South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) unequivocally condemns the resumption of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, what Israel’s Minister of Defence, Israel Katz, has called the “opening of the gates of hell”. This latest offensive has already claimed over 400 lives in its first 12 hours. The genocide is now well into its 16th month, and the claim that these attacks are an effort to broker long-lasting peace in the region and to ensure the safe return of the remaining Israeli hostages are patently absurd.
The second part of the three-phase ceasefire was still under negotiation, and Israel’s latest massacres threaten to destabilize the region again. This action needs to be seen for exactly what it is—a savage show of brute force by war mongers desperate to cling to power at all costs.
In persisting with this genocide, the Zionist regime damns itself with the same markings as the Nazi Holocaust. The smoke from the flames of Gaza’s ruins mingles with the memory of the smoke from Auschwitz’s crematoria. How do today’s Zionists imagine they will be remembered? Do they not recall that the Third Reich ultimately faced trial?
Israel does to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, the Roma, and members of the LGBTQ community, and for similar motives: to try to bolster itself by eliminating people whom it considers inferior or a ‘contaminant’ to humanity. On 24 February, the Deputy Speaker in the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, said as much, calling Palestinians ‘subhuman’. It is no surprise that their rhetoric echoes that of oppressive tyrants through history—ones that have perpetrated the crime of all crimes.
It is precisely because of our common humanity that the perpetrators too are, and will be, affected by their crimes. Those that act at the bidding of the Zionist state forfeit their full humanity when committing such atrocities. No one escapes a genocide unscathed, intact, and whole.
SAJFP vehemently rejects the Zionist insistence that all Jews are willing supporters of the “Jewish” State. These atrocities are entirely foreign to our belief system and to the Jewish values we embody and live by. Far from being antisemitic, our rejection of Zionism is both an expression of the Jewish principles we hold dear and a recognition of the common humanity of all people.
Consequently, we stand with Palestinians in their call for an end to the occupation and for their right to liberty. And, most emphatically, we call for an immediate end to the attack on Gaza, a reinstatement of the ceasefire, and for Israel to negotiate in good faith.
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