No doubt this is apartheid and genocide
A response to Paul Trewhela former MK supporter and author of Quatro, the Exile History of the ANC and SWAPO on the causes of the crisis in Gaza
From the standpoint of the defenders of Israel nothing can ever explain or justify the events of October 7, but October 7 can justify anything and everything.
The first important question that the historian Paul Trewhela (pictured above) directs at me relates to the October 7 attack. He refers to my article, Why Gaza is not a Prison, and wonders why I did not discuss the attack on the military installations of Israel and nearby kibbutzim. Firstly, this attack was not the starting point of history and it would be a mistake to push out of view everything that preceded it, including the daily kidnappings, land grabs, settler pogroms, house demolitions, malicious imprisonment and the state-directed murder of countless Palestinians up to and including on 6 October — factors which were the effective and direct precursor to the massive attack.
To be clear, in that article I was intent mainly on clarifying that the Gaza Strip is not a prison, as is often said, because prisons are for persons who have been convicted of a crime. Prisoners are not routinely exterminated by airstrikes or starved to death. Gaza was to all intents and purposes a concentration camp, which was degraded to an extermination camp after October 7. I do not think any survivor or fair-minded historian will disagree with me on this.
From a distance — amid all the claims and counter-claims I must admit that in the fog of war the details of what happened on the morning of October 7 were not immediately clear to me, which is why I did not write on that subject specifically and did not expand on it until more evidence came to light.
Shockingly, it has since emerged that besides using armored tanks for artillery strikes against the captured kibbutzim, the IDF air force conducted some 945 airstrikes and fired on the fighters and hostages 11,000 times from helicopter gunships, according to Israeli news sources.
That the army relentlessly shelled the homes of the people who were trapped in the area during the attack by Hamas is also attested to by hostages that survived that day. If we look at the scale of the damage to cars and homes, it is inconceivable that the Hamas gunmen, armed only with handheld weapons could cause such carnage.
Therefore, at the time I focused on the subject of Gaza as a concentration camp — something I could prove beyond reasonable doubt — and did not try to impose my assumptions about October 7 on the reader, as the evidence was not yet clear.
But now we know that Israel killed many Israelis in that day. At this point it is not yet clear who killed more people that day, Hamas or Israel, but we know for certain who had the greater firepower and capacity for violence,. We also know from the former minister of defense that the Hannibal directive, which calls for the elimination of hostages, was enforced as official policy.
Israeli officials, as well as sympathetic media outlets in the West and their main sponsor at the time, Joe Biden, have repeatedly propagated the claim that 40 babies were beheaded and women cut open and raped by Hamas, but up to this day we have not seen the names of these babies, or their gravesites or heard from their bereaved parents, nor have we seen any testimony to the mass rapes that were alleged. What we could see from afar were mainly attacks by Hamas fighters on military installations.
Now even if I suspect some terrible things happened, how can I in full confidence claim certainty about things that I have no evidence for? Surely that is not journalism.
Yet we have seen actual evidence of Palestinian babies shredded by Israeli airstrikes, targeted by sniper fire and artillery strikes from land and sea, with many cut to pieces, burnt alive or torn from limb to limb, some entirely disintegrated and others beheaded by the bombs. But Trewhela – who was at one time the editor of Freedom Fighter, a publication of the armed wing of the ANC, Umkontho we Sizwe, which was regarded as a terrorist organization by the SA government – can seemingly not comprehend the motives of the armed resistance in Palestine and has kept mum on such unspeakable atrocities committed daily against the natives, for which there is ample and graphic evidence.
Why the eerie silence? Are Palestinian children’s lives not worth anything, or does he consider them all as deserving of such brutality? Many of the victims were not yet old enough to pronounce their own names before they left this world. Should we regard all Palestinian children as terrorists in the making, as we are told?
Weaponizing sexual violence
Although it is a difficult subject to broach without care, throughout history sexual violence has been a common feature of military conflict. It is therefore not impossible that such things took place on that tragic day in October 2023, although at present we do not have any incontrovertible evidence or testimony to prove it.
