No lessons learned; echoing the past again and again and again

JVL Introduction

This week there were reports of the IDF putting numbers onto the foreheads of Palestinians who they had detained.  The echoes of the past are clear although we are not supposed to say that Israel is acting as the Nazis did.  But people are getting tired of avoiding this comparison and also of hearing that “lessons will be learned” – which never are.

Rather than use this space to say more about this important article, I want to quote from a 2004 Guardian article headed “Israel shocked by image of soldiers forcing violinist to play at roadblock” written near the end of the Second Intifada.

Nearly 22 years ago they wrote “Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin.”  In the article other, much worse atrocities, are described, including “an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old” and “pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man’s head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth”.

“But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians.”

Even right wing commentators were unnerved by the incident with the Palestinian violinist but the Guardian noted: “The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem.” (my emph. LL)

Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in (a)… newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial “not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust”.

“Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust,” he wrote.

So these soldiers should have been prosecuted not for the mistreatment – and killing – of Palestinians but for those echoes of the Holocaust.  Lessons will be learned they said then: it is now August 2026 and the Israeli Army has promised it will investigate itself and that lessons will be learned from the killing of Hind Rajab and of Palestinian paramedics. Does anyone believe them or will they continue to misuse Jewish history to claim all its acts of terror meted out to Palestinians are justified “self-defence”?

Will our governments take meaningful action and sanction Israel rather than issuing yet more words of condemnation?

This article was originally published by Ha'aretz on Wed 19 Aug 2026. Read the original here.