The Genocide Isn't Complicated, Actually

A blueprint for peace

Dawn April 10, 1971: The sun rises on millions of Bengalis living in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The army of West Pakistan has just seized control of the city after a brutal 16 day campaign that had killed between 300,000 and 3 million Bengali people and displaced up to 30 million more -- 10 million fled to India. Operation Searchlight was its name, and those who fled were the lucky ones. My family stayed.

If you were in Dhaka that morning watching West Pakistan's tanks roll through the city streets you'd be justified in thinking the battle for Bangladesh's independence was lost and that its people were doomed to another 30 years of subjugation and exploitation. But, mere months from then, Bangladesh would actually win and become a globally recognized independent state and the forces of West Pakistan would surrender to India and leave the country, never to return. The events leading up to this genocide and the events leading to the defeat of its perpetrators are a blueprint for how the Palestinian people can escape their current situation.

How? Non-violent protests, a revolutionary election, the political will to declare independence, and a millions-strong general strike are how Bangladesh got from vassal state to tenuous independence. Western support for the perpetrators evaporating in light of media coverage of the atrocity, military support from regional powers for the victims, and just enough resistance fighting to stay alive are how it got from foreign tanks in the capital to globally recognized statehood.

None of this requires impotent screaming at Biden to suddenly start doing the right thing or praying that the Israeli government sees the error of their ways or other similar magical thinking. History has taught us there is a path out from oppression and it's up to the Palestinian people to carve it.

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Genocide is always "complicated"

In 2015 I traveled to my birthplace of Khulna, the second largest city in Bangladesh, and wandered the streets searching for book vendors. On the plane over I had learned from my grandfather stories from his perspective on Bangladesh's war for independence and I was enchanted: I hadn't even known there was one. At that time the Wikipedia page for the war was just a few paragraphs long. I was convinced the real story of what happened in 1971 could only be found here, in Bangladesh, through the oral tradition of those who had lived through it and from the small percentage of Bengalis who could read and write and therefore tell their stories.

I squeezed through dark and dingy hallways in Khulna's New Market (it's been called "New" for the last 20 years) to get into one book store. The owner aggressively tried to sell me every book he had in stock and had the vibe of a salesman who hadn't seen a customer in days. Partially out of pity but also because he was massively undercharging, I must have bought at least 30 books. If you ask ChatGPT about Operation Searchlight it's quite light on details because it obviously never ingested the millions of tokens that I bought for about $20 that day.

The books are written in charmingly poor English. There's lovely poems about a village baobab tree metaphorically cut during its youth, a beloved goat kept as a pet found slaughtered after its owner came out of hiding from the invading forces. There's also more serious but equally heartfelt accounts of parents searching for lost children and students losing their college sweethearts when West Pakistani tanks rolled onto university campuses (they targeted the intelligentsia first).

The sense you come away with reading these books is that people were primarily confused. Most of the people in the country were farmers living in the wilderness in literal mud huts. The politically active who had organized against West Pakistan and understood how they had been orchestrating mass starvation in Bangladesh by stealing the country's harvest had no idea that this degree of brutal retaliation was even possible, and news traveled too slowly back then for them to be able to effectively prepare.

There's "complications" in these stories too. The Bihari people of Bangladesh were loyal to West Pakistan, for reasons, and formed militias to aid invading forces against Bangladesh's Mukti Bahini resistance group. Suspicion between countrymen and countrywomen were abound and discrimination and preemptive killing of innocent civilians certainly happened if these accounts are to be believed. It's been confirmed that Richard Nixon had to change his underwear after reading a report that three different types of brown people were killing each other. "Triple the efficiency!" he moaned. Just kidding, the sick fuck probably never changed his underwear.

And prior to Kristallnacht a communist did indeed start a fire in the Reichstag, and before the trail of tears Native Americans did indeed scalp American colonists, and in Palestine Hamas did murder innocent festival goers.

My therapist once told me about something narcissists do, called "leveling". He told me narcissists make a strategy out of treating their abuse as equal to the slights against them. "Sure I cheated on you, but I had to! You're never around!". This equalizing of the severity of bad deeds only benefits the party willing to do more harm, he said.

On a large enough scale, you can find examples of victims behaving badly if you go looking for them. But the morally responsible thing to do is to look at the totality of the violence and determine who's really hurting. And dear reader when it comes to genocide, if you're honest about it, it's never hard to tell.

But enough about figuring out who the bad guys are, that's obvious to anyone not plagued by motivated reasoning. How do we bring an end to the suffering? The conflict between Israel and Palestine is commonly treated as a joke stand-in for some impossible-to-resolve situation but after following the situation for the past 15 years it's one of those rare things that gets simpler the more you learn about it, at least morally, in much the same way you can skip reading every pamphlet from the American colonists describing the savagery of the Native Americans before deciding the colonists were in the wrong.

The rest of the world thinks it needs to solve Palestinians' problems for them but when you adopt the lens that this is their problem to solve, the solution becomes clear and there's several blueprints to follow. Here's one:

Palestine doesn't need Hamas. It needs Gandhi.

Or Sheikh Rahman (more on him later). The independence of Bangladesh was achieved through the most peaceful and well-executed non-violent protest, election, and general strike in human history. And it followed the model established by Gandhi.