What we do know is that the released hostages have denied that they were subjected to rape or torture. On the contrary some have publicly attested to the fact that Palestinian fighters under fire shielded them with their own bodies from Israeli bombardment.
The evidence of sexual violence on the part of the occupying forces is frankly far more prolific, while claims of such atrocities by the resistance has rarely been substantiated.
There is a further danger in using such incidents and reports to legitimate genocide. In the African context, after the Herero uprising against the German colonists in 1904 there were reports and allegations in the German papers of incidents of rape committed by the Herero. The colonial government – despite the long history of sexual violence against the natives by the settlers – weaponized such reports of sexual violence against white women as justification for genocide and launched a campaign of extermination in Namibia (then German South West Africa) in October 1904.
The Herero people must leave this land. If they do not, I will force them out with the Great Canon. Within the German borders, every Herero, armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children – I will drive them back to their people or have them fired upon. This is my decision for the Herero people. – The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, Lothar von Trotha
Von Trotha’s order is eerily reminiscent of what Netanyahu said in the aftermath of October 7, when he called for the extermination of the Amalek.
Do you condemn Hamas?
As to the underlying question, whether I condemn Hamas, which I understand is the basic requirement for acceptance into polite society: the fact is that I have long sympathized with the Palestinian people’s struggle for sovereignty and human rights, although I have not had any dealings with Hamas nor identified with their ideological-theological positions, nor do I equate the people and the party that happens to be in power at any given time.
Even if Hamas ceased to exist today, the Palestinian struggle for the right to self-determination would continue. Ontologically and historically, the two are related, but they not the same.
Making peaceful resistance impossible
Yet we cannot ignore the fact that when the people in Gaza under the leadership of Hamas sought to raise awareness of their plight by means of peaceful protest against the siege and wall of apartheid wall, as during the Great March of Return in 2018, which lasted many months. But they were gunned down day after day, leaving at least 185 unarmed protestors dead and close to 10,000 mutilated by sniper fire.
The world was outraged by this atrocious response to the indigenous people’s peaceful movement for basic rights. By their behavior Israel further legitimized the violence of the anti-colonial resistance in the eyes of the world, because they showed that there was evidently no peaceful means to protest against the occupying power,.
Sitting at a comfortable distance from the fire it may be easy for me to say, “I would have chosen different or better means of resistance than the desperate path chosen by the former political prisoner, Sinwar, and his comrades in October 2023.” But in the final analysis I must agree with Arundhati Roy (to paraphrase her):
“I am in no position to tell the oppressed people how to wage their struggle and how to resist their own extermination.”
Who actually supported Hamas?
The question that we should not ignore though is who actually supported Hamas?
Hamas., after all, did not exist before Israel came into being, but came into existence in the late 1980s as a direct response to the colonial state in Palestine and its brutal operations, which is the raison d'être for the very existence of both Hamas, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the other resistance factions.
Mujama al-Islamiya: which the cleric Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was founded as a charity in 1973 and operated schools, clinics, and mosques in Gaza. Israel officially recognized it in 1979 and provided licenses, funding, and logistical support, believing it would weaken the PLO’s influence. Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev (military governor of Gaza), admitted to financing Yassin’s network to undermine Fatah. Mujama later evolved into Hamas in 1987 during the First Intifada as the resistance took root.
Consider against this background, more recent reports that show Hamas was regarded by top Israeli officials as a means of dividing the Palestinian national liberation movement (mainly the PLO) to delay and prevent independent statehood.
To the point, at a Likud party conference in 2019 Netanyahu openly said:
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas ... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.
He is indicted by his own words.
The evidence thus shows that it was not Jade, but Netanyahu, who supported Hamas and helped maintain their hold on power by funding them with millions of dollars in cash transfers from Qatar that passed through Israel into their hands. Exposing this fact led to the recent tussle over the position of the head of the Shin Bet.
So I hope I have answered these two questions: 1) why I did not go into detail on the events of October 7 as the key facts of what exactly happened were not quite clear to me at the time, and 2) why I did not publicly condemn Hamas, because my position is that I cannot condemn the symptom without condemning the cause. The occupation is the cause of the resistance, not the other way around. The difficult questions should be directed at the man who openly funded and bolstered Hamas.
‘There are no innocents in Gaza’
One more oft-repeated lie that needs to be dispelled is the claim that “They are all Hamas” and that all the people trapped in the Gaza Strip are guilty of some crime — presumably the crime of wanting to be free from colonial oppression — which accusation is considered an existential threat to the occupation forces, and is being used by fanatical statesmen and soldiers to justify the mass expulsion and extermination of the entire population, including the murder of countless children under the age of one and babies (embryos) still in the womb.
The fact is that the last election in Gaza was in 2006. Considering that the median age in Gaza is 18 years, this means that half the population today was not even born when Hamas was elected to power. Moreover, with only 47% of the popular vote, most people at the time voted against them. Since then nobody has had a chance to vote for a political leadership of their choice, because the decades-long siege and political crisis ensured that normal democratic processes would be impossible.
How then can the average person in Gaza be held responsible for the fact that Hamas was in power in 2023 when the majority of them had never had a chance to vote? More so, how can the average person be held liable for what Hamas was secretly planning on October 7 if apparently not even the Israeli intelligence agencies knew about it, since it was a clandestine operation that the average person in Gaza and Israel simply had no knowledge of ahead of the attack?
Now while many things may be in dispute, there is no dispute over the fact that collective punishment of civilians (and even the unborn) is a crime of the highest order.
So, instead of asking me to condemn Hamas and the people caged in and being wiped out by Israel, Trewhela should be asking why the man with his hand on the lever, Netanyahu, whom he seemingly admires, helped to prop up Hamas and fund them, even though it would prove detrimental to the Israelis he was elected to protect.
On the role of the Grand Mufti
To support his undisguised contempt for Islam and its adherents, Trewhela also invokes the dubious claim and talking point of Netanyahu to the effect that Hitler did not really want to execute the Jews, but despite his apparent reluctance a Muslim cleric encouraged him to.
I can do no better than to cite the response of Nasim Ahmed in the Middle East Monitor on this trope:
Images of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, with senior officers of the Third Reich has been a stock-in-trade of Israel’s propaganda dehumanising of Palestinians and their cause. It’s one of the countless bad-faith uses of history that is routine in the demonisation of Palestinians and intended to cast doubt on the motives behind their resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been guilty of this more than most; in a remarkable re-writing of history the Likud leader said that it was Al-Husseini who suggested the genocide of the Jews to Adolf Hitler. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin Al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine]’,” Netanyahu told the World Zionist Congress in 2015.
According to Netanyahu’s version of history, Hitler then asked: “What should I do with them?” and the mufti replied: “Burn them.” In the storm sparked by the comments, Netanyahu was denounced as having absolved Hitler of the crime of murdering six million Jews.
Casting doubt on Netanyahu’s remarks, Professor Dan Michman, the head of the Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University and head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Centre, said that while Hitler did indeed meet the mufti, this happened after the Final Solution began.
An important fact that is also brushed over in the Zionist account, which further exposes the bad-faith ahistorical weaponisation of Al-Husseini’s meeting with Nazi leaders, is the position of the mufti himself. Al-Husseini was not elected by the Palestinians, and the office he claimed to hold — Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — was a creation of British imperial rule in Palestine. To counter the influence of the Ottoman Grand Mufti, the British military government under ardent Zionist Ronald Storrs created the office of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and empowered the Al-Husseini family.
The Grand Mufti was thus an imperial functionary appointed by the occupying British power and no elected or legitimate representative of the Palestinians, yet his meeting with Hitler is still used to legitimize the oppression and even extermination of the natives population up to the present day.
Now if Trewhela were to reflect honestly on the painful past and who really collaborated with Hitler, he would recall the Haavara Agreement of 1933 and other actual and tangible forms of collaboration between Zionists and the Nazis.
