By JOÃO QUARTIM DE MORAES*

The extermination operations against the Palestinians of Gaza horrify without surprising: they are part of the logic of hatred and contempt of the colonizer for the people he subjugates.

With the support of Donald Trump and the hypocritical silence of most governments in liberal Europe, the Zionist state has continued, day after day, month after month, since October 2023, its slow and relentless operation of genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza. The images and reports that come from there reflect horror in a chemically pure state.

More than 50.000 defenseless civilians have already been massacred; about 120.000 have been wounded, among them many children who barely had time to begin life and old people who never knew a better life than that of the great ghetto in which they were cornered by Israel. To assess the genocidal dimensions of the ongoing aggression, it is enough to take into account that the total population of the Gaza Strip was around 2,1 million inhabitants.

At the end of the first decade of this century, Israeli public opinion howled in shock when José Saramago declared that what was happening in Palestine was “a crime that can be compared to what happened in Auschwitz.” Amos Oz, an Israeli writer who sometimes posed as a pacifist (whenever Israel was not at war, clean or dirty), accused José Saramago of being “anti-Semitic” and of demonstrating “incredible moral blindness.” What insolence! The moral blindness is not where he said it, but in using the memory of the victims of Hitler’s extermination to cover up Israeli state terrorism.

The head of the Tel Aviv government, Benjamin Netanyahu, is one of the most despicable political figures of our time. However, he cannot be held responsible for the repeated acts of violence committed against the Palestinian people, even more than his predecessors. The violence began with the colonial deception orchestrated by the British Empire, which made possible the creation of the State of Israel.

During the First World War, the British government, in order to strike a blow against the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany, promised independence to the Arabs, who at the time constituted 92% of the population of Palestine, if they rose up against the Turkish yoke. The Arabs trusted the promise and, fulfilling their part of the agreement, fought with weapons in hand against Ottoman domination. However, in 1917, Lord Balfour, the Foreign Secretary of the British Empire, also promised the multimillionaire Lord L.W. Rothschild, a financier of Zionism, a “national home” for the Jewish settlers established in Palestine.

After the war and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the British and their victorious French partners divided control of the region between them. Palestine was placed under the British Mandate, which immediately put Lord Balfour's trickery into effect by authorizing the mass entry of European Jews into Arab lands. The demographic composition changed considerably, in favor of the Jews: they had made up 10% of the population in 1922; by 1946 they had reached about a third of the inhabitants of Palestine, more than 600.000 in absolute numbers.

The UN had set the end of the British mandate for May 15, 1948. Determined to conquer as much territory as possible for the state they intended to proclaim on that date, between September 1947 and March 1948, the Zionist armed groups intensified their attacks on Palestinian villages, many of which were wiped off the map by the Haganah, the main clandestine Zionist armed organization, and by the Stern and Yrgun groups, death squads specialized in the most cruel and sinister forms of terrorist action.

In the early hours of Friday, April 9, 1948, the two squadrons made a surprise attack on the village of Deir Yassine, slaughtering its defenseless population in an orgy of bestiality that did not even spare pregnant women, whose wombs were stabbed open. Two hundred and fifty-four Palestinians were slaughtered; dozens of girls were raped, one, six years old, literally split in half.

The testimonies of the few survivors and the reports of English police officers were gathered by Sir RC Catling, Deputy Director-General of the Criminal Investigation Department in the “secret and urgent” folder no. 179/11017/65. One of the most objective and complete accounts of the Deir Yassin massacre is in the book Oh Jerusalem, written by journalists Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins.^[1]

Menachem Begin, the top leader of the Irgun and, as such, one of the most heinous political criminals of the 1948th century, was received by the Zionists of New York in December 9. Outraged, prominent members of the local Jewish community, not infected by the fascist-Zionist virus, issued a manifesto in which they firmly dissociated themselves from the executioners of Deir Yassine: “This town did not participate in the war and even refused to serve as a base for armed Arab groups. On April XNUMX, the terrorists [from the Stern and Irgun groups] attacked this peaceful village. […] They massacred […] almost all of the inhabitants, leaving some alive to display as prisoners on the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified by this act. […] But the terrorists […] were proud of the massacre, inviting all foreign correspondents […] to see the piled-up corpses […]”.

The founding of the Israeli state benefited from these methods of “ethnic cleansing” through death squads as abominable as the Storage space Hitlerian. The Palestinians who remained in the territories occupied by Israel were subjected to a regime of “apartheid“Worse even than that imposed on the indigenous peoples of South Africa by a minority of settlers of European origin. (This is what South Africans who have been subjected to this abominable discrimination are saying). The extermination operations against the Palestinians of Gaza are horrifying but not surprising: they are part of the logic of hatred and contempt of the colonizer for the people he subjugates.

*João Quartim de Moraes is a retired full professor of the Department of Philosophy at Unicamp. Author of, among other books, Lenin: an introduction (Boitempo). [https://amzn.to/4fErZPX]

Note

[1] Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins. Oh Jerusalem. Paris, Laffont, 1971, pp.363-369.

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