My Take | Palestinian genocide must not be compared with the Holocaust
- Both in terms of magnitude and similarity, mass killings in Gaza are closer to forgotten German slaughter against the Herero and Nama
Another day, another deadly trap for the Palestinian people. The Gaza health ministry said more than 100 were killed when Israeli forces opened fire on a desperate crowd swarming a food aid convoy. The Israelis claimed their soldiers only killed a few, the rest died from the stampede or being rolled over by the aid trucks. But what were the soldiers doing with the trucks anyway? Helping to distribute flour?
More than 30,000 Palestinians have now been killed in little under five months. The Israeli government is deliberately starving the population, thus threatening a modern-day famine. At this point, I don’t think there is any doubt that Israel is committing genocide, and any countries that enable it to continue, such as the United States and Germany, among others to a less degree, are complicit in this gravest of crimes. Political leaders from much of the West should just shut up and hang their heads in shame.
However, there is one significant point I fully agree with the Israelis and many Americans: the Palestinian genocide should never be compared with the Holocaust. That just confuses the issue and gives the Israelis the perfect excuse to charge critics with antisemitism and illegitimate comparison. That’s why Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was just being counterproductive by making that comparison recently.
One, it’s apples and oranges. Two, the scale or magnitude of the killings is also way off.
Rather, it’s the other German genocide, often unmentioned or just forgotten, that is much closer to what’s happening in Palestine.
Between 1904 and 1907, the German military killed up to 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama in colonised southwestern Africa, or what is Namibia today.
Unified Germany was late to the Great Game of Western imperialism. Bismarck was not a big fan. But the Germans did formally colonise the African region in the mid-1880s. Once German rule was established, various native groups were forced into slave labour, their land and cattle confiscated or killed.