According to the Israeli news outlet, YNet,
… in the beginning of Nazi rule in Germany, way before anyone could have imagined the horrors that would be committed by the German people, there were some Zionist Jews who saw Hitler’s political doctrine as an advantage. The Nazis didn’t conceal their desire to get rid of Germany’s Jews, and some Zionists saw it as an opportunity to boost the rate of Jewish immigration from Germany to the Briths Mandate of Palestine, Land of Israel. One of them was Dr. Kurt Tuchler, a German Jewish judge and an active member of the Zionist Federation of Germany. Even before Adolf Hitler was named chancellor, the Federation decided to contact Nazi Party officials who they thought might support the Zionist goal.
He would also recall the role of the Judenräte, both in policing the Jews in the ghettoes and facilitating their deportation and extermination, because these elements were far more effective in helping to effect Hitler’s plan than the Grand Mufti ever was and tragically so.
To justify this collaboration and the sacrifice of innocent Jewish people on the altar of expedience, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski of the Łódź Ghetto, for example — echoing Cleopas the high priest appointed by Rome at the time of the execution of Jesus — infamously said, "I must cut off limbs to save the body", and so it is a documented tragedy that the Judenräte facilitated even child deportations to the concentration camps. Jacob Gens of Vilna Ghetto reportedly said they preferred to save “productive” Jews for the colony in Palestine and to sacrifice the elderly and sick in their stead.
In her seminal book, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt argued that the Judenräte facilitated the Holocaust by rounding up Jews for deportation, thereby reducing Nazi logistical burdens, by acting as their policemen and enforcers. She argued that their cooperation actually increased the death toll.
With reference to the British-appointed Grand Mufti mentioned above, f we are to use Trewhela and Netanyahu’s logic, that a whole people can be reckoned as guilty on account of the actions and opinions of a few, would that require us to condemn all Jewish people, including the victims of the Nazi holocaust and its most ardent opponents for the readiness of a few perfidious men to collaborate with the fascists?
This issue of the role of the collaborator was also taken up by Tony Greenstein in great detail in his book, Zionism During the Holocaust: The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of the State and Nation. For documentary evidence of the collaboration between the Zionists and the Nazis, he relied much on the 51 documents translated and published by Lenni Brenner.
Notably, the haunting words of Theodor Herzl still ring in our ears, for the founder of modern Zionism wrote that:
We want to let respectable anti-Semites participate in our project, respecting their independence which is valuable to us as a sort of people's control authority… It would be excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites (anständige und akkreditierte Antisemiten) as liquidators of property. To the people they would vouch for the fact that we do not want to bring about the impoverishment of the countries we leave. The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.
Former London mayor Ken Livingstone was humiliated and hounded out of British politics and vilified to the day of his death for pointing out that some Jews had collaborated with Nazi Germany, although — as noted above — it is a thoroughly documented historical fact. The Haavara Agreement, signed on 25 August 1933, was finalized after three months of talks by the Zionist Federation of Germany, the Anglo-Palestine Bank (under the directive of the Jewish Agency) and the economic authorities of Nazi Germany. It was a major factor in the forced migration/expulsion of approximately 60,000 German Jews to Palestine between 1933 and 1939.
The deal however depended on the Zionists’ willingness and capacity to break the global boycott against Nazi Germany. The Agreement, with the pace of German rearmament and reduced reliance on trade with the West, had by 1937 largely undermined the Jewish boycott on Germany and gave the fascist regime a fresh lease on life. (See Francis Nicosia; The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, p. 150 and the Haaretz report for more on this.)
To suggest the political sentiments of the Mufti mean that all Palestinians as being guilty of the same intent and mindset is to make the particular individual feature into a false universal,, to essentialize the traits or view of one person to all people of a certain place. This would be the same as accusing all the Germans of being Nazis, or all the Jews of being Zionists, which we know it simply not true. It is a false generalization. One with lethal consequences.
