and Lebanon has been attacked by Israel before). Every so often we see the “liberal Zionist” politicians (liberalism for me, fascism for thee) such as Keir Starmer parrot platitudes about a “two-state solution”, a dream that has been dead in the water for twenty years and which more recent Israeli politicians have openly opposed, while blaming everyone but Israel for Israel’s choice to massacre unarmed Palestinian civilians.
There must be military action to stop the Gaza genocide. It matters not where it comes from (Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps were liberated mostly by Stalin’s Soviet troops, not British or American troops although they did liberate some of those in Germany itself, such as Bergen-Belsen). It is western politicians who are the enablers of the genocide of the Palestinians by both supplying Israel with weapons and allowing their existing equipment to be serviced here, knowing their intended use, and by failing to take military action to arrest the genocide, while accusing anyone protesting it of being Hamas supporters or antisemites. Media outlets have a share in the responsibility, as some of them cheer it on by calling for victory over or destruction of Hamas, ignoring the vastly greater numbers of civilian victims, the destruction of hospitals and schools etc. and the lack of actual military engagement with Hamas, while others suppress Palestinian voices and tip-toe around the feelings of the genocide’s supporters, as we have seen from the Guardian in the UK. There are of course the Jewish groups that have harassed anyone defending the Palestinians’ right to live in peace in their own country, free of Israeli military and settler abuse and violence, with false accusations of racism for decades, and continue to do the same now that the violence has progressed to genocide.
But popular protest on its ownwill not stop Israel’s genocide. It’s not ordinary people’s fault that Israel’s depravities were not stopped in October 2023, let alone a year later. The fault lies wholly with our political class, the Labour and Conservative parties here in the UK and both the Republican and Democratic parties (the latter especially, as it holds executive power) who have made the choice to throw in their lot with the mass murderers, and the major media organisations. But what protest there has been, has been weak, perhaps because the protest movement is dominated by people with a long-standing (and well-founded) aversion to western military action; during the Bosnia genocide the debate was over military action to stop it, a demand made openly in newspaper columns and on radio phone-ins, and politicians called for Serb forces and positions to be bombed. Here, we talk of ceasefires with an expectation that Israel’s rulers will just honour such a request, which clearly they will not. The talk should be of action, not words.
Image source: Tim Ellis, via Flickr. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (BY-NC) 2.0 licence.
Possibly Related Posts:
