By Viki Caldera

Since March 2, Israel has closed all humanitarian aid corridors to Gaza, depriving the entire population – 2.1 million people – of food. Nearly 200 people have since died of starvation and, as a consequence of this aberrant measure, the lives of more than 100,000 children, including 40,000 babies, are at risk. In addition, 1,900 people have died while seeking food, most of them killed at the distribution posts of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israeli-controlled organization that functions as bait. According to UN data, a quarter of the population suffers from catastrophic hunger, while the remainder suffer from emergency levels of hunger. Famine used as a calculated and deliberate weapon is a fascist trait, one of the many that characterize the Zionist State of Israel.

From the Hungerplan to the Israeli food blockade

A spoonful of lentils a day. That’s all Palestinians in Gaza have been eating for days. There is no formula milk for babies, no food supplements for those who are already malnourished, no flour, nothing. The blockade prevents the entry of humanitarian aid and 60,000 truckloads of goods have accumulated at Gaza’s borders, controlled by members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) armed to the teeth.

The 400 humanitarian aid distribution posts that previously operated disappeared and were replaced by 4 posts controlled by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group of private organizations, all created very recently. Their initial capital is unknown, but they received 30 million dollars directly from the Trump administration, without passing through the US Congress, on June 26th – one month after the beginning of its operations. It has also been proven that the 4 posts operate in military areas built by Israel and that the long journey that Palestinian civilians must make through dangerous and devastated areas is strictly controlled by Israeli tanks and security forces, who brutally attack them. And when they do manage to reach the distribution posts, the situation is described as “every man for himself”. In many cases the distribution lasts less than 20 minutes and in others it is declared finished before opening time. An absolutely cruel villainy.

Speaking to the BBC, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council Jan Egeland stated that the GHF is “militarized, privatized, politicized and not in line with neutrality” and “the people in charge of the organization are military: ex-CIA and ex-military”. Its role, far from humanitarian, is to collaborate with Israel’s plan that seeks the mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza.

Hunger has been a structural problem in Palestine since the Nakba and the Israeli invasion of its territories, which has exercised a brutal control over the lives of the Palestinian population over 77 years. Closer in time, the Red Lines of the Israeli State document reveals the hunger plan that was launched in 2007, after Hamas’ electoral victory, to bring the Gazan economy to collapse with a blockade that would allow for a minimum ration of 2279 calories per person (although in practice it was much less), as a form of collective punishment in the massive open-air prison that is Gaza.

But the current mechanism involves a qualitative leap. Famine expert Alex de Waal calls it “the most meticulously designed and controlled famine since World War II”. There is an objective in this: setting in motion the final solution for the Palestinian cause, that is, to take to the extreme the 77-year-old ethnic cleansing plan that Netanyahu, with the help of Trump and the global right wing, wants to complete, eliminating every last Palestinian from their land, just as the Nazis intended to do with the Jews last century.

Indeed, it is no coincidence that the use of hunger as a weapon was also a strategy that Hitler and Nazism applied both in the concentration camps and elsewhere, with catastrophic consequences for humanity. In the Warsaw ghetto alone, 80,000 people died of starvation and more than 500,000 in Auschwitz.

The Hungerplan (Hunger Plan in German) designed in 1941 by Herbert Backe, State Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, involved appropriating all the food in the USSR to supply the German army and its civilian population, starving to death some 30 million Soviets, fencing off the cities so that the population could not receive any food.

Although they did not manage to implement it in its entirety, part of this plan was the extermination of 1.3 million Soviet prisoners of war condemned to starvation in camps with no access to anything and the siege of the city of Leningrad -today St. Petersburg- which lasted almost 900 days and caused the death of one million people (a third of the city’s inhabitants), most of whom perished from hunger and cold and many others from the bombing.

From the Nazi experience, Rafael Lemkin coined the concept of genocide to describe the atrocity that until then had no name, and in his writings he places special emphasis on the policy of food restriction as a weapon for the subjugation of the group to be eliminated.

From Warsaw to Gaza

Continuing with Lemkin, in his characterization of genocide he included not only overt killings but any other covert means affecting health, food, family life and child care. A clear example of this was the Warsaw ghetto, where, after the Nazi invasion of Poland, some 400,000 Jews were confined in a tiny territory, enclosed by a wall, with a limited food ration of no more than 184 calories a day and no access to medicine. If they tried to escape, they were shot.

Gaza works the same way: it is enclosed by walls and barbed wire, those who are there are there because they belong to a specific ethnic group. They have no access to food or medication. And their captors keep them under permanent siege, bombing their hospitals, ambulances and fire trucks. From October 2023 to today Israel perpetrated 697 deliberate attacks on health targets. 94% of hospitals were destroyed or damaged and less than 2000 beds remain available for the entire population. More than 1,000 health workers have been killed. The health care collapse in the Gaza ghetto is total.

