A Hiroshima-Gaza connection?

Curiously enough, it's Israel's leader that claims the U.S. nuclear massacre of 200,000 mostly civilians in Japan in 1945 legitimizes the genocide for which he's wanted at The Hague

The Washington Post ran this aerial photograph of Gaza by Heidi Levin 5 days ago

Such is the arrogance of Israel’s wanted-for-war-crimes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he seems unaware of just how damning some of his statements are — damning both of himself, and of the entire moral edifice of his Western enablers.

You’d think that Israeli propagandists might blanche at any comparison between Hiroshima and what they’re doing in Gaza, but that comparison has been made by Netanyahu himself According to Joe Biden, when the U.S. leader suggested the Israeli war effort he was backing to the hilt may be killing too many civilians for public-relations comfort, Netanyahu retorted: “Well, you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.”

Claiming the U.S. atom bombs on Japan as moral authority for dropping the explosive equivalent of five or more Hiroshima bombs on Gaza’s captive population would be of dubious value in the court of international public opinion — not to mention in the International Criminal Court. In the eyes of most of the world today, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be deemed war crimes. And the laws of war adopted in 1949 outlaw any deliberate targeting of civilians, civilian infrastructure, or even military targets that inflict disproportionate civilian casualties. Claiming the precedents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as legitimizing Israel’s genocidal bombing of Gaza sounds more like an admission of guilt than anything else. It’s also something of a reminder that Israel emerged as a settler-colonial state in 1948, adopted the military norms of the Western colonial powers at the moment when formal colonialism was drawing to an end in the face of national movements fighting for independence.

That Israel emerged as an historical anachronism, as Tony Judt put it, steeped in the racist norms and narratives of a decaying and discredited colonialism is worth noting because it was in the colonies that Western powers had first developed the habit of dropping bombs from the skies to terrorize rebellious populations. The first aerial bombing was by Italian forces in Libya in 1911, followed by the British bombing Iraq and Spanish forces bombing Morocco. The great Swedish historian Sven Lindqvist argues in his powerful “The History of Bombing” that the adoption of this indiscriminate form of violence against other human beings deemed “racially inferior” or “savages” by their Western overlords created a moral structure of permission that allowed it to be imported into Europe, starting with the fascist bombing of the Basque village of Guernica in 1936, as memorialized by the eponymous Picasso work painted to draw attention to the horrors of Spain’s fascist assault on its democratic republic.

Lindqvist wrote that 11 years before Guernica, Spanish planes flown by American mercenaries had bombed the Moroccan town of Chechaouen to terrorize its civilian population as retribution for Spanish defeats by Rif guerillas. He told an interviewer, “The entire world knows Guernica but practically no one knows Chechaouen. The two villages are very much alike in terms of geographical position, historical importance, and ethnic significance. And they were both severely bombed. The difference was that the news of Chechaouen’s destruction didn’t surprise anyone since it seemed natural that ‘savages’ would be bombed. But when Guernica was attacked, it wasn’t just a small village in Spain; it was also Europe and indirectly us, ourselves, who were being bombed. The colonial wars had in one single stroke moved over to our own turf.”

Cue Cesaire’s boomerang effect, in which the savagery practiced by the “enlightened” West in its distant colonies eventually becomes normalized on its home continent.

And if the deliberate targeting of civilian population centers in the colonies had opened a moral gateway for Western powers to unleash terror from the skies on the cities of Europe and Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the obliteration of more than 200,000 mostly civilian residents of those cities had also been made more permissible by its propaganda featuring colonial-style dehumanization of Japan’s non-European population. “The enemy, is he human?” TIME magazine had asked. President Harry Truman, who made the decision to drop the atom bombs, explained that was unleashing these weapons against “beasts” — sounds almost like a contemporary Israeli leader, no?

Certainly most of the Global South saw the 1945 bombings in Japan as an echo of colonial racism. “They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation,” wrote Michael Ondaatje, capturing the zeitgeist in Asia after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Black leaders in the U.S. and in Africa made the same connection. Langston Hughes, writing in 1953 as Western powers were losing ground in China, Korea and Vietnam, warned that “It’s going to be very hard for some Americans not to think the easiest way to settle the problems of Asia is simply dropping an atom bomb on colored heads there.” And, indeed, the U.S. considered nuclear strikes on Korea, China and Vietnam in the ensuring decades.

Biden claims to have answered Netanyahu’s reference to allied bombing of German cities and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as justifying Israel’s massacre of civilians from the air by saying, “Yeah, that’s why all these institutions were set up after World War Two to see to it that it didn’t happen again — it didn’t happen again.”

Perhaps Biden slept through the bombing of Pyongyang that killed tens of thousands of Koreans, or of Hanoi, where many hundreds were killed by U.S. bombs?

The reality is that Israel’s Gaza genocide is tapping into the racist moral permission structure that legitimized centuries of Western conquest, at least in the minds of the perpetrators, where in the name of “civilization” the latest technologies of massacre were deployed against those deemed “savages”. And the fact that Israel’s claim of “civilizational” superiority in its killing of more than 66,000 people and counting is tacitly embraced in Western media and political circles is an awkward (for them) reminder of how the West achieved its global dominance.