Israel’s genocide resembles holocaust horrors

When Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad turned 100 earlier this year, he marked his birthday by following a lifelong routine of discipline: he ate little, worked a lot, and did not succumb to the lure of rest.

“The main thing is that I work all the time. I don’t rest myself,” Mahathir told Al Jazeera.

“I am always using my mind and body. Keep your mind and body active, then you live longer,” he said.

From a desk at his office in Putrajaya city, south of the capital, Kuala Lumpur, he spent his centenary like most days: penning his thoughts on the Malaysian economy, the country’s political situation and unfolding world events, particularly the situation in Gaza.

Sitting down with Al Jazeera for an interview after recovering from a spell of exhaustion around the time of his birthday, Mahathir predicted that Israel’s ruthlessness against the Palestinian population of Gaza would be etched into world history.

Israel’s killing of nearly 66,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority women and children, will be remembered for generations, possibly for “centuries”, Mahathir said. “Gaza is terrible. They killed pregnant mothers… babies just born, young people, boys and girls, men and women, the sick and the poor… How can this be forgotten?” he asked. “It will not be forgotten for maybe centuries,” Mahathir said.

Describing the war in Gaza as a genocide that paralleled the killing of Muslims during the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s and the Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II, Mahathir said he was confounded that the people of Israel, who had experienced genocide, could, in turn, perpetrate a genocide.

“I thought people who suffered like that would not want to visit other people,” he said. Victims of a genocide should “not want to wish their fate to befall other people”. In April, the Palestine Assembly, a high-profile pro-Palestine conference in Berlin was broken up by hundreds of police officers. British Palestinian rector of Glasgow University, Ghassan Abu Sitta, was stopped from entering Germany to attend the conference and deported back to the UK. He was later banned from entering the entire Schengen area.

Abu Sitta, a surgeon who volunteered in several Gaza hospitals since last year, was planning to deliver a speech on the horrific condition Israeli attacks have left the Strip’s health system in. A German court later overturned the ban.

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was also banned from entering Germany and prevented from even participating in the Congress via a video link.

German authorities said they targeted Abu Sitta, Varoufakis and others at the conference because they deemed their speeches “anti-Semitic”.