“One Holocaust Does NOT Justify Another”: Britain’s National March for Palestine and the World’s Moral Majority

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 20 Nov 2023

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

The National March for Palestine, London, 11 Nov 2023. Photo: Maung Zarni

14 Nov 2023 – Saturday’s [11 Nov] march which drew 300.000 Britons from beyond London – thousands took buses or trains from across the UK – is clear testament to the global consensus moral position among hundreds of millions of people around the world.

The National March in London, UK on 11 November against the genocide in Gaza by Israel, which is officially & exclusively “the Jewish state”, drew the largest number of Britons – from all walks of life and all faith, race, and ancestral backgrounds.

Children in buggies, people in wheelchairs, toddlers on dads’ shoulders, youth and retirees. Academics and blue-collar workers. Trade unionists and self-employed professionals.

#Israel is a #terrorist state. #Genocide is not self-defence. From the river to the sea, #Palestine will be free! pic.twitter.com/Sgg7ZvX7JQ

— FORSEA (@officialFORSEA) November 11, 2023

The occasion that brought hundreds of thousands of us on to the streets of London is grim and horrid – Israeli slaughtering deliberately thousands of civilians in virtually every neighbourhood and physical structure in Gaza City including over 4,300 children, the new-born and the unnamed while telling the world that the Palestinian liberation movement, The Hamas, is responsible for Palestinian deaths. For they are using civilians as human shields.

Well, Hamas is well-fortified in miles and miles of tunnels 70 meters below the ground. And yet Israeli military has been bombing from land and air anything that stands on the ground, with its “moderate” President Isaac Herzog, having made the chilling claim that there is “no one innocent” in Gaza (hence every human in Gaza is a legitimate military target).

Beyond organized death and destruction, genocides typically involve uses of euphemisms and Orwellian DoubleSpeak. Israel’s unconditional backers – from Biden to UK’s All-Party politicians amplify Israel’s spin that the Jewish State has “the right to defend”.

The wholesale intentional physical destruction of Gaza thus becomes an act of self-defence. As if the Occupier has the right to self-defence.

The Americans in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan, the genocidal colonial British and occupying Fascist Japanese in Burma in the 19th and 20th centuries, the British in Kenya in the 1950’s, and the French in Algeria and the “French Indochina” – Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia –all had the colonizer’s juridical and moral justifications for attempting, albeit with no eventual success, to “defend themselves” against the wretched of the earth who rose and revolted, again.

Watch the late Martin Luther King Jr.’s Beyond Vietnam which connected all the dots of White Supremacist racism, the US military-industrial complex, and imperialist violence around the world.

Also see “Beyond Vietnam” | The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute (stanford.edu)

Whatever these “pro-genocide narratives” – how else should one state it? – by Western media, and the political class, the world’s moral opinion is categorically against Israel’s Nazi-like racist propaganda. Based on the ample evidence of death and destruction wrought by 24/7 bombardment by Israel, the verdict is in already: “Israel is a terrorist state” who occupies someone else’s land.

A popular protest chant goes: “One, Two, Three, Four, The Occupation No More”, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, “Israel is a terrorist state.”

The enveloping “moral clarity”, to borrow Israel’s initial spin in response to the October 7 incident involving the Palestinian resistance groups, around the world is that Israel is the really guilty party.

Yesterday’s march – which drew Britons from beyond London – thousands took buses or trains from Kent, Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford, Cambridge, and so forth, is a clear testament to the global consensus moral position among hundreds of millions of people around the world.

You don’t need to be a Muslim or need to have friends and families in Gaza to feel the pain of Palestinians. In her video address to the Free Rohingya Coalition gathering at Barnard/Columbia U in 2018, Angela Davis mentioned Israel (and Aung San Suu Kyi) as a sad and criminal phenomenon wherein “formerly persecuted morphing into the persecutors themselves.”

[Watch Angela Davis’s address below.]

The most shocking thing in all this sordid affair is this: today’s Israeli and Jewish Zionists — there are also fundamentalist Christian Zionists who treat the Bible as the literal history on the basis of which the 21st century policies are to be made — are far darker and immoral than Nazi Germans in the 1930’s and 1940’s, if such a comparison of immorality and inhumanity is even desirable and possible.

