The genocide in Palestine – how to prevent the next stage from happening
Palestinians inspect the destruction following an Israeli raid in Jenin city in the occupied West Bank on 6 August 2024
Ilan Pappé writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 7 September 2024:
As many of us had warned, eleven months into the genocide of Gaza, Israel is now focusing on the genocide of the West Bank.
In this case, it is a more cautious policy, since Israel cannot find easy pretexts as it did to justify its assault and genocide in Gaza. However, the narrative that Israel is using is essentially the same. In fact, it is more than a narrative, it is a myth that Israel’s supporters around the world continue to embrace and repeat.
The myth is this: Israel’s attack on Gaza was a retaliatory military operation while the current assault on the West Bank is a pre-emptive attack against Iran’s proxies in the region.
There is another layer to the myth, and that is the claim that Iran is motivated by the same objectives that have informed the Nazi genocide of the Jews. This is not a new line of propaganda, of course. Israeli academics, diplomats, and politicians attempted to Nazify the Palestinians ever since 1948. The most absurd part of that effort was the claim by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the Mufti had persuaded Hitler to commit the genocide of the Jews in Europe.
This old-new myth led to the sinister comparison between the soldiers and citizens killed on October 7, 2023, and the six million Jews slaughtered by the Nazis. Such a comparison is a total abuse of the Holocaust memory and, more importantly, an attempt to demonize the Palestinian anti-colonialist resistance, which began back in the 1920s – and will continue until Palestine is liberated.
There is no need to spend too much time refuting this kind of fabrication. What matters is that it still provides immunity in Western media and politics for the continued genocidal policies of Israel in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Readers of the Palestine Chronicle do not need to be convinced that the Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip constitute genocide. But what transpired in the last month is that the genocide is not just about mass killings of Palestinians but part of a wider project of erasing the Palestinians from their land.
This erasure strategy led to the total destruction of the universities and libraries in the Gaza Strip in the last eleven months. A barbaric act meant to wipe out the Palestinian identity, cultural heritage, and human capital.
This is also the motivation behind Israel’s actions in the West Bank, masqueraded as a preventive strike against a possible “terrorist” attack on Israel.