The reader would also do well to reflect also on the violence history of the predecessors of Likud in the shape of the terrorist Lehi group, the Stern gang, and the Hagannah and their readiness and repeated offers (pleas) to collaborate with Hitlerite Germany, a fact of history which many seem to overlook, and for which there is ample evidence. In 1940, Avraham Stern of the Irgun made a proposal to Germany, which in part said,
‘The NMO [National Military Organization], which is well acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and toward Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:
Common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.
Cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed folkish-national Hebraium would be possible and, The establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.
Under these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.”
Jewish resistance to fascist elements
Not long after the great war, Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt were among prominent Jewish thinkers, who became aware of the fascistic tendencies of key Zionist groups in Palestine and undersigned an historic letter to the New York Times in 1948, in which they distanced themselves from the fascistic elements of the colonial project and warned:
The public avowals of [Menachim] Begin's party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.
They went on to recall:
“A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin” on April 9, 1948, during the Arab-Israeli war, when the Irgun and the Stern Gang “attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants – 240 men, women and children – and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem”.
Under the leadership of the most ardent Zionists, the new settlers from Europe soon turned their pent-up rage and weapons against the very people who had taken them in, forcing the Palestinians from their homes time and again, and committing unbelievable atrocities against the natives that continue to this day, this hour.
How Islam saved Jewry
Now for the sake of historical accuracy, we need to take a small step back in time — say 2000 years — to the destruction of the temple and banishment of the Judeans.
Given the austere contempt for the Muslim and his faith that we see in the writings of Trewhela and the anti-Arab policies of Netanyahu, we must note the ironic historical fact that after the expulsion of the Judeans from Jerusalem by Emperor Hadrian following the Bar Kochba revolt (132-136 CE), the Jews were only invited to return to the city 600 years later after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem by Umar ibn al-Khattab in 638 CE, who offered protection to Jews and Christians.
History records that in subsequent centuries many Jews converted to Islam — whether through marriage or by assimilation, coercion or doctrinal persuasion — just as many had turned to Christianity during the late Roman and Byzantine era and again after the Crusader conquests. The logical inference is that many of the inhabitants of Palestine today are the descendants of the Judeans who had converted to Christianity and Islam over the centuries.
This lineage is borne out by linguistic, genetic and archeological evidence pertaining to the biological and cultural affinity of the modern-day Palestinians to the ancient Judeans. At any rate, the native Palestinian is for the most part infinitely more closely related by lineage and tradition to the Judeans of old than the recent arrivals from Germany, Eastern Europe, Russia, Ukraine and the United States, who purport to be God’s Chosen People and the sole heirs to the land.
That said, regarding the holy book of the Jews, the Tanakh — which forms the basis of what Christians call the Old Testament — our modern translations all derive from evidence in the Masoretic text. Now history tells us that the Masoretic scribes in Tiberias and Baghdad standardized the Hebrew Bible’s vowel and cantillation marks between the 7th and 10th centuries and thus created an authoritative text that we still rely on, which — as noted — still forms the primary basis of all modern translations.
The Masoretes lived during the period of Abbasid and Andalusian Umayyad rulers (8th to 13th centuries) , when Jewish communities evidently thrived and produced a great deal of critical scholarship. Muslim-ruled Spain (Al-Andalus) also became a center for Jewish philology, with figures like Moses ben Maimon (12th century) writing in Judeo-Arabic and engaging with both Islamic and Jewish thought. Saladin later employed Maimonides as his personal physician in Egypt, enabling Maimonides to write his monumental works, including the Mishneh Torah.
Beside the Masoretic text (notwithstanding the Samaritan version of the Torah) there were no other manuscripts of the Tanakh available to scholars prior to the discovery of the fragmentary Qumran scrolls in the 1940s. Therefore we must conclude that if the Muslim rulers did not allow its reproduction, study and preservation, there would have been no Tanakh today to form the doctrinal basis of Judaism, as we would have had to rely on oral tradition, which is far less stable than the textual tradition.