Shades of genocidal evil

For the Germans, before and during the Nazi era, they were the perpetrators of genocides in Africa (Namibia and Tanzania) and Europe whereas in fact the Jewry had suffered inhumanity and cruelty of the gentiles of Europe, Ukraine, Russia and the Balkans.

And yet the Zionist Jews have proceeded to embrace Inhumanity, Cruelty and Barbarism themselves, viewing the entire native Arabs of Palestine as “human animals” and “inferior” stock. From the pro-Israeli supporters in the streets of New York and Tel Aviv to Israeli cabinet from the Israeli parliament to the Presidency the call for “obliteration” “annihilation” and “physical destruction” of any Palestinians who refuse to “reconcile” with their bondage as the colonized, de-humanized, criminalized and occupied people.

Too many Googleable examples of the call for and plans to commit genocide emanating from virtually all quarters of Israeli state and society, and the Zionist supporters in the diaspora, to give.

The chilling parallel here is this. Through the eyes of the Nazis in 1930’s Germany, the German and European Jewry were seen as a source of “racial contamination” to the Aryans. Hitler’s Germany has “centres for the study of racial hygiene” in places like Hamburg, the second largest city in the Third Reich.

Below: Rob Lemkin, Oxford UK, plays Bach’s Sarabande, from French Suite No. 1 in D minor, BWV812. Rob’s great-great uncle, Naftali Hertz Feit with his daughter and two grandchildren were killed in the Nazi liquidation of the Lvov Ghetto in 1942.

In his tape recorded interviews with a fellow Nazi escapee in Argentina following the Nazi genocide, the SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann interviews made it unequivocally clear that the Mastermind of Nazi Genocide of the Jews in the Nazi-occupied Europe ordered his deputies to carry out the “physical destruction” of the Jews, and all “races” considered impediments to his racially superior exclusively Aryan Reich. [See the two-part BBC documentary The Devil’s Confessions here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0g8b0k5 .] They were impediment to the Nazi policy of acquiring the land or the “Living Space” for the Aryans needed for actualize an exclusively Aryan political state and a mono-racial society.

Enter Israel of 2023. The parallels are more than shocking.

The refusal to relinquish the land occupied since 1967, against the express, popular and official wish of the native Palestinian populations, specifically the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The ever-expanding Jewish settlements in these Occupied Territories, the ghettoization of the entire Palestinian neighbourhoods, the running of Gaza Strip as “open air prisons”, the building of the State of Israel as unmistakably apartheid state (even after the UN had declared apartheid a crime against humanity in the case of S. Africa), dishing out daily humiliations of millions of Palestinians the same way the Nazis treated the Jews, Sinti and Roma population across all Nazi-occupied European countries of Eastern Europe.

What is most troubling is this: Germany is not known for its genocidal victimhood, and never cry victim. But Israel cries victim (of Nazi genocide) as the courageous Israeli journalist Gideon Levy pointed out in the video below:

This is such an extraordinary speech. I only ask of my followers to watch this. Then I leave you alonepic.twitter.com/rZLQKD2BMX

— Bruno Maçães (@MacaesBruno) November 6, 2023

Still, both the overwhelming majority of Israelis and the political state in Israel perpetrate their own version of genocide on a people – the Arabs of Palestine –

that have nothing to do with the Nazis did to the Jews: their initial forced migration, de-nationalization of Jews as full and equal citizens of the Third Reich, putting millions of Jews in “protective custody” (concentration camps), liquidating or rendering them “harmless” (mass-extermination or physical destruction of the Jewish communities across the Nazi-occupied Europe).

And Zionists in the social media, as well as in personal communications, attempt to use their sense of historical victimhood as a moral shield, if that, for their active and vocal complicity and support for Israel’s ongoing genocide.

 These Zionists, both Jews and non-Jewish persons, such as UK’s former Home Secretary Suella Braverman portray these worldwide protest rallies and marches against Israel’s slaughtering of innocent civilians – infants and babies included – by the thousands, as (Antisemitic) “hate marches”. To belabour the obviously, the attempt to label as “antisemitic” anyone who holds and expresses critical views of Israel’s policies and conduct since its founding in 1948 is no longer silencing those who speak out for the Palestinians out of a sense of the universal fellowship of humans. Conversely, the nasty label “self-hating Jews” typically hurled at the likes of Noam Chomsky, Gideon Levy, etc. has lost its potency.

