By Henry A. Onwubiko, PhD
Conscience is an open wound; only truth can heal it – Uthman Danfodio
The feverish and unwavering support given by the Christian Western nations to the State of Israel for its infantile revenge against occupied Palestine by launching a war of genocide with unsurpassed cruelty in the occupied territories of Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem did not come as a surprise to most discerning students of world history. In the Nigerian civil war, with the loss of several thousands of black lives, the same Western Christian nations who colonised and evangelised Nigeria into a religious dynamic, designed to trigger genocide, killed for and robbed each of the warring regions. Their capitalist concerns were about which region had the crude oil and could readily pay its various competing military industrial complexes in cash, commodities or loans, in return for jet fighters, bombers, armoured cars, phosphorous cluster bombs and heavy artilleries, to expedite the genocide of black people.
This time, in Palestine, the Zionist seed that was planted to initiate Palestinian genocide resulted from the guilty conscience of the Christian Western nations, arising from the holocaust – the planned murder of over six million members of the European Jewry due to their envied culture of creativity and perseverance. This discrimination against Jews attained its peak in the Second World War among the Nazis in Germany with Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer, who organized for their elimination through torture in concentration camps as the final solution. Also the doctrine of White Supremacy by the same Westerners dehumanized the African, imposed racism, lynching by Jim Crow laws as forms of genocide in order to enslave the black man to work for him in his plantations and raise the industrial capital without pay for 400 years to lay the foundations for his industrial domination of the modern world. The prejudice and persecution of European Jews led to a world-wide migration of the surviving ones to the United States, Britain, France, Palestine and other nations.
At the end of the First World War, Palestine, together with other Arab territories, came under the British mandate with Britain among the Western victors against the defeated Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, Britain, the United States and its Western allies were also the grand victors of the Second World War. But it was not their awareness of the vast oil reserves found in the land of the Semitic people of Arabia and its prime importance as a source of energy for the emerging and conquering Western Imperialism that was their main concern. The Christian Western nations were propelled by their guilty conscience to provide a homeland in Palestine for the surviving European Jews, fleeing from the holocaust. They actualised this plan in 1948 by utilizing the opportunity that Palestine was mandated to Britain as a victor of World War I. Lord Balfour on behalf of Britain apportioned part of the Palestinian land formalized under the Balfour declaration to settle the European Jews.
The unsettled Palestinians forced out of their land in 1948 by the Israeli occupiers became known to Palestinians as the first Nakba, while they trod to Gaza as refugees to live as open fenced prisoners under surveillance and alienation, a process that has meant 75 years of Israel occupation of their homeland. Having engaged the Israeli occupiers in several wars of resistance, after each war, Israel not only ceased and retained the purloined Palestinian lands but deprived the Palestinian people also of their inalienable human rights. Palestinians live under an apartheid state where they are required to carry a pass or documents permitting them to work or travel to only specified places in Israel. The Palestinians are now catastrophically witnessing their second Nakba, besieged by Israeli bombardment of Gaza by air, land and sea, amounting to genocide.
Also, thousands of Palestinians are languishing in Israeli prisons, many of them minors awaiting trial for many years with no formal charge established against them. Just this year alone, several Palestinians have been killed by incoming anti-Semitic Israeli settlers from the United States, France and other nations armed with rifles by the Ben Givir, the present Israeli Heritage Minister. They attack Palestinian families in the West Bank, and other occupied territories, as well as resettle in their homes with the encouragement and reward of more money and guns from the Zionist state.
There is no defined separation of religion and state, and the Jews openly discriminate against Palestinian Arab Moslems, just as they were discriminated against by the Christian Western nations. Numerous efforts by the Palestinian people through their popular organisations such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Fatah, the Islamic Jihad, Hamas among others have used various strategies from civil disobedience to armed struggle to draw the attention of nations of the world including the United Nations Organization to the racism, religious intolerance, apartheid and unjust killings of innocent Palestinians by the Zionist anti-Semitic settlers encouraged by the Zionist State to occupy their lands and homes. Had Hamas not adopted its outlandish strategy to surprise Israel by launching its widely alarming, unexpected and unanticipated attack, the world may still be numb and immune to the cry of the Palestinian people over the occupation of their land for over seventy years, subjected to racism, apartheid killings, detentions without trial among other most inhuman, cruel and barbaric treatments to eliminate them from their homeland; as was the intention of the Christian Westerners in Europe, and perhaps the final solution of genocide.