Further evidence of Muslim patronage of Jewish scholarship is also found, for example in the fact that Caliph Abd al-Rahman III (912–961 CE) of Cordoba appointed a Jewish polymath, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, as his court physician and diplomat. Ibn Shaprut later sponsored Jewish scholars, including Menahem ben Saruq, who compiled the first Hebrew dictionary. Samuel ibn Naghrillah, a Jewish vizier in Granada, was a patron of Hebrew poetry and Talmudic studies under the Berber kings. By all accounts, Islamic culture played an indispensable role, not only in preserving the works of Plato and seminal tracts in Western philosophy, but also in in patronage and the preservation of Jewish language and culture by facilitating, firstly the return of the Jews to Jerusalem and through the preservation of their most important ancient literary works and cultural practices.
Even the right-leaning Jewish Chronicle concedes this in an unchallenged opinion piece titled ‘So, What did the Muslims do for the Jews?’ in which the author affirms that “Islam saved Jewry.” There we read that
“Had Islam not come along, Jewry in the West would have declined to disappearance and Jewry in the East would have become just another oriental cult.”
I need not belabor the point, that despite their visceral hatred and barely disguised contempt for the Muslim, Trewhela and Netanyahu must concede that if it had not been for Islamic culture and tolerance, there would likely be no Judaism in any substantive form as we know it today. On it thus not unfair to say their hatred of Islam is sorely misplaced, for without Islam there would be no Judaism as we know it today.
In the time of the Islamic conquest, many Jews converted to Islam. it is a fact. One last example should suffice, which strongly suggests that Jewish thinkers were also instrumental in the early development of Islamic thought. Ka‘b al-Aḥbār, for example, a 7th century Jewish rabbi converted to Islam during the Rashidun Caliphate and became a prominent Islamic scholar and advisor to Caliph Umar.
The Jewish Encyclopedia says of him, that he was
‘One of the most prominent fathers of Moslem tradition, and one of those who introduced into this branch of Arab literature the method as well as many details of the Jewish Haggadah. (d 32 or 35 a.h. (652 or 655 C.E.).’'
As could be expected, others converted voluntarily due to intermarriage or for doctrinal and intellectual reasons, or perhaps even to avoid the tax on Jews and Christians. The evidence is clear that the native Palestinians today are more closely related to the Judeans of old than the recent white settlers from Europe who claim the sole bearers of authentic Jewish culture and heritage.
The Myth of Moses
In his call to exterminate the Amelek, Netanyahu invoked the powerful ‘memory’ of Moses. This rhetorical move of appeal to Scripture, however, involves the invocation of a false memory,. Prominent historians and leading Israeli scholars, such as professors Israel Finkelstein, Yonathan Adler as well as Gad Barnea have shown that there is no evidence of any great Exodus from Egypt, nor of any conquest of Jericho by Joshua in the late Bronze Age. Russel Gmirkin and others have shown there was no trace or knowledge of Moses nor any recorded observance of the Torah until the 3nd century BCE at the earliest.
They, like all well-educated people today, understand these biblical stories to be rather late fabrications. There is also no evidence of Jewish synagogues (a Greek word) before the Hellenistic period. The entire biblical premise on which the white settlers, who deem themselves the Chosen People, thus claim the land of Palestine as their own God-given right is fictional and false, because it rests on the claim that Moses granted it to them already in the Bronze Age as an endowment from God.
Yet even in the 4th century BCE — as the surviving records from, Elephantine Island in Egypt show — the Yahwists (who identified as worshippers of Yao (Yahweh) knew nothing of Moses or his commands, nor of any Exodus, Passover, Sabbath observance, or any of Moses’ prohibitions. They had their own temple to Yao at Elephantine, with the blessing of the high priest in Jerusalem. Neither they nor the high priest in Jerusalem at the time, Yohanan, who had coins minted with his face on, showed any knowledge or observance of the laws of Moses as set out in the Torah.