These attempts, nonetheless, continue to be made to falsely equate what Einstein and Arendt, among other Jewish thinkers, called “Fascist state” as early as 1948, with the Jewish people, anywhere.

This attempt to distorting worldwide moral opposition to the 21st’s unfolding genocide, accessible on the social media 24/7, is really a cheap attempt to defend the indefensible.

I was therefore so glad to see placards that read ” This Jew opposes Israel’s onslaught in Gaza” and other similar ones. Millions around the world know the violent conflict in Israel and Palestine is not a civilization war or a religious crusade, although the Zionists – and their counterparts from the Islamic world – try their best to mis-frame it as such.

You don’t need to be anything to oppose this genocide, typically in the name of “self-defence”. You just need to have decent humanity, equipped with conscience and the capacity to feel compassion.

Finally, every genocide scholar will tell you that denial is part of the genocide.

The SS were busy trying to erase any evidence of their crimes against humanity when they realized they were about to be defeated. Alas, the overwhelming majority of Holocaust museums, genocide scholars with Zionist views are busy are either keeping their mouths shut or publicly denying that “The One and Only Jewish State”, Netanyahu’s words, is perpetrating a textbook genocide.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew, who studied law at the now Ukrainian city of Lviv, and coined the term genocide, would be turning in his grave.

Phillippe Sands, the renowned genocide lawyer and scholar, who said approvingly that the Russian massacres of Ukrainians in Bucha, on the outskirt of Kyiv was genocide has not used his influential pen on the pages of the New York Times. Daniel Feirstein who is past president of Genocide Studies Association has not said a word about the genocide in Gaza.

The Genocide Watch issued its Alert on 15 October that devoted 2/3 of its word count to how barbaric Hamas and how belligerent Israel’s Arab neighbours have been while repeating all throughout its Alert, Israel’s singularly most important spin “Israel is defending itself” (from the barbaric terror of Palestinian militants). It calls into question the organizational and professional integrity of those who repeat ad nauseum the mantra of “self-defence”.

The political class and intelligentsia doggedly insist on condemnation of the Hamas before anyone is allowed to say genocide by Israel, something they would summarily dismiss.

So, being out on the streets of London with hundreds of thousands of people who come out to let the world know that the world is still inhabited by Humans with conscience and compassion. And that we are not represented by the Western political class and the Establishment Intellectuals, and the genocidal Zionists.

I will leave you with three views on what is unfolding: a genocide denialist view of a Brown University historian of the Holocaust, a Jewish American’s personal view and that of a seasoned international law expert who resigned from his UN Directorship of human rights commission in New York.

1) The genocide denialist perspective by Brown University historian of genocides:

“As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. That means two important things: First, we need to define what it is that we are seeing, and second, we have the chance to stop the situation before it gets worse. We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.”

2) A Jewish American’s perspective:

“I am honoured that my brother Zarni has asked to share my comments on a social media post he shared.

My comments were prompted by the original post that appears in the image. This is how I answer the query made by lawyer Ash Ahmed:

“Yes, it can be explained: extreme Zionists (both Jewish & Christian) have poisoned the well. They have managed this because they hold so much sway with political leaders, government agencies, and the mainstream media. This is due in large part to the backlash effect (compensating for the horrors of the Holocaust–and a variety of social impacts).

This Zionist evil is also a powerful force in the USA, but our resistance is growing; check out the numbers of large protests by many people who are willing to endure arrest for their civil disobedience.

By the way, I’ll mention that I’m Jewish (although non-practicing), and have spent extended time in Palestine/Israel, even joined a peace conference (of Arabs and Jews) when I was in Jerusalem. So I’ll say in advance to anyone who may comment: don’t bother accusing me of anti-semitism. I am no more anti-semitic that the woman in the photo–who is the subject of lawyer Ash Ahmed’s puzzlement.”

–Diane is a citizen of the USA who supports immediate ceasefire in Gaza, humanitarian aide for all in need, and international diplomacy for Peace negotiations”

3) The view of the UN’s Senior Human Rights official Craig Mokhiber, who resigned from his senior position at the UN New York Office of the Human Rights Commissioner.

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni s the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

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