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<h1 class="gmail-single_title">From Gaza to Congo: Zionism and the unlearned history of genocide</h1>
<div class="gmail-article-author"><h3>By <a href="https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250012"> Ramzy Baroud </a></h3></div>
<p class="gmail-single_date">Wednesday 10-January-2024 - <font size="1"><a href="https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/from-gaza-to-congo-zionism-and-the-unlearned-history-of-genocide/">https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/from-gaza-to-congo-zionism-and-the-unlearned-history-of-genocide/</a></font></p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>-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).</em></p>
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