By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals”. “Human animals” might be referring to the fact that biologically we are all animals, being part of the mammalian subgroup, the warm-blooded quadruped species, as set aside from the reptiles, fishes and birds.

But it would be a waste of time for a busy minister in a war situation to be delivering a lecture on basic biology instead of mobilising soldiers and collecting materiel to send to Gaza to pulverise that hapless enclave, which has known no peace over a decade and half of the Israeli blockade.

Rather, what the minister was doing with that statement was undergoing a Freudian slip that put Adolf Hitler’s words in his mouth, words primarily used by the Nazis to characterise… Jews.

“Animals” in this case was popular with the Nazis, who used it to dehumanise Jews, relegating them to the level of sub-humans, in some cases equating them to disease-carrying rodents which should be got rid of by extermination.

When I watched the minister as he said these words I went back to an article by Michelle Wiebe, a student at the University of Ontario, titled Extermination and Euthanasia: Animal Symbolism in Nazi Germany.

To be fair to Adolf Hitler, he did not invent antisemitism; it existed for centuries before the Nazis arrived on the scene – the Jews as slayers of Jesus was an emotive thought since Calvary, and the stigma followed Jewishness throughout the Middle Ages.

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In the same era, Wielbe writes, there were records of Frenchmen or women being accused of bestiality and burned alive because they had had sexual liaison with a Jew — considered beasts. Such dehumanisation was rampant in many Christian nations, and pogroms were commonplace everywhere in medieval Europe.

So, the Nazis only found a most useful tool to wield in their quest for world conquest, and they used it to devastating effect, the Jews paying the heaviest price.

That a defender of the state of Israel, a Jewish state, should be caught on tape using Hitler’s language is truly incredible.

And yet that is the logic of oppression and inhumanity. Those who seek justification for the unjust acts have a serious penury of words with which to explain to their constituencies what they intend to do to solve whatever they see as their problem.

For the Nazis and Hitler, it was important to convince the German populace — already with heavy doses of antisemitism — that the Jews were at the core of all the decline, suffering and destruction of the German people; they had to be exterminated.

Wiebe compares this with the justification for the African slave trade and the horrible tribulations suffered by Africans during the so-called Middle Passage.

Those involved in this commerce had to justify those crimes by equating their Black cargo to simians, apes, which could not be fully human and were therefore good material for forced labour. Even the popes of the time blessed this abomination.

The belief that Black slaves were some kind of higher order of primates made it easy for the crews of the seagoing vessels to sardine-pack rows upon rows of Africans in hellholes beneath the decks, where innumerable Africans died of disease or starvation, or were jettisoned into the ocean waves when rations went dangerously low.

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So, the minister’s statement forms part of the discourse of genocide perpetrators throughout history. In the Rwanda genocide of 1994 such narratives were weaponised and put at the service of the mass murderers, such as calling Tutsis cockroaches.

It is this type of madness that seems to have entered the Israeli minister of Defence, who may have forgotten that these are Hitler’s words that should be associated with the Holocaust. The denial of all means of livelihood — no food, no water, no power, no fuel — as announced by the same minister, could lead to mass murder.

For all that, the United States and Western governments have given Israel a carte blanche to do pretty much as it pleases, which means Gaza is cooked. Hardly a week has gone by since the pounding of this enclave started and it is already a moonscape; it is frightening to imagine what it will look like in another week.

The glib talk about rules of war and respect for civilian welfare rings hollow when one considers that, over the years during which Israel has occupied the West Bank and imprisoned the Gaza Strip, there is very little respect paid to civilian life in way, shape or form.

The pictures we are accustomed to watching are of heavily armed Israeli soldiers firing at children armed with catapults and stones. During this phase we are likely to see some more of these disconcerting scenarios, with America supplying the arms.

I have been listening to the various declarations from Western governments siding with Israel unreservedly, and they all forgot — rather conveniently — to mention the real casus belli of all the series of flare-ups since 1948.

Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: [email protected]