I’ve been posting a lot recently about Israel’s ongoing actions against Palestians. On February 5th I wrote:

It’s been many years but one thing I remember about being in school and learning about the Holocaust is that it was a common refrain for kids to ask “Why or how did the people of Germany let it happen? Why did they go along with it?” It’s the sort of question that echoes into adulthood and into the public consciousness on the question of the Nazis, fascism and the crimes of the time.

But I look around today and I think, well, we can see how it happens. It’s happening again. If history demonstrates that Israel committed genocide in 2024 how will you feel about your silence, your role as an enabler?

A reader sent this message:

Can I offer a suggestion? I appreciate the intention, but making comparisons between Israel’s actions and those of Nazi Germany is considered antisemitic. It’s a very painful comparison that is hard to have reasonable discussions about.

They shared this link: Working definition of antisemitism

Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:

The particular bit that stood out to me in the context of my post was this:

  • Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

The reader went on to share this:

Unfortunately, there are many other instances of genocide in recent history. I’ve found the Rwandan and Armenian genocides, where government forces blamed a whole people for a rebel group’s actions and collectively punished them, to be a good comparison point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides

It’s a list worth looking at. We should bear witness to all genocide. But my primary concern right now, in 2024, is the fact that in the near future it’s likely that Israel will be on that list and along with it should be the United States.

I may not have been clear in my writing but I’m not just referring to the state of Israel but the US as well. My point is that if genocide is being committed in 2024 by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people the citizens of the US are complicit. We aid and abet Israel and have for many decades. The crimes being committed today are an extension of previous crimes that we have supported.

And to be clear our criminal, interventionist and violent foreign policy goes far beyond our support of Israel.

I’m certainly not attempting to spread anti-Semitic views and I’ve bookmarked the site for further reading. But that said, Israel may well be, at this moment, committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Certainly the ICJ thinks this is a very real possibility.

I want to make clear that I understand that Israel does not equal the Jewish people and that not all Jewish people agree with the policy of Israel. In no way should blame be directed at Jewish people as a collective whole.

But at the end of this, it may well be that Israel on that Wikipedia page, noted as a state that carried out genocide along with many others over the course of history. And the US should be listed along with it.

I would also add this link to another page on Wikipedia that deals specifically with the genocide of Indigenous peoples.