However, the Western Christian nations claim both a moral, historical and profitable obligation to protect, arm, equip and fight with Israel against Palestine and the Arab world. Their moral obligation stems from their guilty conscience from the holocaust in the elimination of six million of their fellow human beings as a consequence of their prejudice. The same Western Christian nations behind western imperialism have imposed racism, the doctrine of white supremacy and negrophobia against the black and African people and 400 of slavery their bones littered in the world’s oceans only to be joined in our modern era by their great grand children as migrants perishing in the Mediterranean Sea, denied entrance to Europe by their newly elected racist governments. The material and second obligation is to arm and fight against Palestine and encourage Palestinian occupation in the trust-worthy role of Israel in securing their investments and the development of Arab oil in providing ample energy to empower their multinational industries which sustain Global Western hegemonic rule led by the United States.
The tragedy of Palestine however lies in the shameful failure of the Arab bourgeoisie who in fear of their own people and to protect their scandalous standard of living, rely for their protection and survival on these Christian Western nations and the Zionist State of Israel as the chief security agent for protecting Arab oil and Western Investments and most important of all Western Hegemonic Rule which of course include the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, led by the United States of America. For instance, in the genocidal war against the Palestinian people of Gaza which started in October 7th, Egypt which shared an entrance gate with Gaza did not freely enable the transport of food, water, drugs and other incentives blockaded by Israel for fear of its own security being invaded by Gazan Palestinians subjected to starvation and intense bombardment by Israeli forces by air, land and sea with the bombs dropped on Gaza equated with seven times the atomic bomb in the Second World War dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.
The unsurpassed cruelty by Israel, the United States and the Organized Western Christian nations displayed on the civilian population of Gaza are certainly far more than the reflected figures reported by the United Nations and Gaza authorities. The total number of Palestinian civilians in Gaza killed from October 7th by air bombardments was over 12,000 with 5,500 children and 30,000 injured. These reports also indicate that the bombardment, while displacing 1.5 million Palestinians could not account for 3,250 Palestinians, most, still buried under the rubble from their crumbled concrete houses, where the alarmed youths with jack-hammers drilled through the concrete slabs or used axes and bare hands to pull out corpses and the injured that they hastily rushed to the ambulances quickly driven to their corpse littered hospitals also targeted for direct bombardment. In Gaza’s biggest hospital, al-Shifa, 36 premature babies requiring oxygen for incubation lay wrapped and scattered on the floor to die for lack of electricity and fuel for the generators.
The justification of Israel and the Western powers for bombing these hospitals was that they had evidence that the Hamas were taking cover in subterfuge in these hospitals although the United Nations reports clearly denied such spurious claims by a mean and sordid Israeli armed forces without respect for humanity. While Gaza had been reduced to rubble as promised by Israel fascist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the genocide of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is just commencing with over 200 Palestinians civilians killed, this time by a combination of Israeli settlers forcefully searching and occupying Palestinian homes with the assistance of Israeli soldiers, with 2400 Palestinian civilians thus far injured.
To make their intent on genocide more vivid, the Zionist state of Israel supported by the United States and the Christian Western nations, through the Israeli Finance Minister, Benzala Smotrich, as a mop-up operation, has began to suggest the fascist idea of moving what is left of the Palestinian population of Gaza to other countries, while encouraging voluntary migration for Palestinians weary from their unsurpassed and pathological cruelty, possibly transplanted in them during their persecution in the concentration camps of Europe in the descent of humanity led by the United States to Palestinian genocide. Perhaps the subject of psychoanalysis could theoretically supply proof on how a people for fear from their past inflicted genocide can unleash a most inhuman cruelty on innocent Palestinian civilians together with their powerful Western past prosecutors who once unleashed genocide upon them.
Meanwhile, the United States, Britain, France, NATO and the European Union leaders who have all paid their solidarity visits to the fascist, far right Israeli war cabinet – even Richie Sunac – the Prime Minister of Britain, having supplied arms and pledged billions of dollars to supplement the military might of Israel not only as a final solution to wipe out Palestine but to frighten the Arabs who are afraid of their growing proletarian country men and women who support the people of Palestine.
