“In the words of the Lord’s Prayer that we share, I ask you to forgive us our trespasses and our guilt. Without a conscious process of remembering, without sorrow, without apology, there can be no reconciliation.” This quote is from a speech given by Germany Economic Cooperation and Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul at the ceremony that marked the 100th anniversary of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama tribes in what is now known as Namibia, which had been under German colonial occupation, officially beginning with the Berlin Conference held between 1884 and 1885.
The story is simply what we see today in Gaza. Added to it is the accumulation of experience and craftsmanship in acts of cruelty and killing, which the advancement of technology of death has allowed to accelerate: settler colonialism and taking over indigenous land is met with rebellion and resistance by its rightful owners.
When the rebellion against the settlers violating Namibia escalated, German Emperor Wilhelm II tasked General Lothar von Trotha with quashing it, just as Israel now wants to quash Hamas in Gaza. The tribes were surrounded by the region of Waterberg, which resembles Gaza. All roads were blocked so that the "saboteurs" (a term I of course heard from Galant and Netanyahu) could not escape. The genocide of the Herero and Nama tribes then began in full force in mid-August 1905.
There was no escape outside of surrender or death. People were chained together and killed by the tens of thousands. If the world had been alarmed by what the Germans did in Namibia, there would not have been a Holocaust; we would have had neither gas chambers nor the Holocaust of the Jews. Namibia sounded the alarms and warned of the mass crime that we would later see elsewhere. What alarm is Gaza sounding to the world today? What is most dangerous about that is the world failing to take notice of the genocide in Gaza and its repercussions.
I write this article as someone who has documented and believed in Western values. However, I find myself almost losing faith in the entire value system that I had been in awe of when I migrated to the United States and then moved to Europe. I no longer believe that their values have any bearing on their actions. The repentance of the Germans or the British for their atrocities against the Africans had perhaps given me hope, but it seems that it had been misguided.
Going back to Germany's story, there wasn't even a consensus around the German minister’s reconciliatory tone, one hundred years after the crime against the people of Namibia. Then Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer disagreed, refusing any kind of reconciliation or compensation for the estimated 60,000 victims from the Herero tribes alone - no apologies for the torture camps and hard labor, nothing.
A large part of Germany's elite has no desire to recognize their mistake. So how did the Germans acknowledge their sins against the Jews but refuse to apologize to the Namibians, even in the name of their shared God? Isn't a hundred years enough for the Germans to admit to their genocidal campaigns in Africa? How many years will the Israelis need to admit to their genocide campaigns against the Palestinians?
As for British occupation, it is linked to British settler colonialism in Kenya. It also relied on massacres, hangings, and genocide against the indigenous people. What is true for Palestine was true for Kenya. In 1945, nationalists like Jomo Kenyatta (a parallel to Mahmoud Abbas from the Kenyan African Union) were pressuring the British government to grant them political and civil rights, seeking an agreement similar to the 1993 Oslo Accords that would remove settlements and redistribute land ownership, with parts of it given back to its original owners, but to no avail.
The rivals of Kenyatta and his allies were a radical Kenyan faction known as the "Mau Mau" (a British, not a local term), which mirrors Hamas in Gaza. Within the Kenyan African Union, they formed a more radical group.
In 1952, fighter groups from the "Kikuyu", along with fighters from two other ethnic groups, the "Embu" and "Meru", allied together to attack white settlers, creating a coalition similar to that of Hamas with Islamic Jihad. The "Mau Mau" was an ideological group, with its members swearing allegiance to their cause, as do Al-Qassam Brigades.
The campaign to eradicate the "Mau Mau" began in October 1952. It went on until 1960 and resulted in tens of thousands of Kenyan casualties. While the British were watching the Golden Jubilee celebrations of Queen Elizabeth, I was following a British trial of the war crimes committed by the Empire in Kenya, including the detention of about a 100,000 Kenyans of a single ethnicity for up to 10 years without trial. Despite all these efforts to uncover the truths of the genocide in Kenya, Britain only recognized a fraction of the compensation they owed to the descendants of the "Mau Mau," paying only 9 million pounds.
We are faced with an ethical disaster here. So, why would Britain empathize with the Palestinians in Gaza? Were the "Mau Mau" groups in Kenya Islamists? Were the Nama and Herero tribes Muslim? Is it useful to look at the ideology of the resistance, or should we look at the ideology of the occupier and the killer?
In a conversation with my friend Dr. Ali Abdul Latif Ahmida, author of the 2020 book "Genocide in Libya: Shar, A Hidden Colonial History,” which I reviewed for this newspaper (April 18, 2021), he told me that the German Nazis used to send missions to Libya, so they could learn to kill proficiently from the Italians. He pointed out that genocide was a craft to the Nazis, not just an ordinary task or conventional warfare. He added: "What is happening in Gaza is a reiteration of the genocide that the Italian Fascists carried out in Libya in 1929, but the absence of accountability and trial has poisoned our contemporary memory."
From this brief overview, it is apparent that what is happening in Gaza today is the outcome of an accumulation of German, Italian, English, and Israeli expertise in perfecting massacres and genocide. Thus, these same countries have united around the genocidal Israeli campaign, along with France, which committed even more heinous acts for over more than a century in Algeria. Only the Americans as a state (apart from what happened to the Native Americans before the establishment of the state) are newcomers to this craft.
