After the Second World War, the Jewish state of Israel was created. At the time, Israel had a large number of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and those numbers were increased by emigration to Israel by Holocaust survivors from the US and Europe. These immigrants felt that the Jews now had a country of their own that they must build and develop.

The survivors of the Holocaust would have had two potent memories, among others, of life, under the Nazi regime. One was race instinct based on eugenics. The Nazi party and those that supported it from the German population believed that other races were inferior to the German people, who were derived from the Aryan race.

It was not only the Jews that were seen as an inferior race, but all other ethnic groups. The Jews suffered the worst fate because of their numbers in the country. In an earlier column looking at what the Israeli government and army are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza, I made reference to a scene in the movie Schindler’s List.

When I taught the second year course in Philosophy at UG, yearly, I would show Schindler’s List to the students as part of the teaching of the philosophy of Arthur Koestler. Koestler argued that the Homo sapiens race was a fatally flawed species that had an inbuilt tendency to enjoy killing.

I asked students to pay special attention to a scene in the movie in which the death commander who lived on the concentration camp had a maid who was a Jewish woman. One evening, he felt the need to have sex and drew the maid closer to him in an emotional embrace. Then, in a paroxysm of racial awareness, he pushed her violently away. He realised in a moment of rage that he should not have sex with a woman that the Nazi ideology considered as not fully human.

The second memory Holocaust survivors took with them to Israel is the Nazi war punishment policy. The Nazi policy was to kill large numbers of people in European villages where attacks on soldiers, policemen, and Nazi officials took place. That was a deliberate display of Nazi sadism that the Nazis thought would deter the villagers from harbouring resistance fighters.

After the occupation of Palestinian territories and the 1967 war between the Arab nations and Israel, successive Israeli governments have inculcated race hatred in their attitude toward the Palestinians and have employed the punishment policy the Holocaust survivors knew about from the Nazi era. Israeli governments since the occupation of Palestinian lands would have been the beneficiaries of these two memories Holocaust survivors took with them to Israel.

What the Israeli government and the Israeli army are doing in Gaza is copying from the Nazis. It is foolish for anyone to think that 18, 000 Palestinians, of which 70 percent are women and children, have been killed by Israeli bombing by accident.

It has been two months of bombing, yet the civilian casualties have been rising, not decreasing. If the Palestinian people in general are not being targeted, then how do you explain the increase in civilian deaths against relentless calls by the international community, including intimate allies of Israel, for the Israeli air force to avoid civilian causalities? What is happening in Gaza is what the Nazis did to Europe: kill European Jews and European people out of spite for German soldiers that were attacked by partisan fighters.

It has been two months now since Israel has been bombing Gaza killing civilians indiscriminately, yet the world has not seen the defeat of Hamas. So, where are the Hamas fighters? Why have they not been defeated as yet? And if they are being defeated, how come 18, 000 Palestinians have died in the bombing?

The answer is that removing Hamas is the pretext for instituting the punishment policy of the Nazis. The Israeli army is looking for Hamas fighters, alright, but they are also targeting the civilian population, as the Nazis did. What has been taking place for the past two months in Gaza is a horrible war crime similar to what the Nazis did to the Jews.

Against this background, an important question comes into play. How do teachers discuss the Holocaust given the new Holocaust in Gaza perpetrated by the victims of the Holocaust themselves? Before the Gaza genocide, the Holocaust was required reading in the teaching of philosophy. How does the teacher go about lecturing on the philosophical importance of understanding the Holocaust as an example of genetic xenophobia while looking at the contradiction of a Jewish army committing genocide against another race?