Israel And Genocide: Not Only In Gaza
DECEMBER 22, 2023
BY MARK LEWIS TAYLOR
Movement protest sign from FestivalesSolidarios, @festivalesgt.
It was on the streets of Guatemala City in 1987 when I began awakening to Israel’s partnership with the USA in facilitating genocide.
Today we are “seeing genocide”–a decades-long cumulative “genocidal condition”–being played out, as Israeli Modern Culture and Media Professor, Ariella Aisha Azoulay argues. We see it in the US/Israeli onslaught against Gaza. My memories and knowledge return to reflect on Israel’s connection to genocidal practice, not only in Gaza but also in Guatemala.
In Guatemala of the 1980s, a counterinsurgency by U.S.-backed military governments slaughtered Maya indigenous and tens of thousands of other dissidents and suspects. There was no social media to cover it. Most American citizens knew nothing of it. The killing of this period in Guatemala has been recognized as “genocide” by official analysts and by a thorough 12-volume investigative report (CEH, 1999). This latter study made clear the appropriateness of the phrase “acts of genocide” to name the crimes of Guatemala’s military against the Maya, in spite of the military’s claim that they lacked “intent” to commit genocide, that it was only motivated by economic, political or military concerns (CEH, 1999, ch. 2, vol.3). As with Israel in Gaza of Palestine, so with Guatemalan elites relative to the indigenous Maya, it is the historical record of decades of accumulative killing, occupation, forced removal and dehumanization, which establish the acts and conditions as those of genocide.
The studies of Guatemala’s genocide, as I will show, reveal also the special role of Israel in that slaughter under the aegis of US imperial interests.
I was first in Guatemala in 1987 to interview educators and activists who were important for my research about the role of religious beliefs among Maya indigenous peoples as they waged resistance to their ongoing repression. 1987 was a date when Guatemala’s latest series of military governments had just passed the worst of mass violence against Maya communities, the worst occurring between 1981 and 1983 (see historian Grandin and anthropologist Schirmer). The period is often called a “hidden/silent holocaust,” the “Guatemala holocaust” or the “Maya holocaust.” And this is only one site of Israel’s involvement with massive state violence and terrorism throughout Latin America. I had been working with Guatemalans and others in the US to seek an end to U.S. military aid to Guatemala.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/22/israel-and-genocide-not-only-in-gaza/