By Dr Gideon Polya
This article is based on excerpts from a talk by Prof. Gideon Polya at the third KP Sasi Webinar on ‘Israel: The last outpost of White European Colonialism’ held on 22 June 2025. Dr Polya’s presentation is from 7.47 minutes to 29.10 minutes
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKA2Pyj04os&t=42s]
Firstly, I want to address the theme of Israel as the last European settler-colonial project by going right back to about 10,000 BCE, with the transition from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, which involved cereal crops, animal husbandry, and permanent settlements. Settled agriculture created the need to protect agricultural surpluses and settlements. It led to male militarism, patriarchy, wars, the evolution of military technology, cities, city-states, nation-states, and empires. Ultimately, it has led to the nuclear weapons of our time that can decimate humanity and the biosphere—a fact we are very conscious of today.
The Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and Muslim dominance of North Africa, the Middle East, and West Asia prevented Western European expansion in those areas. As explained by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, in expanding elsewhere, Europeans especially prized lands that could support European-type agriculture (i.e., wheat, sheep, and cattle). Diamond also makes the fundamental point about the historical technical superiority of Europeans, which was derived from the east-west axis of Eurasia. This meant that an advance in agronomy or technology, say in China, would be rapidly transmitted along this axis to Western Europe, but not so for the north-south axes of Africa and the Americas. In seizing land and expelling or killing the indigenous inhabitants, European invaders adopted the lie of terra nullius, which means “an empty land” in Latin.
This racist lie was adopted by the European settler-colonials in the Americas, Australia, and Southern Africa. Terra nullius was also adopted by the genocidally racist Apartheid Israel, the last settler-colonial project that wants all of Palestine plus other lands between the Nile and the Euphrates, with the indigenous inhabitants to be killed, expelled, or confined to ghettos and concentration camps.
It is useful to look at the deaths from European settler-colonialism, something the West does not want to acknowledge. About 100 million Indigenous Americans died from violence, deprivation, and especially from introduced diseases like smallpox. In the Pacific Islands, there was mass mortality due to European colonists introducing novel diseases such as measles. In Australia, about 1 million Indigenous Australians died from violence, deprivation, and introduced diseases in the first century after the British invasion in 1788. Overall, about 2 million Indigenous Australians have died from violence, dispossession, deprivation, and disease since 1788. Of the 350 to 700 Indigenous Australian languages and dialects present in 1788, only about 120 survive today, of which over 20 are endangered.
In India, the vastly outnumbered British adopted a deliberate strategy of keeping the conquered population—about 300 million in 1860—at a bare subsistence level, controlled by British forces and a large body of British-led and well-fed Indian sepoys. It is estimated that 1.8 billion Indians died avoidably from imposed deprivation over two centuries. For example, despite a very high birth rate, the Indian population was about 300 million in 1860 and was still 300 million in 1930. There were many man-made famines in India between the 1769-1770 Great Bengal Famine (10 million killed) and the World War II 1942-1945 Bengal Famine (six to seven million killed). Indeed, in 1935, Winston Churchill, an architect of the Bengal Famine, told the British Parliament, quote: “in the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people.” India needed to import one to two million tonnes of grain annually before World War II, but the average yearly importation of grain in 1942-1945 was about 0.5 million tonnes, barely enough to feed the 2.5 million-strong Indian army.
In China and the Congo, the populations also exceeded those of the colonial invaders. Nevertheless, an estimated 20 to 100 million Chinese died in the British Opium Wars and the connected Taiping Rebellion. In the Congo, the Belgian colonizers killed about 10 million Congolese while maximizing the extraction of rubber and ivory; hands were chopped off if there was insufficient delivery. An estimated 35 to 40 million Chinese died under the Japanese occupation from 1937-1945.
By way of comparison, we can then turn to deaths from violence and imposed deprivation in the Gaza genocide and the broader Palestinian genocide. The Palestinian breakout from the Gaza concentration camp and the 57-year Zionist Israeli occupation was associated with the deaths of 1,139 Israelis. However, prize-winning Western journalists have disputed the official Zionist Israeli narrative, and it seems extremely likely that the October 7, 2023, breakout was enabled by the Zionist Israelis to provide a 9/11-style excuse for the destruction and ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Many of the Israelis killed on October 7 were victims of the IDF’s high-explosive firepower, operating under the Hannibal Directive to prevent hostage-taking, even if it meant killing the hostages.
From data published in the leading medical journal, The Lancet, it is estimated that by April 25, 2025, Gaza deaths from violence will be 136,000 and from imposed deprivation will be 544,000, for a total of 680,000. This is based on the conservative assumption that indirect deaths from deprivation are four times the number of violent deaths. Exhaustive analysis of avoidable deaths from deprivation in all countries since 1950 reveals that under-five infant deaths constitute about 70% of such avoidable deaths in impoverished countries, as detailed in my book, Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality Since 1950. Infants are highly vulnerable, as we all know. Accordingly, the 544,000 Gaza deaths from forced deprivation include about 380,000 infants under five years old. This horrendous death toll can be further broken down into 380,000 infants, 479,000 children, 63,000 women, and 18,000 men.