TL;DR for this section (but read the whole thing if you want to learn about the milestones in Bangladesh's unlikely path to independence and see some parallels to the situation in Gaza): Bangladesh achieved independence through decades of non-violent protest. Gandhi had proven that protesting is a checkmate: either give in to the demands of the protestors and lose control now or crush it violently and lose control a bit later. These protests sparked the creation of a united political party to fight for independence and that party won in a landslide election and a declaration of independence soon followed which triggered West Pakistan's genocide. Their brutality against Bangladesh's peaceful protests was not un-noticed by the rest of the world either, which is a fact that would be instrumental in Bangladesh's victory during Operation Searchlight.

In 1949, Bangladesh wasn't a country. It was a remarkably fertile bit of land about the size of Illinois known colloquially as Bangal and inhabited by tens of millions of decentralized farmers with little else going on. The British (of course it's them) came and "civilized" the area. They established a government and, when they decolonized, gifted it to West Pakistan (now known as just Pakistan). West Pakistan treated Bangladesh as its bread basket. It exercised its military and political strength gained from being a vassal of the British government to force food and wealth to be exported to Pakistan, leading to the deaths of at least several hundred thousand people from starvation. I guess West Pakistan also picked up some tips from their colonizer's treatment of the Irish.

In 1952 police under Pakistan authority fired on thousands of students making a humble demand: recognition of Bangladesh's native language by West Pakistan. Many students died that day, which laid the seeds for a political party led by the surviving students to later take power.

By 1970, it had been quite a few iterations of this cycle of exploitation, protest, and beatdown. Things were bad enough that there was only one political idea that now mattered: independence. So the people of Bangladesh used the tools the British unknowingly provided them to flip the script on West Pakistan in a way no one expected. See, the British had set up a single government for both countries and allocated seats according to each country's population. Bangladesh was far more populous and was allocated 162 seats -- ostensibly fair -- but had failed to assemble a unified coalition to stand against the 138 seats of West Pakistan, likely due to a rigged system, election meddling, and West Pakistan's superior political experience.

That year, Bengali people voted overwhelmingly for the Awami League who promised independence above all else, and they proceeded to seize 160 of the 162 seats. Awami almost immediately, led by a charmingly nerdy fellow named Sheikh Rahman, sued for independence via a document called the Six Points. West Pakistan responded by pretending the election didn't happen, that the Six Points didn't exist, and refused to transfer power to Sheikh Rahman and the Awami League.

Simply refusing to recognize the winners of an election is certainly A Strategy, but Sheikh Rahman wasn't putting up with any of it. He called for a nationwide general strike (more specifically, the Awami League straight up made it illegal to work. Based.)

Shortly after, the 1970 Bhola Cyclone hit Bangladesh, killing at least 300,000 people. West Pakistan passive aggressively chose to do basically nothing to help in the relief efforts of the disaster. A Reagan-esque "if they all die maybe we don't have to worry about them" strategy. It didn't work and the Bengali people just got angrier.

Tensions were high as the country basically just elected independence but the tyrants in power weren't letting go, and protests were breaking out everywhere. One protest in particular, at the Gazipur Ordnance Factory, showed Pakistan that they couldn't rely on political influence and the status quo to remain in power, they'd have to get involved directly and with overwhelming force. They ordered the Bengali police at the factory to shoot protestors but this time, unlike in 1952, the police didn't listen. They joined the protestors instead.

And so days later, Operation Searchlight began. But I expect most of you at this point are thinking "enough backstory about your shitty little country, how does this relate to the situation in Palestine?" Well notice that up until this point Bangladesh is actually winning the war: every action West Pakistan had been taking since the student revolt in 1952 made them lose their iron grip over Bangladesh just a bit more. The brutality became more obvious and more unbearable with each crushed protest, with every dead student, with every starving farmer.

A post-Hamas path to peace

Bangladesh's victory in Operation Searchlight isn't complicated either. West Pakistan's brutality during the military campaign was motivated by the fact that they could not afford a protracted resistance and they hoped to pacify it within months. But Bangladesh had gained the sympathy of the world and especially India, the major power in the region. India was supplying the resistance and Pakistan, in a panic, attacked India in early December 1971. They unconditionally surrendered to India about a week later. The United States continued to provide support for West Pakistan throughout the operation but this soon became a politically untenable position and they halted their military alliance with West Pakistan and recognized Bangladesh as an independent country shortly after.

There's hope

It's not anti-semitic to be critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians. I grew up in a majority Jewish community in Long Island where so many of my classmates went to Hebrew school I asked my parents why I wasn't enrolled too. Jewish peoples' opinions on Israel's behavior are as varied as any other demographic's and it's anti-semitic to treat them as a monolithic block. Many of the pro-war Zionists are not jewish either and are hawkish for their own reasons.

What we can expect during the war between Israel and Palestine is increasing attempts to control the media narrative in order to keep support for Israel among Americans high. This will include labelling Jewish people who don't support Israel as "not real" Jews, spreading uncertainty about strikes that result in large amounts of civilian casualties, and attempts to appear humane to Palestinian civilians but whos real purpose is to propagandize to American viewers.

I don't think it will work. Humanity's capacity to feel empathy for victims of oppression has a pretty strong track record and I want to believe that the example set by the brave men and women in Bangladesh from the 1950s to 1970 can be followed by others in similarly dire situations. These things have humble beginnings but glorious, peaceful ends.