By Alfredo García Almeida *
A week after the start of Hamas' insurrectional offensive, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that every Hamas member is a "dead man," as he announced a new national emergency government to fight the Palestinian organization. "Everyone in Hamas, they should be considered dead. Those above and below ground, inside and outside Gaza," the Israeli leader said.
The notion of "extermination" has a particular meaning in Israeli culture, as it is related to the "final solution to the Jewish question", a Nazi expression used to refer to the Third Reich's plan for the extermination of the Jews in Europe during World War II.
For the Nazis, German Jews had "betrayed" Germany during World War I and were responsible for its defeat; they were also to blame for Germany's "economic misery" during the depression of the early 1930s. These claims were linked to a "global Jewish conspiracy" and laid the groundwork for the fateful Holocaust.
On December 12, 1941, after declaring war on the United States, Adolf Hitler addressed his party leaders in Berlin on the "war situation" and the "inevitable annihilation of the Jews," as propaganda minister Joseps Goebbels recorded in his diaries. The result of this criminal policy was one million civilian Jews murdered, including Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Norway, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, German-occupied western and southeastern Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy and Hungary.
Although in different times and circumstances, the rise of fascist ideology in the Nazi seizure of power in 1930 in Germany and the formation of the ultra-conservative coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2022 coincide in the murky process of political manipulation to "legally" weaken democratic institutions, taking advantage of the laws in force to lay the foundations of an authoritarian government.
Last July 24, the 64 members of the ultra-right coalition of the Israeli government voted in favor of the reform of the Judicial System proposed by Netanyahu, which abolished "reasonableness", which implies that "an act of the government was beyond the reach of a reasonable and responsible authority". The opposition has warned that the judicial reform means the end of the separation of powers of the nation and constitutes a virtual institutional "coup d'état".
Netanyahu's ultra-right maneuver to push through the judicial reform has provoked massive demonstrations against it. In the midst of this popular confrontation, the Prime Minister was surprised by the insurrectional offensive of Hamas and in response, he conceived the fascist idea of its extermination, whose deadly toll to date is 7,028 Palestinians dead, mostly civilians, including 2,913 children, more than 15,000 wounded and 1,500 missing, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
* Journalist, international analyst and contributor from Mérida, Yucatán.