To buy time to ensure their implementation of Palestinian genocide, it was necessary for the Western Christian nations to use their veto power in the United Nations Security Council to defeat any resolution for a permanent ceasefire in an overwhelming infantile and grossly asymmetric war of revenge in the occupied Gaza strip against the oppressed Palestinian people. As to be expected, the resolution presented by the United States rejected a ceasefire and by the rule of the United Nations nullified other resolutions. Such a world body, by the few powerful minority members of the security council, against smaller and individually powerless countries show that the United Nations had reached a point where it must be reformed to reflect a new balance of power for the coming multilateral and democratic new world order. The diplomatic tussle in the United Nations, due to the frustration in the Security Council of passing a resolution for a ceasefire, to stop the brutal bombardments and killings of Palestinian infants, children, mothers, and fathers, further gave Israeli armed forces more time to bomb and re-bomb the dead in Gaza hospitals, refugee camps, schools and residential areas, to arm and rearm the Jewish settlers arriving from the United States, France, Britain and other nations, to kill off the people and occupy all of Palestine as a final solution to occupying their lands.
The world, having noted through the media the brutal bombardments by land, air and sea of Palestinian civilians, schools, hospitals, residential areas and other vital infrastructure have mobilized and turned out in thousands in the streets and metropolis of the various nations to protest against the cruelty of Western Imperialism being meted out to Gaza – a land of only 100sqm but one of the most populated and dense areas on earth.
In Africa, South Africa having liberated itself from Apartheid and racism from Western Imperialism had the highest number of protesters against Palestinian genocide. However in many African nations where the Western Christian evangelists have continued to mis-educate and set their well-orchestrated trap of genocide, the people support Israel as the watch dog of Western Imperialism in the oil rich Middle East and are indoctrinated to believe that Israel was the only adored child of God or western imperialism and by such virtue has the licence to kill and carry out Palestinian genocide. These Africans are only waiting to be called out by their pastors from their churches to protest for the Israeli Zionist occupation forces in support of the global rule of western hegemony while they fatefully await the inevitable and spontaneous commencement of their own genocide as planned by Western Imperialism.
Usman Dan Fodio, many centuries ago commented that “Conscience is an open wound; only truth can heal it.” The Western Christian nations sustained a wounded or guilty conscience by the murder of over six million of its European Jewry, just as the genocide of Africans during slavery and colonization where millions of black people perished, also hangs equally on their conscience, based from prejudice and their own intolerant culture of racism, anti-Semitism, apartheid, Jim Crow and Negrophobia. But the occupation of Semitic Palestine by anti-Semitic Zionists, armed by Western Imperialism with the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art weapons to secure its energy investments, and ensure its continued access to the Arabian oil reserves to globally empower its multinational industries and sustain its Western hegemonic rule led by the United States where the sun as the defunct British Empire never sets, neither has ensured the truth nor healed the guilty conscience. Certainly Palestinian genocide and exile is not a solution just as the holocaust or Jewish genocide in Europe exacerbated a culture of racism and intolerance perfected by Hitler and the European Nazis, was not the final solution to bring healing to a guilty conscience. Only the end of the occupation and the restoration of Palestinian land for use by its indigenous Semitic people, an end to anti-Semitic discrimination, apartheid racism, the guarantee of equal opportunity, and the separation of religious prejudice from the powers of the State or a negotiated two-state solution under the 1967 boundaries in accordance with the United Nations, can restore the truth, that will not only secure the stability to Arabia, Jews, Christians and Moslems, who for centuries coexisted in the same Semitic desert before the emergence of capitalism, western hegemonic rule and the discovery and use of oil. Nothing, not monopoly capital, not exploitation, not large oil reserves, not European culture of white supremacy that has energized Zionism, not sophisticated ammunitions especially their atomic bomb which the present Israeli war cabinet had considered dropping on the Palestinians of Gaza and Palestinians in other occupied territories, but the truth can heal and restore peace to a guilty conscience.
Henry A. Onwubiko, PhD, is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka