The Palestinian Resistance is Winning: the Movement Must Expose and Defeat Netanyahu’s “Final Solution” to the Palestinian Question
Here are the key points I am making in my article.
- The Israeli plan to annihilate the Palestinian people is as terrifying but it is strategic. The “final solution”—as Germany called its mass murder of all Jews in its reach— means that the Israelis have tried everything else but now, after the Hamas offensive, they believe they cannot allow Palestinians to live in their own land—even in the concentration camp of Gaza.
- The term genocide is being used rhetorically, assuming it only means mass murder. But genocide means the attack on any group of people by a government that is trying to debase and displace them. If thee are 1 million Black people in prison that is Genocide under the 1948 U.N. Convention on Genocide. If Black people die at outrageous numbers during COVID that is genocide. If the Palestinians are forced to give half of their own country because England gave it to Israel, that was genocide on its face.
- The plan for the mass murder of the Palestinian people is the latest and worst form of Israeli Genocide. Netanyahu’s plan to “destroy Hamas” and all its real and suspected supporters is the most horrific stage the longstanding Zionist strategy of taking over all of Palestine—one bloody step at a time.
- How is the Palestinian Resistance Winning? Hamas is now recognized internationally as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Israel has been convicted of Genocide by the International Criminal Court. Prince William of England has called for the end of the hostilities. President Biden, now widely known at “Genocide Job” has created an internal rebellion among the Democrats. None of this mitigates the unbearable suffering, but politically, history is moving towards the people of Palestine.
- The history of Blacks and Jews in support of Palestine reached its peak at the height of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation/anti-Vietnam war movement. In 1967, SNCC, led by its courageous communications director Ethel Minor, wrote Third World Round Up: The Palestine Problem, based on the work of the Palestine Research Center. SNCC concluded:
Comrades. It is clearly a question of right and wrong. In the Middle-East, America has worked with and used the powerful Zionist movement to take over another people’s home and replace the Palestinian people with a partner that has well served America’s purpose, a partner that can help the United States and other white Western countries to exploit and control the nations of Africa, the Middle East and Africa. We have no choice but to resist
I hope you would read my article, write a brief review, and forward it to friends, colleagues, and comrades Great appreciation to my partner, Lian Hurst Mann. We worked together draft after draft to clarify and refine a complex political assessment of the situation.
Eric
A Reader’s Review by Erin Aubrey
Since last October, I’ve read countless opinion and historical pieces on the Israeli oppression of Gaza that’s become genocide. I’ve known Eric since the debut of the Bus Riders Union and have always admired his activism and his cogent writing. But this latest piece blows me away. With precision, moral clarity and wisdom built on years of on-the-ground experience, Eric illuminates the rationale of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the anti-Palestine campaign within Israel that’s led to the realization of the ‘Final Solution.’ But the piece still manages to be compassionate and relatively optimistic. A must-read for anybody feeling paralyzed and tempted to turn away from this tragedy. Eric reminds us that in truth there is always power.
An Excerpt from the Article
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, facing worldwide condemnation, desperately tells his isolated supporters that Israel needs “absolute victory.” On Christmas Day 2023, the Wall Street Journal gave the Prime Minister a worldwide platform to assert his manifesto—“Our Three Prerequisites for Peace: We Must Destroy Hamas, Demilitarize Gaza, and De-radicalize the Whole of Palestinian Society.” Netanyahu makes his objectives clear. He wants a “final solution” to the Palestinian problem—the mass annihilation of the Palestinian people. His goal is a Palestine without any Palestinians so Israel can completely occupy all of Palestine once and for all.
The Israel ruling class’ direct application of Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” warrants a brief historical reconstruction. By 1939, Adolph Hitler gave a speech calling for the “mass extermination of all the Jews in Europe.” The very term “extermination” is based on the dehumanization and vilification of the Jewish people. The “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was the official code name for the murder of every Jew the Nazis could reach. This policy of deliberate and systematic mass murder in Germany and German-occupied Europe was formulated in procedural and geopolitical terms by Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin. It culminated in the Holocaust, which saw the murder of 90 percent of Polish Jews, and two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. Raul Hilberg, author of The Destruction of the European Jews, wrote that in 1941 the first phase of the mass-murder of Jews, the mobile killing units began to pursue their victims across occupied eastern territories; in the second phase, stretching across all of German-occupied Europe, the Jewish victims were sent on death trains to centralized killing camps built for the purpose of systematic murder of Jews.
Eric Mann
is the co-director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center. He is a veteran of the Congress of Racial Equality, Students for a Democratic Society, and the United Auto Workers New Directions Movement. He is the host of KPFK/Pacifica’s Voices from the Frontlines. His forthcoming book is I Saw a Revolution with my Own Eyes: History, Strategy, and Organizing for The Revolution We Need today.
He welcomes comments at Eric (AT) Voicesfromthefrontlines (DOT) com