Genocide
Gen·o·cide
noun
The total or partial destruction of an ethnic group, race or religion by cruel methods.
(Aurélio Dictionary)
By saying that “What is happening in the Gaza Strip and to the Palestinian people is like nothing else in history. In fact, it existed when Hitler decided to kill the Jews”, did Lula make a mistake?
The Brazilian president’s intention was to equate the Palestinian genocide with the Jewish genocide, but although the massive and systematic murder of innocents is always an equally repulsive act, regardless of the number of people affected, the State of Israel is demonstrating that it is high time for us to overcome the Holocaust as the ultimate criterion of humanity’s monstrosity.
There are many criteria that can also attest to the monstrosity of the conduct of states. One of them is historical responsibility. All those who experience a situation of injustice and cruelty, if they do not seek revenge, have a historical duty to fight to ensure that the suffering and barbarity they have endured is never repeated – with anyone, with any people, at any time. As we have seen, in the opinion of various organisations, world leaders, thinkers, among others – Jewish or not, in the face of all the efforts to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive so that it is never repeated, it is inconceivable that the State of Israel should still perpetuate the massacre in Palestine, a veritable open-air concentration camp.
In addition, there are many elements in the genocide committed by the State of Israel that must be taken into account so that we don’t allow ourselves to be so buried by the monstrosity of the Holocaust that we lose sight of the monstrosity committed against the Palestinians today. We know that the war against the Palestinian people is based on a great deal of confusion aimed at making anti-Semitism the right of defence of the Jewish people. This right of defence announced by the State of Israel has been used, however, as a seal for the formation, for decades, of a terrorist, murderous and genocidal state. Let us look at the elements:
Firstly, while the Third Reich in Germany lasted for 12 years, Palestinian apartheid has been going on for more than seven decades. Secondly, the atrocities committed in the Nazi concentration camps were condemned and repressed through a world war that did not allow the Holocaust to be naturalised and made it possible for the Jews to be liberated and obtain their state. The Palestinian genocide, on the other hand, has been distorted and naturalised by the spokespeople of global Zionism for decades, keeping the Palestinians massacred for all these years and with no hope of liberation in sight. Thirdly, the repulsive anti-Semitism is directed against a nation of people who today have the protection and adopt as their culture and home a plurality of states spread around the world. Hatred of the Palestinian people seeks to eliminate a fragile and vulnerable nation made up of just over five million people confined (imprisoned) in a narrow strip of land that has not even been guaranteed its right to form a state of its own.
There is another element – perhaps the most important one – which makes it inappropriate to say that the Palestinian genocide is equivalent to the Holocaust. The Jewish tragedy was an unprecedented event in human history. Just like the murderous atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, until the Holocaust it was impossible for the imagination to conceive that human beings would be capable of such atrocities. However, once they happened for the first time, the reiteration of such events can no longer be considered mere repetition. Those who carry out an unimaginable atrocity for the second time are not drawing on a wild cruel imagination. Instead, they are simply rationally and deliberately reproducing what the Western culture of which they are a part has established as immoral, repugnant and unacceptable.
When it comes to the terrorist, murderous and genocidal state of Israel, the Holocaust can no longer be used as the ultimate criterion of humanity’s monstrosity or as a way of shielding itself from criticism. We can no longer tolerate that all those who rebel against the State of Israel be threatened with the label of “anti-Semites”. The Jewish nation is not to be confused with the terrorist, murderous and genocidal state of Israel. To say that the terrorist, murderous and genocidal state of Israel has lost the legitimacy of using the Holocaust as a rhetorical device to shield its war crimes in no way detracts from the Jewish nation’s just struggle to preserve the vigilant memory of a past that must never be repeated against anyone, any people, at any time.
Perhaps it’s time to think about how today the terrorist, murderous and genocidal state of Israel and its Western allies are fuelling antisemitism in the world, given that their actions over the last seven decades are largely responsible for the bloodshed of innocent Jews and for shaming the memory of all those who were exterminated in the Hitler genocide.
Friends of the Earth Brazil therefore expresses its support for President Lula’s statement and rejects any kind of retraction on the part of the Brazilian government towards the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of the terrorist, murderous and genocidal state of Israel.
Friends of the Earth Brazil – 20th February 2024