What if Chicago or Brisbane was Gaza?

More than 46,000 dead, All Infrastructure Gone

Every year since the liberation of Auschwitz and the horrors revealed then, people have continued to say “Never Again”.

I remember being in Phoenix Arizona in 1995 when I saw for the first time a number tattooed on a survivor’s arm. She was an elderly Jewish woman and I had the chance to speak to her about her horrible experience. Seeing the pain of memory in her face as she recalled being in a Nazi concentration camp is something I will never forget. It added to my fierce opposition to political extremists.

I never want to see another person who has had to suffer as this Jewish woman suffered or see any human being reduced to being just a number and not a person. Yet it continues to happen every day.

The trouble is that despite the horrors, our memories and prejudices limit us, and we give a hierarchy of importance to the mass tortures and killings of different peoples that touch us most in every generation. Some don’t touch us at all.

In Australia, treatment of Aborigines by white settlers hardly touched us. Until recently school students were denied knowledge of the sad history of white settlement and First Peoples. A research project, at the University of Newcastle, headed by historian Emeritus Professor Lyndall Ryan, estimates that more than 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives were lost in more than 400 massacres, up from a previous estimate of 8,400 in 302 massacres. By contrast it is estimated that 168 non-Aboriginal people were killed in 13 frontier massacres.

The reason why we weren’t taught this illustrates the core of racism that is in every culture.

It remains true that we are only deeply touched by tragedy when it strikes us personally. So with Gaza I ask how would we would view the State of Israel’s decimation of Gaza if it had happened in a different place and with different players? Somewhere closer to home. What if Chicago had been attacked and bombed out of existence, with hospitals, schools, churches and synagogues and infrastructure completely destroyed? All this on the basis of wiping out criminals who were hiding in the populous.

What then if it was Brisbane or a city close to where you live?

I chose Chicago and Brisbane as two modern cities with populations around the 2.6 million people, similar to estimates of Palestine at the beginning of the war. Now consider how would we view the leaders who directed the attacks on our cities, killing our children, destroying our towns? How would we justify that if we could not distance ourselves from it?

The modern troubled history dates especially to 1948 when the State of Israel was created, but it goes back to the United Nations partition declaration of the two state solution.

This followed the Jewish Holocaust and the deaths of some six million Jews that is a terrible blight on our humanity. To imagine today that we have Neo-Nazis protesting in our cities and anti-semitic attacks on synagogues and other Jewish premises in Australia is gut wrenching. But so too is the Democide of the peoples of Palestine by the State of Israel.

When Israel was attacked by Hamas, the Palestinian militia and political movement on 7 October 2023 around 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 hostages taken. Israel’s unproportionate response, best seen in photographs of before and after, would be universally condemned by the world if it wasn’t Israel. The photos before and after of Gaza remind me of similar photos before and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

 

American academic Rudolph Joseph Rummel (1932 – 1914), coined the term ‘Democide’ for murder by government, including that of indigenous people through colonialism, Nazi Germany, the Stalinist purges, Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and others too.

The terms Genocide, Holocaust, Ethnic Cleansing and the like have been highly politicised over the years. Even now we have politicians in Australia who are using the disgrace of anti-semitic violence to gain notoriety for themselves as being the only virtuous ones standing up for the Jews. It is much worse in America where the Jewish lobby is so powerful and the military machine thrives on war.

The term Democide has not yet reached the level of sanctity that prevents its use or discussion.

The word Holocaust, unfortunately, like Democide cannot be limited to any one ethnicity. Professor Rummel spent his academic career studying data on collective violence and war with a hope of helping end the immorality of it all. Of German descent, he was born in Cleveland Ohio and was an American political scientist, statistician and professor at Indiana University, Yale University, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

As an example of another Holocaust, (Genocide or Democide), he quoted that:

“… from the invasion of China in 1937 to the end of World War II, the Japanese military regime murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. This democide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture (such as the view that those enemy soldiers who surrender while still able to resist were criminals).”

I strongly believe that we need to remember that no matter where it happens, or what people are involved; murder is always murder, and when a Government seeks to eliminate another people it is Democide, Genocide or a Holocaust. People bleed the same variety of bloods in every situation, and their tears are always salty.

So we now have another peace, of sorts, between Israel and Palestine. We have President Trump wanting Jordan and Egypt to take all the people from Gaza to “clean out the whole thing”. Thing being a place inhabited by people of varying nationalities and religions for millenia, Arabs, Jews and others.

 

Peter Beinart is editor-at-large of Jewish Currents and professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York. In an interview in The Guardian about his latest book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” he said:

“What Israel has done in Gaza is the most profound desecration of the central idea of the absolute and infinite worth of every human being. And yet the organized American Jewish community acts as if Palestinians in Gaza have essentially no value. Their deaths are dismissed on the flimsiest of pretexts. These people are basically saying that the state has absolute value, but the human beings who live in this state, if they have the misfortune of being Palestinian, don’t have value.”

Surely it’s time that we worked hard to recognise that the inherent belief that some people always matter more than others is just plain wrong.

The world can be so unkind.

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About David Ayliffe: In my spare time that doesn’t exist I’m trying to get children, families, schools and people everywhere to recognise and value Kindness in daily life and community. It applies also to electing kind leaders. You can sign The Kindness Pledge here and read more about it and The Zorzles refugees who transform a village.

 

See also: New survey reveals extent of Israel’s failure to improve humanitarian access in Gaza in the year since ICJ ruling

 

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