Published :
Updated :
For all latest news, follow The Financial Express Google News channel.
When Brazil's President Ignacio Lula da Silva compares Benjamin Netanyahu's murder of Palestinians to Hitler's killing of Jews in the 1940s, he is not indulging in antisemitism but only pointing to the glee with which both men have gone around pushing innocent men and women to death.
When the government of South Africa hauls the state of Israel before the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide committed against Palestinians, it is not antisemitism but a bold move to demonstrate to the world that what Nazi Germany did to the Jews in the Second World War is precisely what the Israeli authorities are doing to the Palestinians today.
When millions of people march on the streets of London, Washington, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Tunis, Amman, Ramallah and other cities around the world, all they are doing is protest against the genocide of Palestinians by Netanyahu and his killing machine. These marches are not against Jews, for conscionable Jews have also been part of the marches.
These marches are against a government which has severed itself from basic morality and has decided to kill innocent men, women and children without any fear of God, without any remembrance of the prophets of old who preached the power of faith to all manner of people. These marches are against a state which wages war against people whose homes have gone, who suffer from hunger, who do not wage war in retaliation.
Those who today paint support for Palestinians and condemnation of the state of Israel as acts of antisemitism are people who have lost their sense of history, who do not choose to remember that what Netanyahu and his murderous regime are doing in Gaza and in the West Bank is a revolt against God, against all the beauty which comes from faith and from religion.
These people who seek to undermine pro-Palestinian protests through tarring them with the brazen charge of antisemitism are unwilling to acknowledge the brutality with which Netanyahu and his war machine have killed more than 29,000 Palestinians since 7 October 2023.
This charge of antisemitism against these millions of voices raised in protest against Israel's military action is but a ruse to silence people in a crude and anti-historical way. When people around the world condemn Netanyahu as a war criminal, they are not wrong, for they are excoriating a man who falls in the category which has always defined Hitler and his Nazis, which has characterised Yahya Khan and his army, which has shamed Milosevic and his Serbian killing army.
In Israel today, it is not a decent government which operates but a sinister force which bombs homes, schools, hospitals and refugee tents, for it seeks the blood of Palestinians. It is a government which has mutated into a bunch of marauders.
This is what the world condemns, this brazenness which today defines Zionism. This is what the world speaks of when it asks that Netanyahu and his men be restrained from the macabre acts they have inaugurated and continue to indulge in. These men in power in Tel Aviv have violated the rules of life through taking life.
They have not only killed Palestinians but have without shame gone on building illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land. In these past four months and more, they have turned illegal Israeli settlers in Arab land into 21st century versions of Hitler's SS stormtroopers, for these illegal settlers have gone around occupying Palestinian homes, abducting Palestinian men and razing their property to dust and ashes.
You speak of these atrocities and Israel's megalomaniacal leaders swiftly fall back on the hollow weapon of antisemitism to paint themselves as victims of persecution. They are not the victims but oppressors who have without an ounce of shame held on to Arab land they have occupied since the June 1967 war.
They have refused to let go of that land despite all forms of international resolutions and global condemnation. These oppressors have gone around engaging in targeted killings of Palestinian political and military figures and have thus committed crimes unprecedented in modern history.
It is not antisemitism when good men and women condemn these abhorrent acts as war crimes. It is a simple reassertion of the truth that these men in Israel, these generals, these extremist politicians around the cabinet table are not people who deserve the respect of the world.
They are elements committing crimes against humanity and therefore deserve to be hauled before the ICJ to answer for their crimes. These are men who order a desecration of Palestinian graves, who have their soldiers steal Palestinian bodies, in ghoulish manner. These are men who bomb sleeping families to death in nocturnal air force raids.
These men are the genocide makers in whom conscience has gone missing, in whom religion has died a painful death. Their absence of shame comes through when they laugh away the shame heaped on them at The Hague and on the streets of the world.
That is the mark of hooligans, of the unruly elements children and their elders encounter in the lanes and streets of their neighbourhoods every day. These hooligans today rule Israel. Today they cheerfully go around Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon for people to kill. Their lust for Palestinian blood has no end.
Shaming these men before the world has nothing antisemitic about it. But, yes, these are the shameless men the enormity of whose crimes has parallels with the murder and gore let loose upon the world by Hitler and Hideki Tojo decades ago. When these men leap into a characterisation of their immorality as antisemitism, it is an excuse they are looking for in order to justify their criminality.
They ought not to be allowed to get away with these excuses. And those who are quick to jump to the defence of these merchants of murder, who look away from the travails of the Palestinians, are to be informed firmly that they are complicit in the bloodletting Netanyahu presides over in Palestine.
Good Jews remember God in the synagogue. They remember that the Jewish people have wandered the earth in search of a home for centuries. They know the meaning of pain, of loss, of a defilement of life through a shedding of the blood of the innocent.
These men in Tel Aviv, with murder in their eyes, are no good Jews. They are but bloodthirsty men for whom the Palestinians are prey, animals to be hunted down. These men, this cabal of Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant and their accomplices in the government of Israel are enemies of God. They militate against the beauty of Creation.
President Lula and President Ramaphosa have spoken for the world. These are war criminals in Israel whose place is in the dock at The Hague, who ought to be locked away in high security prisons hidden away from the world.