By Syed Zafar Mehdi / Press TV

Israeli regime is resorting to Nazi-like policies of collective punishment with the intent to bring about the physical destruction of the population of Gaza, says a renowned genocide scholar.

In an interview with the Press TV website on Monday, Dr. Maung Zarni an academic and human rights activist from Myanmar who just returned from his visit to Gaza and occupied Palestinian territories, said the Tel Aviv regime has since October 7, 2023, sought to accelerate the “genocidal slaughter and the physical destruction of a sub-population of Palestinian nation under occupation since 1967.”

The death toll from the genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza has soared past 41,000, most of them children and women. The unofficial fatality figure, however, is believed to be much higher.

Dr. Zarni, a world-renowned genocide scholar, said he is not comfortable in creating a hierarchy of evil (and crimes) but he is prepared to say that Israel is “resorting to Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel)-like policies of collective punishment with the intent to bring about the physical destruction of the population of Gaza.”

“Gazans have fared worst for a number of concrete reasons:  According to Ami Ayalon, former naval admiral and former head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, Israel has run Gaza with its 2.3 million people as “an open-air prison,” he told the Press TV website.

“On top of that, Israel has maintained a permanent blockade simply because it wasn't prepared to respect the democratic will of the Gazans, who elected Hamas twice as their government.”

Hamas-led Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (Storm) was launched in response to decades of military occupation and atrocities unleashed on Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

However, the response from the Israeli regime was totally disproportionate and brutal, which Dr. Zarni refers to as a “collective punishment of the entire population.”

“When the prisoners of Gaza rebelled, as in the Oct 7 attacks, Israel launched a collective punishment of the entire population. Israel's response is straight out of the Nazi SS playbook,” he asserted.

“On 7 October 1944, the Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau killed all 4-SS officers who managed the gas chamber and dynamited the crematorium. The SS responded by slaughtering all Jewish inmates in the entire barrack.”  According to the Gaza media office, 69 percent of total victims are children and women.

Dr. Zarni said the Israeli regime’s kill rate of children and infants in the besieged territory is “far worse” than the number of children slaughtered at the Mauthausen Concentration camp in Hitler's native upper Austria.

“The SS slaughtered 23,000 children at Mauthausen in roughly 7 years ( between the autumn of 1939 and Spring of 1945) whereas Israel has brought about the direct murder or death of 17,000 Gazan children and infants in mere 11 months,” the scholar and activist told the Press TV website.

While the world is still debating whether the Israeli regime is committing genocide and war crimes in Gaza, Dr. Zarni said the “moral majority” of the world – as evidenced by the protests around the world, in both Global North and Global South – “are not debating about Israel's crimes in Gaza.”

“It is Western politicians, Western states, ideological institutions such as the media, universities, and thinktanks - themselves built via settler colonialist genocides and colonial loot, theft and pre-colonial slavery and slave trade - that are splitting legal hair and propagating this lie of "Israel has the right to defend itself,” he emphasized.

He said that based on his studies and research of the Cambodian genocide, the Nazi genocide or the Burmese genocide of Rohingya, the Israeli genocide in Palestine has produced what he calls "the ecosystem of genocidal methodologies."

“I will say that Israel's Zionist project of establishing, maintaining and expanding the Jewish majority (or supremacy) state has produced what I call "the ecosystem of genocidal methodologies" with a singular mission of destroying, at varying speeds, the native population of Palestine,” he noted.

“Specifically, different pockets of Palestinian populations have been subjected by Israel to very inventive methods of population destructions and induced mass deprivation (pervasive mass poverty, chronic and acute humanitarian crises) through 810 k of the illegal wall and unpredictable check-points, permanent regimes of political, psychological, cultural, and social subjugation, denigration and destruction.”

There is no war between Palestinians as a nation under occupation and the Israeli occupation, he said.  “There is Palestinian resistance, armed and non-violence, against the decades of settler colonial occupation and expansion of the land that clearly belongs to the Indigenous Palestinian people, of different faiths, including a small percentage of Jewish Palestinians,” the Burmese scholar said

On whether we would see the total extermination of Palestinians if the genocidal war continues, Dr. Zarni said even Nazis under Hitler failed to exterminate the entire Jewish population in Nazi-occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945.

“None other than Adolf Eichmann, head of the Jewish Affairs in the SS, lamented on the audio-recording the fact that the Nazis failed to achieve their own stated objective of the physical destruction of the entire population of Jewish people,” he stated.

“I think Israel will find itself in a similar predicament as Eichmann and the Nazis.”

He elaborated that the Nazi racial supremacist ideology and Israel's Jewish supremacist racism (Zionism) have much in common: “targeted populations of European Jews and Indigenous Arab Palestinians are seen as "subhumans" or "animals".”

“But there is one fundamental difference. The Nazis went for total extermination of their victims, primarily Jews, whereas Israel is categorically more interested in grabbing and expanding the land.”

“Israel has instituted a very creative mix of policies aimed at depopulating the land of its original Arab people, including wars of choice, physical destruction of communities, institutions essential for sustaining any life, humans and livestock.”

What the Israeli regime is doing in Gaza, Dr. Zarni said, is “a textbook Lemkinian genocide.”