The Israeli Defense Forces kill dozens or even scores of Palestinians within every 24-hour period, and of course there are the thousands of Lebanese civilians killed in the past few weeks by Israeli attacks. Such deadly massacres are seen on a daily basis, and they truly constitute terrorism.
But Gaza is not Israel’s first campaign of genocide. We just have to travel back in time to the Guatemalan civil war which raged from 1960 to 1996 to find an earlier offense. In this horrendous conflict, over 200,000 Maya men, women, and children were massacred, over 626 Indigenous communities were wiped from the face of the Earth. The arms and technology used in this genocide were provided to the fascist Guatemalan government by Israel, acting as a proxy for United States imperialism.
Israel thus has a long track record of genocidal in partnership with the U.S. In the late 1970s, Israel first intervened in Guatemala, providing arms, training, and equipment to successive military governments that savagely massacred tens of thousands of Indigenous Maya. This was all done with U.S. government approval, planning, and coordination.
The dictatorships that ruled Guatemala had a policy of extermination, of annihilation, and wholesale massacres of Maya communities became commonplace in this era. Small children were killed by soldiers grabbing them and breaking their backs over their knees. The Maya were beheaded, garroted, burned alive, bludgeoned to death, sometimes with sledgehammers, and hacked to death with machetes.
In many cases, the Guatemalan military specifically targeted children and the elderly. Soldiers were reported to have killed children in front of their parents by smashing their heads against trees and rocks.
The atrocities included burying Maya alive in the village wells and torturing young women but keeping them alive to be raped over the course of several days. Some women hemorrhaged to death from repeated gang rapes by soldiers. Maya villagers were also killed by drowning them in large pits filled with human waste. They’d be thrown in, and soldiers would stand on the edge of the pits with long poles pushing the victims under the waste when they surfaced.
In over 400 documented massacres, as many as 600 villages were razed.
Where did the means and training for such unspeakable atrocities arise? The answer: Israel. These revolting, shocking atrocities were committed after the Guatemalan armed forces were trained by hundreds of Israeli military advisors. They were often carried out with Israeli rifles and supported from the air with U.S.-supplied helicopters.
As early as 1977, joint discussions began between Guatemalan defense ministers and Israel that included the supplying of weapons, munitions, military communications, tanks, armored cars, and the possible furnishing of advanced fighter aircraft.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter had cut off direct aid to the military government in Guatemala that year as the public recoiled at its brutality, but Israel stepped into the gap to play middle man for U.S. weapons suppliers.
Eventually hundreds of Israeli military personnel also were sent to advise the Guatemalan military, and the macabre, horrific slaughter proceeded full steam ahead. There is a most palpable connection between the training by the Israeli advisors and the inhuman atrocities. Indeed, the most unspeakable savagery did not start until after the training of the Guatemalan military by the Israeli advisors. This is no coincidence.
Guatemalan military officers even referred to their atrocities as the “Palestinization” of Maya-inhabited lands. Israeli involvement in this horrific genocide has long been referred to as an “Open Secret.”
Once again, the U.S, and Israel have clasped their hands together in a bloody partnership in the daily genocidal massacres of another Indigenous people, the Palestinians of Gaza. The Israeli government has a decades-long record of working closely, “hand in glove” with the U.S. in opposing and suppressing national liberation movements – from the Middle East, to Latin America, to Africa.
In this regard, the Guatemalan soldiers were trained by Israeli advisors to commit unspeakable atrocities against the Maya people fighting for national liberation. These outrages, for which Israel and U.S. imperialism are responsible, are embedded into the national memory of the Guatemalan people; they will never forget the horrors of the genocidal war waged upon them.
This has not been lost on the Indigenous people of the genocidal enabler, the United States, either. Nick Tilsen, the president and CEO of the Indigenous organization the NDN Collective, has publicly stated, “We stand in deep solidarity with the Palestinian people.” On Oct. 19, 2023, the NDN Collective called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and has continued to stand in support of Gaza ever since.
Now, the Israeli government has unleashed its war machine against the people of Lebanon and is giving them the Gaza treatment. And it’s not just about some supposed battle against Hezbollah; mass killings by Israeli war planes and drones and the leveling of entire residential areas have become the daily reality for non-combatants.
The peace movements of the imperialist countries must not let up in trying to bring this genocide to a halt; we must fight to end all weapons shipments. Israel must be stopped, and Netanyahu – the butcher of the Middle East – must be dethroned.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views expressed here are those of the author.
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