Column | You and I all know what is happening in Gaza

Sometimes I wish I didn’t know: that a genocide is taking place at the moment. Because I am furious, and anger is an extremely tiring emotion. But once you know, you can’t know anymore. The oppression of the Palestinians has been quietly taking place for decades, while the war has been busy for 1.5 years. It also feels like it is the last war: the decisive, definitive blow is distributed here. We have all been able to see how experienced the extermination takes place. We see how many children die, and we read how hospitals were bombed, how even the simplest field clinics – the last refugees for a population on the flight – are razed to the ground. We read, read again, double check whether it is true that Israel caregivers executed blood blood. It is all indisputably true and yet nothing about silence changes, nothing about the cultivated powerlessness, nothing about the ease of looking away.

There is not only the shadow of the genocide on the Jews, but also the long shadow of the colonial past, about the genocide of the Palestinians. It seems that it was always the intention to purify the country of the original inhabitants. That is why it can also be discussed without any fuss about the ‘redevelopment’ of an area, about building a holiday resort on the same land where a genocide is now taking place. The conversations between Trump and Netanyahu to make Gaza a Rivièra of the Middle East are reminiscent of Namibia, where colonialism and racism came together in a perfect dance dance at the beginning of the twentieth century.

That dance was used by the German Empire under Wilhelm II. They thought that, for a balanced life, a person Lebensraum needed. And that space was found in Namibia, a beautiful country that bordered on the Atlantic Ocean. The residents of the area – the Herero and Nama – did not deserve it to live there, they thought. Germany was in his right to kill them because, like a German citizen in 1904 to the emperor: « After all, we are not fighting an enemy who follows the rules of honor, but against Wilden. »

In Namibia, tens of thousands-perhaps even more than one hundred thousand-people were murdered in just four years (1904-1908). A new world was then built that was not allowed to remind us of the suffering of the original inhabitants. Where once a concentration camp had been, in the city of Swakopmund, a shopping center was now erected where white tourists were seduced by shiny shops. Motorized buggies were rented on the outskirts of the same city, with which tourists and local young people could cross the many small hills. Those hills were Hundreds of unmarked graves From victims of the genocide. But nobody was talking about that.

It is a horrible history. But looking back on injustice is never as unbearable as to see the injustice in the present. You and I all know what is happening in Gaza. The politicians in the Chamber, with access to so much more information than we – they know. And they do nothing. I wonder: how do they sleep, who know about the abuses in Gaza, and they still do nothing, say nothing, take a position? Has Prime Minister may have a trick, with which he can put aside the facts presented to him by aid organizations? Maybe he wants to share it with us: how to simply refuse a plea to empathy. Maybe he can teach me to wait quietly until it is over, until every Palestinian is dead, after which the big concealment can begin. And we can all say that we have not known it – really -.

Karin Amatmoekrim Is a writer and literary. She writes a column every other week at this place.

To share

Mail the editors