GUEST BLOG: Ian Powell – Rhyming holocausts from the Herero in early 20th century to Gaza today

From time to time people assert that history is repeating itself. I don’t necessarily agree, depending on how far one wants to drill down. However, history does rhyme a lot (echo a lot is another way of expressing it).

I thought of rhyming (or echoing) history when reading a paywalled article by Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov published in the New York Review of Books(24 April 2025): ‘Infinite License’.

My previous Gaza genocide blogs

It provided an additional dimension to my previous blog posts on the Gaza genocide:

1. When apartheid meets Zionism (15 March).
2. Reasons for supporting ethnic cleansing through genocide (28 May).
3. Ethnic cleansing, genocide and recognition of Palestine (4 June).
4. Justifying 400,000 Palestinian deaths (2 July).
5. Biblical justification of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians (29 August).

Israeli-American historian Professor Omer Bartov an expert on holocausts

Omer Bartov certainly knows about holocausts. He is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University (Rhode Island).

In reference to the horrific Jewish Holocaust of Nazi Germany in the context of Israel’s use of genocide to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, Bartov calls a spade a spade:

The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.

The Herero holocaust

What particularly struck me, however, was Professor Bartov’s reference to an earlier holocaust in the early 20th century involving the Herero people living in what was then German Southwest Africa (now independent Namibia).

Namibia (then German Southwest Africa) home for pastoral Herero

The Herero were a pastoral group of about 80,000 who depended on their vast cattle herds for their economic, social, and cultural life. However, migrating German settlers from the late 19th century onwards increasingly encroached upon their grazing lands.

In response, on 12 January 1904, the Herero launched a series of attacks destroying many scattered German settler farms. More than 100 settlers were killed in these attacks.

For the settlers this was confirmation that the Herero, who they described as “baboons”, needed to be eradicated. Around 10,000 soldiers were sent from Germany. By August they had crushed the Herero fighters.

Vernichtungsbefehl

Bartov quotes the German commander Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha who, in October, issued what has come to be known as his Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order) to those Herero who remained:

The Herero are German subjects no longer. They have killed, stolen, cut off the ears and other parts of the body of wounded soldiers, and now are too cowardly to want to fight any longer…. The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the big cannon. Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children.

The outcome for the Herero was horrific. They were shot or died of thirst and hunger in the desert to which they had been expelled. Several thousand others were taken to forced labour camps.

This first holocaust of the 20^th century was ignored by Germany for years. It was not until 2021 that Germany formally apologised for:

…the suffering, inhumanity and pain inflicted on the tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children by Germany during the war in what is today Namibia.

 Part of this formal apology was a pledge to pay over a billion euros in reparations.

“Remarkable similarities” with Gaza

Professor Bartov identifies “some remarkable similarities” between this remote genocide over a century ago and “…the campaign of ethnic cleansing and annihilation prosecuted by Israel in Gaza.”

Herero and Palestinians share subjection to ethnic cleansing

Specifically, Israel saw the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023 as being strikingly similar as how German (and German settlers) saw the Herero attack 119 years earlier.

That is, it confirmed that the militant group was:

…utterly savage and barbaric, that resistance to Israeli occupation would always incline toward murder, and that Gaza’s Palestinian population as a whole should be removed from the moral universe of civilization.

In this specific context Bartov quotes Israeli major general Ghassan Alian as stating soon after the attack that:

Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.

Spot the difference between this major general’s response and Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha’s Vernichtungsbefehl against the exterminated Herero!

An interesting observation

Professor Bartov’s article is more broadly discursive than I have referred to in this post. However, there is one observation as part of this wider discourse that he made which I found sufficiently intriguing for me to mention.

Loss of Palestinian land from 1948 to 2005 through Israeli ethnic cleansing

Ethnic cleansing was a direct consequence of the creation of the state of Israel in May 1948. Zionism required Palestine to be cleansed of Palestinians.

This began with the war of 1948 and the expulsion of the vast majority of the Palestinian population (about 750,000 people) known as the Nakba.

In asserting its “historical and moral right to exist”, the newly created Israel issued a “remarkable document”, a declaration of independence which it called its  ‘Independence Scroll’.

It promised equal rights and dignity to all citizens, including what it termed the “Arab inhabitants.” Bartov suggests that:

Had a constitution in the spirit of this declaration followed, it could have created a state based on liberal and democratic principles. That, of course, never happened. No constitution was ever agreed on, and the legal standing of the Declaration of Independence is at best disputed. Even as different versions were being frantically drafted and then finalized by Israel’s first leader, David Ben-Gurion, Jewish militias and later the IDF were engaged in turning the land’s Palestinian majority into a minority through intimidation and violent expulsion.

Had the ‘Independence Scroll’ been part of a constitution, argues Bartov, Zionism may not have become Israel’s guiding ideology.

If Jews and Palestinians were to have “equal rights and dignity” as proposed then, according to the logic of his argument, ethnic cleansing would not have occurred.

Further, all that consequentially followed, including the current genocide and holocaust in Gaza and repression on the West Bank, would not have eventuated.

I’m not convinced of this suggested argument but it is not without plausibility. It is certainly worthy of further discussion.

Overcoming false memories

Just as the descendants of the German government, soldiers and settlers had to overcome the false memory for the holocaust forced upon the Herero of Namibia and do penance as a result, so also may the descendants of those responsible for today’s holocaust of the Palestinians of Gaza.

Israel, United States and Western Europe operating under a cloak of hypocrisy

Omer Bartov describes it very well this way as a fitting conclusion to this post:

By uncritically accepting that argument and assenting to the eradication of Gaza, the governments of the US and Western Europe have also accepted and employed a false memory of the Holocaust and a distorted understanding of its lessons for the present.

The long-term consequence of this travesty may, however, be that the genocide in Gaza will finally liberate Israel of its status as a unique state rooted in a unique Holocaust. This will hardly help the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims or the victims of the Hamas massacre, the dead and dying hostages or their broken families.

But the license that Israel, the land of the victims, has long enjoyed and abused may be expiring. The sons and daughters of the next generation will be free to rethink their own lives and future, beyond the memory of the Holocaust; they will also have to pay for the sins of their parents and bear the burden of the genocide perpetrated in their name.

 

 

 

 

 

Ian Powell was Executive Director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, the professional union representing senior doctors and dentists in New Zealand, for over 30 years, until December 2019. He is now a health systems, labour market, and political commentator living in the small river estuary community of Otaihanga (the place by the tide). First published at Political Bytes