Another favorite target is the press, precisely to prevent the reality of the genocide from spreading on a massive scale. That is why Israel has killed almost 300 journalists with attacks specifically aimed at annihilating them. As we write this article, we learn that Israel killed the Al Jazeera news team in Gaza, bombing their tent located in an area clearly identified for journalists, which reinforces the certainty that they were killed to silence them, just when Israel intends to enter Gaza to kill starving civilians.

The murder of Odeh Hadalin, a contributor to the documentary No Other Land, by an Israeli settler in the West Bank was also widely publicized, demonstrating that the persecution and annihilation of Palestinians by Zionism is not limited to the Gaza Strip.

The persecution and criminalization of those who denounce the genocide is also brutal and worldwide, an example of this is the DAIA’s (Delegation of Argentinian Israeli Associations) cruelty towards our comrade Alejandro Bodart, who faces trial for taking a stand against the massacre perpetrated by Zionism on the Palestinian people, and although he was acquitted, they have appealed the ruling.

From Goebbels to Netanyahu

The flip side of the extermination of the critical press is the promotion of an addicted press, which questions absolutely nothing and is dedicated to spreading ideas that validate genocide. While accusing of anti-Semitism, censoring and criminalizing anyone who denounces the barbarities committed by Israel, they spread all kinds of lies to justify the massacre: from ambulances, hospitals and other civilian targets being covers for Hamas to the food crisis being a result of Hamas stealing food. A case of worldwide resonance was the fake news of the beheaded babies, spread by various global media outlets.

These media are used to disseminate propaganda that undermines the human condition of those it attacks. They seek to dehumanize the Palestinians so that their elimination is not unbearable, but even desirable. This did not start in October 2023. Its origins lie in the creation of the State of Israel itself, which, in order to exist, unfailingly requires the expulsion of the Palestinians from their lands. To deny them their dreams, expectations and lives they turn them less than nothing, effectively denying their existence. In fact, one of the founding phrases of Zionism is “a land without a people for a people without a land”, i.e. the absolute denial of the existence of the Palestinian people. There are innumerable quotations from the greatest exponents of Zionism ratifying this dehumanization. To take just a few examples: Menachem Beguin, former Israeli Prime Minister affirmed that “the Palestinians are beasts that walk on two legs”. More recently Sergio Pikholtz, former vice-president of the DAIA published: “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, perhaps only children under 4 years of age”.

The comparison with animals, monsters or savages. The assimilation of an entire people as terrorists and dangerous. The call to eliminate them from the face of the Earth as the only means to achieve their goals. All this is part of the Zionist propaganda since the creation of the State of Israel, and has intensified in recent times.

The similarities with the Nazi propaganda carried out by Goebbels to dehumanize Jews, communists, gypsies and all those who could constitute a scapegoat for Germany’s hardships, to mold them as an enemy and therefore enable their extermination are clear. In this respect, Hitler himself said in his book My Struggle: “The purpose of propaganda is not the scientific education of everyone, but to draw the attention of the masses to certain facts, needs, etc., the importance of which only in this way enters the visual circle of the masses. The art lies exclusively in doing this in such a perfect manner as to provoke conviction of the reality of a fact, of the necessity of a procedure, and of the justice of something necessary (…) Every action of propaganda must necessarily be popular and adapt its intellectual level to the receptive capacity of the most limited of those for whom it is intended. Hence, its purely intellectual level must be regulated downwards, and the greater the mass of the human mass to be covered (…) The receptive capacity of the great mass is extremely limited and its faculty of comprehension is no less small; on the other hand, its lack of memory is enormous. Bearing in mind these antecedents, all effective propaganda must be concretized only to very few points and know how to exploit them as apothegms until the last son of the people can form an idea of that which is pursued”. Thus, Goebbels designed a narrative in which Jews, Bolsheviks and other components of the “enemy” were associated as animals, parasites, monsters. Ideas repeated ad nauseam by the press, posters, cinema, radio, television and all the media at his disposal.

From Lebensraum to Greater Israel

Lebensraum (living space in German) was the term used by the German empire to encourage colonization since before World War I, but it was the Nazi regime that put it into practice. The thrust of this policy was that a superior race – according to them the “Aryan race” – needed a large living space for its survival and that the inhabitants of these lands, belonging to inferior races or, in their terms, untermenschen (subhumans) – Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs and other Slavic nationalities – should be expelled or exterminated. Thus Hitler invaded Poland and later the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine, annihilating the population and creating administrative units there with the aim of future colonization. The expansionist policy was a key feature of Nazism, which, as we can see, was rooted in the supremacism and racism that characterized it.

