Famine as a weapon of genocide: Gaza 2025 – Soviet Union 1941

It’s clear, then, that the State of Israel’s present use of famine as a weapon of war against the population of Gaza is akin to the “Hungerplan” implemented by the Nazis in the Soviet Union in 1941-1942, to eliminate 30 million Soviet citizens. In both cases, the same dehumanization of the victims, the same desire on the part of those posing as the “Herrenrasse” (master race) to exterminate their “Untermenschen” (sub-humans) – Slavs and Jews then, Palestinians today – and the same plan to empty the territory of its indigenous populations in order to occupy and colonize it. And to Goering, who declared to Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s Foreign Minister, that “20 to 30 million people will die of hunger this year in Russia. And that’s probably just as well, because some peoples have to be decimated“, echoed Israeli Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who declared bluntly that it would be ”justified and moral to starve 2 million Palestinians in Gaza”…

That said, in the end “only” around 6 million Soviet soldiers, civilians and Jews died of hunger, not because the Nazis lacked the will or determination to see their Hungerplan through, but because their war against the USSR had taken a wrong turn. So Ernest Mandel is clearly right when he observes that “It is not true that the Nazis’ extermination plans were meant exclusively for the Jews. A comparable proportion of the Gypsies was also exterminated. In the longer term, the Nazis wanted to exterminate a hundred million people in central and eastern Europe, above all Slavs”. [1]

In short, the Shoah is not the only holocaust in history. But, if it is not unique, if there were others before or at the same time as the Shoah, then Ernest Mandel is right to draw the following conclusion: “We say deliberately that the Holocaust has been the apogee of crimes against humanity so far. But there is no guarantee that this apogee will not be equalled or even surpassed in the future. To deny this a priori strikes us as irrational and politically irresponsible. As Bertolt Brecht said, ‘The womb from which this monster emerged is still fertile”’ .

In just a few words, Ernest Mandel not only invalidates the arguments of all those who have made their fortune by repeating that the Shoah is unique, “unspeakable” and “irrepeatable”, but he also warns us and prepares us for the possibility of new holocausts. And in so doing, he responds in advance to the two all-too-familiar reactions, each as unfounded and stupid as the other: the one that calls it “sacrilege” and forbids any comparison of the Shoah [2] with what is currently happening to the Palestinians in Gaza, and the other that asks “how is it possible for Jews to do to Palestinians what they themselves suffered at the hands of the Germans?”. As long as “the womb from which this monster emerged is still fertile” “” – in other words, as long as what Mandel calls the “material, social and ideological preconditions for the Nazi genocide” exist and come together – new holocausts are possible, and our duty is to prepare ourselves to prevent them by mobilizing all our forces against their “preconditions”!

So what can be said and done about the leaders of 153 countries, including our own, who, although signatories to the “Genocide Convention”, blatantly refuse to apply it? What is to be said and done about them, who refuse the “duty to prevent genocide” imposed on them by this Convention, a duty “which arises as soon as a State is aware, or ought normally to have been aware, of a serious risk of genocide”, which includes “the use of starvation as a weapon of war”,… “acts constituting war crimes, crimes against humanity, in particular extermination, and acts of genocide”? [3] What is to be said and done about these accomplices of genocidaires and others guilty of crimes against humanity?…

And where does the left stand in all this, the Israeli left first and foremost? Considering what it doesn’t say and what it doesn’t do in the midst of the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, one can only exclaim: this Israeli Left is in name only!. [4] Because you don’t even have to be a leftist to revolt against this genocide, to do everything in your power to stop it, while fighting tooth and nail against the genocidaires at the head of your own country.

And yet, this Israeli “left” does none of this. Of course, it denounces Netanyahu, even going so far as to call him a fascist, but it says nothing about the Palestinians who are methodically starved, and systematically bombed and massacred by the tens of thousands by their country’s army. It refuses them solidarity. It doesn’t give a damn about them. As, moreover, just as its ‘left-wing’ counterparts in the Diaspora who talk “in general” about peace and coexistence with the Palestinians, but don’t even dare to distance themselves from the genocidaires and their executors by doing what German antifascists once did under the Third Reich, and what are fortunately doing today thousands of other Jews in the United States and around the world: take to the streets alongside the Palestinians, publicly brandishing the four words that save the honor of both Jews and humanity: “not in my name”!

Footnotes