EDITORIAL: “DEMOCRATIC” STATES AND GENOCIDE
Vinod Mubayi
Israel’s genocidal assaults on the Arabs, first the Palestinians and now the Lebanese are intensifying. What are the world’s democratic nations doing? Polls have demonstrated that large numbers of people in the US, perhaps even a majority, support a ceasefire in Gaza that is rejected out of hand by the government of Israel. In a democracy, one might expect that the views of the people should be reflected in the policies of their government and elected representatives. However, of the 535 members of Congress, 100 Senators and 435 Representatives, barely 17, i.e. 3%, expressed support for a ceasefire.
The remaining 97% loudly and firmly rejected it as has the Biden administration that continues to provide Israel with its weaponry, active military assistance when needed as witnessed in the US shooting down some of the Iranian missiles, intelligence gathering, as well as unconditional diplomatic and political support in the UN and elsewhere. It would not be amiss to characterize the US political class, whether Republican or Democratic, as the enabler of the genocide of the Palestinians being perpetrated by Israel. Nor would it be greatly wrong to describe Israel as an outpost of the American global empire in the Middle East and the Arab world.
Despite the mountains of evidence gathered by its own investigative agencies about the egregious violations of human rights by Israel that would trigger an embargo on the supply of US weapons, the Biden Administration has chosen to deny its own officials, some of whom have resigned in protest, and lie to the US Congress to allow the smooth flow of guns and bombs that Israel is using to commit genocide. To kill one person in southern Beirut, Hassan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, Israel is estimated to have murdered almost a thousand people, most of them innocent civilians, with the aid of the advanced bombs supplied by the US. Neither presidential candidate in the forthcoming elections next month has paid heed to the most crucial moral issue of our time: the genocide perpetrated by Israel. As far as Palestine is concerned, the choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President, and convicted felon, Donald Trump could be characterized simply as a choice between bad and worse. The only difference, perhaps, is that Harris continues to advocate a two-state solution, no matter how meaningless it has been rendered by the actions of Israel’s government, while Trump’s views likely align with the Israeli extreme right-wing racists and fascists like Smotrich and Ben Gvir who wish Israel to conquer not only the West Bank and Gaza but likely southern Lebanon too.
The outright repression being carried out at US universities on the issue of student and faculty activism against the Palestinian genocide is another marker of the divide that exists between popular opinion and the ruling elite comprised of billionaire donors, university administrations and politicians at various national, state and local levels, all of them desperate to prevent a return of the student protests that captured national and global attention last spring. Those protests were met with harsh repression such as at Columbia University and UCLA, now the rulers want to curb any protests before they even start. Policy changes to institutionalize repression on the Palestine issue across universities have been demanded by politicians, whether Republicans or Democrats, and members of university governing boards and donors, some of them directly linked to companies in the military-industrial complex selling arms with US “aid” to Israel. These draconian policies targeting individual students and faculty are being implemented by compliant university administrations and have led to the dismissal of professors for speaking in support of Palestine in the classroom or initiating deportation proceedings against foreign students who have taken part in Palestine solidarity events. The absurd level of such repression at some universities is the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism that treats a political ideology, Zionism, as a protected Semitic identity. This has led to some ludicrous results like anti-Zionist Jewish students and faculty labeled as antisemitic.
But, as Israel devastates Gaza, Jewish anti-Zionists are resisting and insisting that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. In a searing commentary published on Oct 3, 2024, Brant Rosen, an observant anti-Zionist Jew from the Tzedek congregation in Chicago, provides a very incisive and honest account of how Israeli Zionism is perpetrating genocide. Writing at the time of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Rosen says “In the Jewish new year, we must confront the carnage that Zionism has wrought.”
He writes:
“At Rosh Hashanah, we begin the holiest season of the year for the Jewish community: the 10 Days of Awe, which conclude on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Over the next ten days, we will be challenged to break open the shells of inertia and complacency that have built up over the past year….
I cannot remember a Rosh Hashanah when the collective moral stakes were any higher for the American Jewish community than this year. I would even go as far as to say it may be the most morally consequential High Holiday season of our lifetimes…How can we begin to fathom a moral accounting of the genocide being waged in our names? Over 41,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza to date and over 95,000 injured, the majority of whom are women and children, according to official reports. According to one estimate, the ultimate death toll may already be closer to 200,000… Whole extended families, entire Palestinian bloodlines, have been wiped out completely. Much of Gaza has been literally reduced to a human graveyard, with scores of bodies buried beneath the rubble of destroyed and bulldozed homes. Neighborhoods and regions have been literally wiped off the map.
Gaza’s infrastructure and health care system has been decimated. According to the UN, an “intentional and targeted starvation campaign” has led to widespread famine and disease throughout the Gaza strip… Health care workers, humanitarian workers and journalists are being killed, injured and imprisoned in massive numbers. Human rights agencies have documented widespread torture and abuse of prisoners, including sexual abuse, throughout a network of torture camps…Please note that this unspeakable litany is not a review of the past year. It is a description of a nightmare that continues in this very moment, with no end in sight.