However, the Zionist-perverted mainstream media ignores the notion of deaths from deprivation and, at the moment, reports only around 50,500 deaths from violence, ignoring the huge number of indirect deaths. Presently, Gaza deaths from violence and deprivation total about 0.7 million, as opposed to the 50,000 you will read in the newspapers. Interestingly, the NSA advisor to Trump has repeatedly indicated that of the pre-war population of 2.4 million, 1.7 million surviving Gazans will have to be moved to make Gaza a nice, Riviera-style luxury resort. This implies that 0.7 million Gazans are missing (2.4 million minus 1.7 million). We know that about 0.1 million managed to escape to Egypt, which suggests that about 0.6 million Gazans have died from violence and deprivation—a shocking figure. What Trump has said is actually in accord with what top British epidemiologists are saying, but what is reported is the 50,000.
The Palestinian genocide essentially commenced in 1908 with the discovery of oil in Iran. Britain invaded the Ottoman Empire in 1914, occupying Iraq, which eventually led to the French and British invasion of the Middle East. One should also consider the European backing of Israel in what it has been doing for 77 years, and in particular, over the last 20 months. Before the bombing of Iran, the G7—all of whom possess, host, or endorse nuclear weapons (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and the US)—responded to the Israeli bombing of Iran by falsely declaring, “We, the leaders of the G7, reiterate our commitment to peace and stability in the Middle East. In this context, we affirm that Israel has a right to defend itself. We reiterate our support for the security of Israel. Iran is the principal source of regional instability and terror. Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.” Australia, which is not a member of the G7 but was invited to the recent conference, falsely agrees with the G7.
The reality is dramatically otherwise. The US-backed Israeli attack was unprovoked and violates international law. Israel has 90 nuclear weapons, but Iran has none. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but Israel is not. For 50 years, Iran, other Muslim countries, and the UN General Assembly have demanded a nuclear-free Middle East. Iran has invaded no country for millennia, but Israel bombed five countries in 2025 and has attacked 14 in its 77 years of existence. And of course, if Iran actually did have nuclear weapons, why would it use them against Israel when half of its subjects are Palestinians? And why would it commit suicide by using nuclear weapons against the West? The same flawed argument was used, you may remember, when weapons of mass destruction was the excuse to destroy Iraq.
The question has been asked why the former genocidal colonial powers of the G7 support genocidal apartheid Israel. The truth is, except for Japan, they are all European. That is a simple proposition. The United Kingdom has managed to invade 123 countries over the last thousand years. The United States has invaded or otherwise had a military presence in all but three countries in the world. All 32 countries of NATO, all European, firmly support Israel. Many of them belong to the Zionist International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which fervently supports Israel with propaganda.
To summarize the European complicity in the Gaza genocide and the unprovoked, war-criminal devastation of Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen:
First, overwhelmingly, European countries are allied with the serially war-criminal and Zionist-perverted America, which, since Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons in the 1960s, has become the dog being wagged by the Zionist Israeli tail.
Second, all G7 members were involved in the US and NATO-imposed Afghan Holocaust that killed 7 million Afghans through violence and deprivation. The G7 countries and many of their non-G7 associates have further records of involvement in war, imperialism, and the genocide of Indigenous people.
Third, all G7 countries and many of the non-G7 European countries have a prior record of racist settler-colonialism and genocide. The genocidally complicit racism of the European supporters of Israel persists, as revealed by their sustained pro-apartheid Israel conduct for 77 years and by their political rhetoric. This is borne out by how they vote at the United Nations General Assembly.
The 1.7 million surviving Gazans are forced to choose between starvation or risking being shot by Zionist Israelis when seeking food. This is what I see as I eat my dinner each night and watch the television news. Gaza, the 4,000-year-old city that trans-shipped the perfumes of Arabia to the Roman Empire, has been demolished. William Dalrymple’s marvellous book, The Golden Road, details how India had a massive effect on human civilization from Indonesia and Japan to Spain. He argues that Gaza, when it was conquered by the Crusaders, was a key place for the transmission of the wonderful Indian-Arabic flowering culture of the Middle Ages to Europe. The Crusaders took this Arabic-Indian learning and mathematics back to Western Europe.
The world must immediately act with draconian sanctions against US-backed apartheid Israel and all its supporters, notably the US, UK, Australia, the G7, and the EU. The genocidal oppression of the Muslim world by the racist West must end immediately. The US could end it by simply abstaining at the UN Security Council. The century-long suffering of the Palestinian people would end if the world simply insisted, under pain of draconian sanctions, that Palestinians are accorded all the human rights enjoyed in the West and elsewhere.
After the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, where 69 Africans were killed, the world imposed ultimately successful sanctions on apartheid South Africa. It should do likewise over genocidal apartheid Israel. This toll of 680,000 Gazans killed by April 25, 2025, is nearly 10,000 times the number killed at Sharpeville.
Thank you for your attention.
Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia over 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, notably a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (2003). He has also published “Body Count.
12 July 2025
Source: countercurrents.org