All this only goes to show that the claim that an unknowable deity named Yao (or Yahweh) (trust me bro) gave the land to his preferred people as their permanent endowment by the command of Moses some time in the Bronze Age, and with it the right to exterminate the inhabitants and enslave their neighbors is simply ridiculous, ahistorical and unsupported either by evidence or logic or basic morality.
Netanyahu’s invocation of the memory of Moses and his call to exterminate the Amalek, as if it were the fulfilment of biblical injunctions rests on a foundation of myth and ancient literary fiction. Israel’s foundational story, its exceptionalism, its call to endless war are based on a theological fiction, om a false story and the invocation of the false memory of Moses, a mythical figure from a mythical past.
What was Israel supposed to do?
To return to the issue at hand. Trewhela also asks in the context of October 7: What was Israel supposed to do to defend itself? In response, we may rightly ask what it is that Israel is defending at such great cost.
Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter and many political luminaries and people familiar with the situation on the ground have characterized Israel as a brutal apartheid state, even worse than South Africa ever was, for the Afrikaner government never bombed the townships nor tried to starve the natives to death. The bifurcated legal system which denies the natives equal rights, and the racist atrocities committed against the Palestinians, the whole history of settler violence from prior to 1948 would take many volumes to record and could fill a monumental encyclopedia, perhaps libraries, on the subject. It will no doubt also occupy and befuddle the minds of many generations of scholars, but the inescapable fact is that the status quo is morally indefensible.
Trewhela, who once presented as an anti-apartheid fighter, who endured imprisonment and torture for his readiness to support armed resistance against the apartheid state, should ask whether apartheid is worth defending today?
Under international law, and all conceivable norms an occupied people have the right to defend themselves by force of arms, but an occupying power cannot claim any such right. In the same way, a rapist or an intruder who breaks into someone’s house cannot claim any right of self-defense.
Moreover, let us not forget that by 20 October Hamas had offered to release all the Israeli hostages in exchange for the release of thousands of Palestinians held in detention by Israel, including hundreds of children that Israel holds in captivity either without charge, or on what are often frivolous and trumped-up charges.
The tyrant in Tel Aviv, however, refused to negotiate in good faith or be deterred from his ambition to use this tragic occasion to ethnically cleanse the whole area and utterly exterminate “the Amalek” and take their lands, while preparing for wider war. It is for this reason that there are daily protests on the streets of the capital, as Israelis accuse him of sacrificing the hostages on the altar of his own ambitions, when he had many opportunities to save them all through a negotiated settlement. But that would require him to concede that he is dealing with human beings that have legitimate aspirations, not with animals, something he’s not prepared to do.
This is tragic for everyone concerned. As much as we weep for the Palestinian mothers and children, one cannot but feel the pain of the families in Israel who are still waiting to hear from their loved ones while Netanyahu insists on indiscriminately bombing everything in sight. I am sure there is no person in their right mind who does not want to see the hostages freed and returned to their families, but Netanyahu’s obstinacy has made this nearly impossible..
Thus we should ask whether the policy of the extermination and expulsion of the natives is the only option, as Netanyahu insists and as Trewhela’s question implies?
Was the Hannibal directive to sacrifice the Israeli hostages the only conceivable way to deal with the hostage situation? I think not. It would have been possible with their sophisticated surveillance technology and focused intelligence operations after October 7 to conduct a surgical and expert police operation to identify and extract the guilty parties rather than try to kill off the whole population by the most barbaric means in revenge, the vast majority of whom had absolutely nothing to do with the October 7 attack and were totally unaware of it until after the fact.
If the Israeli leaders were minded to recognize the legitimacy of the Palestinian people’s aspiration to live and be free in their lands, a compromise could have led to a political settlement to release the hostages immediately and map the way forward to a solution for all the people that inhabit the land between the river and the sea. But no. Instead the personifications of the racism branded the Palestinians as animals while leading politicians and military men vowed to blot them out from under the sun.
As in South Africa, where white people were vastly outnumbered, it would not have been impossible to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the conflict in which everyone between the river and the sea enjoys equal rights under the law. But this was unthinkable to those who would be sole claimants and absolute masters of the land.