The constant expulsion of the Palestinian people from their lands since the foundation of the State of Israel until today shows that Zionism also has an expansionist objective that seeks to occupy all the Palestinian land, and even more. Its center, as we well know, is the false story of the promised land, which is nothing more and nothing less than another version of racism, because only from this conception do they have the right to occupy those lands, and must therefore oppress, expel and exterminate the other nationalities/races/religions that do not “deserve” them.

Since the ill-fated Oslo Accords of 1993, which accepted the existence of two states -one Palestinian and one Israeli-, Israel has done nothing but expand over the already reduced territory of Palestine, leaving it limited to its minimum expression, most recently with the announcement by the Israeli government of the establishment of 22 new Israeli settlements in the West Bank, where thousands of settlers will be added to the more than 750 thousand already occupying West Bank lands, including East Jerusalem. On top of this comes the recent approval of a plan to take full control of Gaza.

In this new offensive against the Palestinian people, seeking a “final solution”, many Zionists are deluding themselves with the idea of the Greater Israel promoted by its main ideologue Theodore Herzl, as a Jewish State extending “from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates”. In recent statements Netanyahu affirmed that his is a historical and spiritual mission closely linked to the Promised Land and Greater Israel, which provoked the repudiation of several countries in the region for considering it a clear advance against their sovereignty.

Also part of this imperialist and racist expansionism is Trump’s promotion of an AI video that imagines the Gaza Strip as a resort where he, Netanyahu and Elon Musk enjoy themselves while real estate development expands. Israeli settlers who organize cruises to see the bombing of Gaza, celebrate Trump’s initiative to build large towers in Gaza where they plan to live “returning to their promised land”.

In addition to plundering the common goods in the Palestinian lands, Israel intends to advance in its plundering on a global scale, for example with its state-owned water company – Mekorot – which plays an appalling role in limiting access to water for the Palestinian population and seeks contracts to manage water in Argentina. The first step was taken by Wado de Pedro – ex President Alberto Fernandez’s Minister of the Interior – signing the Master Plan for the Water Sector in which 5 Argentine provinces sealed agreements with Mekorot. Now, after the privatization of the national water works AySA, the water apartheid company is interested in buying it.

From Nazism to Zionism

Zionism shares with Nazism a common philosophical basis: the supremacist idea, since both consider themselves an exclusive and superior racial group. In fact, Zionism itself considers Jews as unassimilable to non-Jewish societies, which justifies the establishment of a Jewish state. But it is not the only thing they share, they also have a common history, part of which is recorded in the agreements between Zionism and Nazism to promote the departure of Jews from Europe to the Palestinian land. The Haavara Agreement (1933) signed between the Zionist Federation of Germany and Nazi Germany – which provided large amounts of money to the Nazi regime while blocking the boycott that was being organized throughout the world – as well as the visit in the same year of Leopold von Mildenstein to the Zionist colonies in Palestine, which would culminate in extensive pro-Zionist articles published in Goebbels’ newspaper Der Angriff, and a shameful commemorative medal with the swastika on one side and the Star of David on the other, are some evidence of this link. But, undoubtedly, where they most resemble each other is in the brutal genocide that one and the other have committed.

Netanyahu is today the main enemy of humanity, he and all his accomplices are provoking a catastrophe that has already killed more than 60 thousand people, most of them women and children. It is our moral duty to reject this visit and to organize mass mobilizations that live up to the historical cause and the courage of the heroic Palestinian people who have been resisting for 77 years and who, as long as there is at least one Palestinian alive, will never surrender.

Endnotes

Up to this point we have tried to reflect with documented data the more than eloquent evidence of the fascist character of the Zionist State of Israel and the genocidal massacre it perpetrates on the Palestinian people. We pointed out that, although they are not the same, they have many similarities with Nazism. We did so trying to leave aside the irremediable anger that overwhelms us, the deep anguish we feel and the frightening pain of being witnesses of a new Holocaust. We do not want to lie to you, the reading of each material for this article had to be interrupted on more than one occasion because tears did not allow us to continue.

If to you, as to us, this provoked the same anger, pain and anguish, typical of our humanity, we invite you to organize with us. We owe it to the Palestinian people and especially to Palestinian children to ensure the world in which they grow up is not this hell of siege, violence and death to which they are being subjected today. More and more people throughout the world are mobilizing and demanding an end to genocide and raising their voices against the Zionist State of Israel and its accomplices. Thousands of Jews are shouting “not in our name” and rejecting the policies of Zionism. We call upon them and all the peoples of the world to rise up against this barbarism. Palestine is a cause of humanity, we have an enormous debt with this people, and we cannot but fight tirelessly until we put an end to the fascist state that annihilates them and build a free, secular, democratic and socialist Palestine from the river to the sea.