Purging the Palestine in US
Once upon a 1966, I chaired a plenary session of a conference of proNATO International Students Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. Dressed in suffocating ignorance of history, I offered equal time for delegations of Palestinian and Israeli students’ associations to present their appeal for our collective support. National associations of newly independent African countries should take sides with adequate historical narratives to inform their decisions.
Israel’s claim to national territory seemed similar to that by European-Settlers against whom the Mau Mau fought a bitter war in Kenya. In Africa, agenda of liberation targeted European-Settler oppressors in the Rhodesias (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), apartheid South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia and Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. Delegates of the Israeli Students’ Union must explain the paradox of nationhood which they claim for themselves but denied the Palestinians.
American, British, French and Scandinavian student delegates were furious but would not voice their position openly. They moved to impeach me and sought to detract me with an offer to lead a non-existent organisation – a Commonwealth Students’ Association. I did continue to insist that Israeli students had a responsibility to expose to African and Asian delegates Hitler’s drive to exterminate Jews. Colonial Britain, France and Portugal had hidden from our school syllabuses that horrendous and barbaric record of European civilization, while claiming that Africans held a monopoly of inter-tribal wars. Israel, I insisted, could not aid Euro-America in hiding their barbarism against Jews, and yet expect Africa’s youth to support them against Palestinian wars against war and seizures of lands.
Israel has shown restraint from expositing genocide against Africans (labelled as “Aborigines”) in Australia; various nationalities across North and South America; Namibia and the Caribbean islands. Bolaji Akinyemi has criticised Argentina for deliberately decimating her African population from 45 per cent in the 1820s to the current less than one per cent. Israel has also failed to mount a joint campaign against the European genocide against six million Jews with the bigger Euro-American genocide against 20 million Africans who perished in slave ships on the Atlantic Ocean as well as the largely ignored Arab slave violence against Africans. Africa’s foreign policy towards the African Diaspora has not benefitted from Israel’s exploitation of its own extensive Diaspora in the world of academic research and investigative journalism to expose this evil side of world history. Professor Ali Mazrui has claimed that the Jewish community have criticised his call for Africans and Jews to share victimhood by genocide.
In reviewing my 1966 impeachment, I explored library resources at Stanford University and the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin to learn about the Jewish question. What liberated me, to some degree, were documentary movies and photographs in books which showed piles of emaciated naked Jews starved to death as specimens in experiments by German scientists. There were also pictures of handbags made from skins of Jewish victims of German industrial experiments. My awareness was jolted to another face of Regis Debray’s view that a “revolution revolutionises the counter-revolution”, when power commits murders and incites counter murders. A moral volcano lies crouched waiting to be incited by a joint Africa-Israel initiative for fertilizing world civilization.
President Robert Mugabe was being cynical when he accused Americans and the European Union of being hypocritical by invading Gadafi’s Libya in 2011 to save “civilians” who were likely to be slaughtered in Benghazi but have not invaded Israel that was bombing, burying alive, killing over 1800 and wounding over 9,000 Palestinians by August 3, 2014. He had launched a liberation war against Ian Smith who was protected by a hypocritical Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in Britain, echoing a tradition of Britain recognising the right to slavocracy by independent rebel colonies in North America. Powerful interests in America’s “land of the free” supported and defended racial dictatorships across mineral-rich and strategically located Southern Africa.
The matter of hypocrisy fuelled the foreign policy of the Organisation of African Unity when it formed a Liberation Committee to support wars for freedom across Africa at a time when, as Ambassador Salim Ahmed Salim has said, EuroAmerican diplomats smugly predicted permanent racial dictatorships in southern Africa; while preaching freedom against “communist dictatorships” in the Soviet Union.
The power of television pictures gives this matter of Euro-American hypocrisy a rare explosive power each time Israel has bombarded Palestinians, and when reporters claimed that American precision bombs entered nostrils of children in Baghdad in the war against Sadam Hussein. Onesided explosion of bombs against defenceless people humiliates all those who share racial or religious identities with victims. White policemen gunning down and bashing heads of children of Soweto humiliated and infuriated black peoples everywhere.
It could be argued that resultant yearnings for dignity, justice and revenge fuelled desperate actions ranging from Palestinian Miss Khalid hijacking a civilian airline in 1968, to a Tamil girl assassinating Rajiv Ghandi in a suicide bomb attack. A neo-morality of ‘revenge-justice’ begins to bash walls of hypocrisy and complicit silence in human conscience. In a moment of dialectical anguish Israel must begin to face her growing raw moral nudity on the global arena; and from bowels of historical pain and panic end her belief in the doctrine of self-salvation by superior capacity and will to wage and win wars. Africans, Israelis and Palestinians must jointly mine volcanic lava of revenge-justice.