[News] From Gaza to Congo: Zionism and the unlearned history of genocide

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 From Gaza to Congo: Zionism and the unlearned history of genocide
By Ramzy Baroud <https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012>

Wednesday 10-January-2024 -
https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/from-gaza-to-congo-zionism-and-the-unlearned-history-of-genocide/

Thousands of miles separate Uganda and Congo from the Gaza Strip, but these
places are connected to Palestine in ways that traditional geopolitical
analyses would probably fail to explain. On 3 January, though, it was
revealed that the far-right Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is
actively discussing proposals to expel millions of Palestinians to African
countries, in exchange for a fixed price.

The discussion about expelling millions of Palestinians from Gaza has
supposedly entered mainstream thinking in Israel since 7 October. However,
the fact that this discussion remains active over three months since the
start of Israel’s war against Gaza indicates that the Israeli proposals are
not an outcome of a specific historical moment, such as Operation Al-Aqsa
Flood, for example.

Even a quick glance at Israel’s historical records point to the fact that
the mass expulsion of Palestinians — known in Israel as “transfer” — was,
and remains, a major Zionist strategy which aims at fixing the apartheid
state’s so-called “demographic problem”.

Long before fighters from Al-Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian
movements stormed the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel on 7
October, Israeli politicians discussed on many occasions how to reduce the
overall Palestinian population to maintain a Jewish majority in historic
Palestine. The idea was not only confined to Israel’s extremists in the
cabinet today, but was also discussed by the likes of former Israeli
Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman when he suggested a proposal in 2014 for
a “population exchange plan”.

Even supposedly liberal intellectuals and historians have supported this
idea, both in principle and practice. A top Israeli historian, Benny
Morris, regretted in an interview with the liberal Israeli newspaper
Haaretz in January 2004 that Israel’s first Prime Minister, David
Ben-Gurion, failed to expel all Palestinians during the Nakba, the
catastrophic event of murder and ethnic cleansing that led to the creation
of the state of Israel on top of Palestinian towns and villages.

Further proof that the idea of “transfer” was not concocted on the spur of
the moment is the fact that comprehensive plans were produced immediately
after 7 October.

They include a position paper published by the Misgav Institute for
National Security and Zionist Strategy think tank on 17 October, and a
report released three days later by the Israeli news outlet, Calcalist,
which outlined a document proposing the same strategy.

That Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries openly and immediately declared
their total rejection of expelling Palestinians was an indication of the
degree of seriousness of those official Israeli proposals.

“Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans,”
said Netanyahu on 2 January, “and we are working on it.” His comments were
not unique. Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said that,
“What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration.”

It was then that Israeli official discourse adopted the term “voluntary
migration”. There is nothing “voluntary” about 2.2 million starving
Palestinians facing genocide as they are pushed systematically toward the
border region between Gaza and Egypt.

In its legal case submitted to the International Court of Justice (ICJ),
the government of South Africa included the planned ethnic cleansing of
Gaza by Tel Aviv as one of the main issues listed by Pretoria, which
accuses Israel of genocide.

Due to the lack of enthusiasm on the part of pro-Israel Western countries,
Israeli diplomats are circling the globe looking for governments which are
willing to accept ethnically-cleansed Palestinians. Imagine if this
behavior came from any other country in the world; a country that murders
civilians — children, women and men alike — and then shops around looking
for other states to accept the survivors in exchange for cash.

Not only has Israel made a mockery of international law, but it has also
set the bar at a new low for despicable behavior by any state, anywhere in
the world, at any time in history, ancient or modern. Nevertheless, the
world continues to watch, support — as in the case of the US and the UK —
or protest gently or vehemently, but without taking a single meaningful
step to stop the bloodbath in Gaza, or to block the possibility of truly
terrifying scenarios that could follow if the war does not end, and end
soon.

There is one thing that many people might not know, though: the Zionist
movement, the ideological institution that established Israel, had
considered the suggestion to move the world’s Jews to Africa and establish
their state there, prior to the choice of Palestine as the “Jewish national
home”. The so-called “Uganda Scheme” of 1903 was raised by Theodor Herzl,
the atheist journalist who founded political Zionism, at the Sixth Zionist
Congress. It was based on a proposal put forth by British Colonial
Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. The scheme eventually fell through, but the
Zionists continued to shop around for some other place before, finally — to
the misfortune of the Palestinians — settling on, and in, Palestine.

If we compare the genocidal language of Israel’s leaders of today, and
study their racist references to Palestinians, we can see a major overlap
with the way that Jewish communities were perceived by Europeans for
hundreds of years. The sudden Zionist interest in Congo as a potential
“homeland” for Palestinians further illustrates the point that the Zionist
movement continues to live in the shadow of its own history, projecting
European racism against Jews through Israel’s own racism against innocent
Palestinians.

Israel’s Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu proposed on 5 January that
Israelis “must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death.” We
do not need to struggle to find similar language used by German Nazis
against Jews in the first half of the 20th century. If history does repeat
itself, it has an odd, and unkind way of doing so.

We have been told that the world has learned from the mass killings of
previous wars, including the Holocaust and other World War Two atrocities.
Yet, it seems that the lessons have largely gone unlearned. Not only is
Israel now assuming the role of the mass murderer, but the Western world
also continues to play the role assigned to it in this historical tragedy.
Western leaders are either cheering Israel on, protesting politely, or
doing nothing at all.

*-Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
He is the author of five books. His latest is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken:
Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud is
a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC).*
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