Article by Jorge Cadima, collaborator of the International Department
If there were any doubts about the nature of the Zionist leaders in Israel, they were definitively shattered during the past week. In words and in deeds. During four days of death and destruction, Israel killed over 100 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. One third were children (Al Jazeera, 2.3.08). In the midst of this orgy of blood, Israel's Deputy Defence Minister, Matan Vilnai, declared to the Israeli army radio: «The more [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves» (BBC, 29.2.08, 12h24m20s GMT). Just like that: «holocaust». As the BBC news item – with the title «Israel warns of Gaza 'holocaust'» - makes clear, «'holocaust' is a term rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi genocide during World War II». The Deputy Minister's words stated what goes on in his soul.
The slaughter in Gaza recalls the Nazi-fascist doctrine that the life of a member of the "chosen people" must be "paid" with the lives of many untermenschen ("sub-human") civilians. Gaza is today what were Gernika, Lidice, Marzabotto or the hundreds of Russian and Byelorussian villages decimated by the Nazi hordes. It is the ultimate collective punishment of a people. A people which, to a large extent, is made up of refugees, expelled from their homes and their lands in the operations of ethnic cleansing (to use the words of the courageous Israeli historian Ilan Pappe) that have accompanied the six decades of the Zionist State .
In a clear display of the complicities and agreements between imperialism and Zionism, the (highly "news-worthy") scandalous statement of Israel's Deputy Minister was soon minimized, concealed. Two and a half hours after posting the above mentioned news item on their website, the BBC replaced it with another one, in which the word «holocaust» gave way to «disaster». Only half-way through the news item did the information appear that the Hebrew word used was, in fact, «shoah».
Nazi-fascism in the 20s and 30s was the most violent and ferocious response of a crisis-ridden capitalism, that had been shaken by the October Revolution, the growth of the working-class movement, its profound economic crisis. Nazism used anti-Semitism, which for centuries had been promoted by the European ruling classes, to nourish its war against what it called the «judeo-bolshevik plot». Today, a capitalism in profound crisis, decrepit, corrupt, permanently engendering wars and poverty, incapable of solving its contradictions or the problems of Humankind, appears to be opting for the same solutions of force. The phraseology of «judeo-bolshevism» has given way to that of «islamo-fascism». But the contents of the policies are the same: the indiscriminate use of force to crush the peoples, the workers, those who resist their domination. The Zionist State is today in the ranks of the machinery of imperial and class domination that was responsible, sixty years ago, for the death of so many million Jews. Its leaders will have to be held accountable for their extremely long list of crimes.
The Palestinians' unending suffering is a scandal for the whole of Humankind. Their heroic resistance, in the most difficult and despairing conditions, is a call for our duty of solidarity with the peoples who are in the front-lines of imperialist terror.