Graham Wroe

Israel has massacred 70 people in Gaza last night and today, after announcing the ceasefire deal (which they are already trying to sabotage). Just unbelievable levels of depravity. It's impossible to fathom.

Germany's active support for Israel's genocide against Palestinians is all the more sickening when you understand the striking parallels with Germany's first genocide, against the Herero and Nama people in Namibia. Germany colonized Namibia in the late 19th century and began seizing land from the Herero and Nama, forcing them into reservations, abusing and murdering them, and establishing settlements on their territory - exactly as Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for generations. In 1904, the Herero and Nama took up arms and rebelled against their colonizers. In the process they killed over 100 German settlers. Germany, enraged at this show of resistance by a subjugated people they considered racially inferior, retaliated with overwhelming genocidal violence. They massacred the rebels and cut the people off from food, water and basic supplies, causing mass death from starvation, dehydration and exposure. In a second stage of the genocide, they forced people into concentration camps where the majority died of diseases and abuse. German soldiers routinely and systematically raped women and children in the camps. The Germans used the rebellion, and the death of settlers, to whip up popular outrage about "violent savages" to dehumanize the people, to justify mass extermination, and accelerate their plans to ethnically cleanse the region. All told, the Germans killed between 34,000 and 110,000 people during the genocide. These events bear striking similarities to the Israeli case. A long history of colonization and ethnic cleansing triggers a revolt from the colonized, and the colonizers respond with overwhelming disproportionate violence to destroy the society and accelerate ethnic cleansing. The same pattern occurred repeatedly during the genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America. Colonizers stole Indigenous land and cut people off from the means of survival; Indigenous people would resist and sometimes in the process kill settlers; and the colonial state would whip up a storm of outrage sufficient to provide popular support for genocidal violence and more ethnic cleansing. Israel's genocide is a contemporary expression of the same colonial violence, with the same ideological underpinnings. Germany has formally apologised for the Herero and Nama genocide. If they had any shred of moral integrity they would now remove support from Israel and do everything possible to stop its assault on the Palestinian people.