From a purely legal point of view, a myriad of academic and legal experts have long since confirmed the charge of genocide. As far back as October, Holocaust and genocide scholar Raz Segal has called Israel’s actions in Gaza “a textbook case of genocide.” On October 18, almost 800 scholars, lawyers and practitioners called on “all relevant UN bodies … as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to immediately intervene … to protect the Palestinian population from genocide.” More recently, Omer Bartov, a respected historian of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, accused Israel of “systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions.” But beyond the legal arguments, there is a critical, moral imperative behind this claim. For many Jews, it’s impossible to imagine — let alone say out loud — that a Jewish state, founded in the wake of the Holocaust, could possibly be perpetrating a genocide…The violence of October 7 did not occur in a vacuum. It was a brutal response to a regime of structural violence that has oppressed Palestinians for decades. At the root of this oppression is Zionism: a colonial movement that seeks to establish and maintain a Jewish majority nation-state in historic Palestine.
While Israel was founded in the traumatic wake of the Holocaust to create safety and security for the Jewish people, it was a state founded on the backs of another people, ultimately endangering the safety and security of Jews and Palestinians alike. Israel was established through what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba: the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. And since that time, Israel has subjected Palestinians to a regime of Jewish supremacy in order to maintain its demographic majority in the land. More than ever before, this High Holiday season calls for Jewish communities to reckon seriously with what Zionism has wrought. Not only in Gaza, but throughout the West Bank, where violence and ethnic cleansing is running rampant, and in Lebanon, which is now experiencing its own carnage and displacement, bringing the entire region ever deeper into war.
How could it be otherwise? This is what comes of an ideology and movement that from the beginning viewed Jewish safety as zero sum; in which our security can only be achieved at the expense of others, empowerment gained through the sheer power of superior military technology, stronger weapons and higher walls.”
In contrast to the US ruling class, some elements of the working class in the US have taken a principled position on the events in the Middle East. In the past, the leadership of the US trade union movement generally supported the US government’s imperial foreign policy without question. However, the United Electrical Workers, a union with 30,000 members, has severely condemned Israeli military actions and its elected officers urged President Biden to end all military aid to Israel immediately stating that it was “the only mechanism available to get Israel to agree to an immediate cease-fire.” UE has a history of opposing U.S. wars and occupations and it issued a strong call for an immediate cease-fire and opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel. The union also played an important role in encouraging other unions to sign onto an early cease-fire call, at a time when the Biden administration was discouraging its own staff from even uttering the word “cease-fire.”
In an interview that was carried by In These Times of Sept 27, 2024 and also reported on Portside, Carl Rosen, general president of UE, emphasized that labor unions in our country ought to be able to speak out regarding foreign policy issues affecting the United States. “This is activity being done with our tax dollars. This is activity which, in many cases, is undermining working people and the standards of working and living in other countries, and therefore contributes to the race to the bottom for all of us.” Rosen pointed out that “it doesn’t take much moral clarity to see that what is happening right now in the Middle East is absolutely atrocious… Number one, people are being killed by the hundreds. That ought to be enough to spark outrage among all Americans, because it’s being done with our money, our weapons. Second, there’s a very real concern here that Israel intends to do to southern Lebanon what they’ve done to Gaza, which is to bomb it back into the stone ages and make it uninhabitable. This is the definition of ethnic cleansing or genocide. And it’s totally unsupportable… And make no mistake: The United States has the ability to call them to heel. They have been our pit bull in the Middle East for decades now, and we have a responsibility to rein them in. And it’s only for domestic political considerations that that hasn’t happened yet, and because of the interests of the military-industrial complex in this country that is making obscene profits off of the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the Middle East.”
Countries in Western Europe are now facing the same split between the views of many of their people, sickened by the industrial-scale slaughter of innocent Palestinians and now Lebanese, many of them women and children, and the policy of the governments that had continued to send military supplies to Israel. The impact of public opinion is beginning to show some results as France’s President Macron has called for an embargo on military supplies to Israel saying “It is a priority to return to a political solution and to stop arms deliveries for the fighting in the Gaza Strip.”
Meanwhile, India that labels itself as the largest democracy in the world, and whose leader Narendra Modi considers himself as a Vishwaguru (World Guru), has made no statement on the genocide being carried out, preferring instead to issue inane calls for peace and a two-state solution. In the UN India recently abstained on a UN General Assembly resolution that called for an immediate ceasefire by a lopsided 124-14 margin with only the US and Israel and a few island states, prodded by the US no doubt, opposed. India has continued to supply arms to Israel through joint ventures such as the one between Adani and Elbit. The close friendship between Netanyahu and Modi along with Hindutva’s embrace of Zionism are determining factors. Some days ago, Modi issued a statement on the conflict denouncing “terrorism” that was clearly aimed at Hamas or Hezbollah, not Israel. Last month, Israeli terrorism was openly manifested in Lebanon when thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies booby trapped with explosives by Israel exploded killing several young children. Even a member of Israel’s Parliament, Ofer Cassif of the Hadash party, stated “Activating explosive devices in crowded places is an act of terrorism by any accepted definition. And it doesn’t matter who is responsible for it: the IDF, Hamas, the CIA or the Mossad.” Modi or his government have made no reference, let alone condemnation, to this naked act of terrorism by the Israeli government.
How far India has drifted from the views of Mahatma Gandhi is shown clearly by a statement Gandhi made in 1946 that incidentally also highlighted Jewish terrorism in establishing the state of Israel. In an article Gandhi wrote on 14 July 1946, he said “In my opinion, they (Jews) have erred grievously in seeking to impose themselves on Palestine with the aid of America and Britain and now with the aid of naked terrorism… Why should they depend upon American money or British arms to force themselves on an unwelcome land? Why should they resort to terrorism to make good their forcible landing in Palestine?”
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