In a recently published book Steven Friedman, who has written extensively on the political and social aspects of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, explores the racist underpinnings of the west’s responses to Israel’s war in Gaza. This is an extract from the book, Good Jew, Bad Jew.
Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani sees a link between the violence of the coloniser and the slaughter of Jews and Slavs by the Nazis. The racial theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and others who claimed the Aryan race was superior meant that Jews and Slavs, who were both regarded as not Aryan, could be placed beyond the pale of civilisation and were thus candidates for the “laws of nature”, not of war.
According to Mamdani, in World War II, the Nazis “observed the laws of war against the Western powers but not against Russia”, and not against Jewish civilians and resistance fighters. British, American and French prisoners of war were treated according to the rules of the Third Geneva Convention, but Russians were not.