There were clearly a number of alternatives available to secure the immediate release of the hostages, including specialized police operations, honest negotiations, and political and humanitarian concessions to achieve a peaceful outcome, but instead it suited Likud and its allies and arms suppliers in the US and Europe better to opt for Armageddon and to cause destruction to people and planet of biblical proportions through the destruction of a 5000 year old city and the extermination of the people they deemed to be the Amalek.
Indeed, more heavy munitions have been dropped on Gaza over the past few months than on all the cities of Europe during World War 2 combined. By November 2023, Israel had already dropped explosives equivalent to two nuclear bombs (each Hiroshima bomb yielded ~15,000 tons of TNT). By mid-2024, the total reached 70,000+ tons, far exceeding the Hiroshima/Nagasaki blasts. It has been a lot more since.
Call it by its Name
Despite all the extreme brutality we have been forced to witness over the past 18 months in restless agony, Trewhela in a recent email objects to my use of the term “genocidal maniacs” to describe the behavior of the soldiers and politicians from Israel, but this is really the most mild of terms I can find, for it is hard to summon words suitable to depict the sheer carnage and heartless massacres and destruction that we see unfold every day. It is a special and cruel kind of torture for the world.
The violence and its sorrowful consequences exceed the limits of language. One can hardly find words to describe the suffering unleashed on the Strip and on the world by the crushing and amputation of an essential part of the human body, for it is not possible to destroy one part of humanity without damaging the whole.
Yet Trewhela would suggest that opposing genocide and calling it by its name is somehow disrespectful and immoral., perhaps even anti-Semitic. The fact is that what the Israelis are doing to their brown-skinned neighbors they are also doing to themselves, for Israeli society is not only deeply damaged by it, but stands debased and disgraced before the whole world. It is now deeply traumatized, isolated and by all accounts on the brink of economic, political and psychological collapse.
The Zionist colonial state has now become a pariah and a gross anomaly in world affairs: isolated, reviled, and despicable in the eyes of all humanity. Meanwhile actual anti-Semitic strife has reared its unsightly head everywhere, endangering innocent Jewish people who have nothing to do with these unsightly crimes against humanity.
Netanyahu kept promising “total victory,” but what sort of victory is this that leaves you isolated and disgraced in the eyes of all humanity? Where is the honor in bombing hospitals and universities, in killing doctors, nurses and professors and even the beautiful ones who are not yet born? It is a disgrace.
Trewhela can try to shame me for refusing to accept the status quo, for refusing to acquiesce to the violence and self-righteousness of the settler, for opposing genocide by any means at my disposal,. Just as all right-minded people opposed Von Trotha’s extermination plans, as did Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht with might and main until he was finally recalled in 1908, and just as any sensible person would have supported the armed resistance of those who fought so against all odds in the Warsaw Uprising to resist the plans of the Nazis by every means possible, so too it is good and noble in our own time to oppose such atrocities by any means necessary and to lend support and solidarity to the oppressed and besieged in Palestine, or wherever they may be, regardless of their skin color and their religious creed.
Genocide remains the greatest of all conceivable crimes. We should not be shy or hesitant to oppose it with everything in our power, but must go boldly forth against it.
In closing
I conclude by remembering my grandfather Cecil McClune, who joined Jan Smuts in Cape Town in 1939 to go fight alongside the Allies on the side of General Montgomery against Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s forces in north Africa, helping to halt the Nazis’ advance toward the Suez Canal in 1942, so marking a turning point in the war. Not forgetting the great sacrifices of that generation that stopped Rommel and the fascists in their tracks, it is incumbent on us to uphold this noble anti-fascist tradition and to oppose by word and deed any and all attempts to commit such evil deeds against humanity.
After all we have seen, we do not need to doubt what has become plain as day. Zionism is the Nazism of our time. We must therefore say clearly to those who would intimidate, punish or try to shame us into silence, as to those who would insist they have the right to commit crimes against humanity: “No pasarán!”