Has Israel’s ‘Holocaust’ weapon finally jammed?
JVL Introduction
Tony Karon writes perceptively about the way in which the Holocaust has been consciously used to legitimise the state of Israel, from the Eichmann trial in 1961 onwards.
It is always Holocaust imagery that is appealed to in the last analysis e.g. when Gilad Erdan donned a yellow star at the United Nations in October, when visiting dignitaries are taken immediately on an obligatory trip to Yad Vashem, or when Israeli schoolchildren are taken on trips to Auschwitz in what Karon calls “the engineered traumatization of successive generations of Israelis in ways that make them imagine themselves as Holocaust survivors”.
What happens, asks Karon, when this appeal simply ceases to work any longer, or even becomes counter-productive?
“To the extent that the Holocaust is used to justify or distract from today’s genocide, Israel will only have succeeded in discrediting and cheapening the power of Holocaust memory, reducing it to simply an excuse for genocide… Israel’s cynical effort to cloak itself in the striped pajamas of Auschwitz as it rains hell on Gaza will, if its ruse is believed, actually promote Holocaust denial or minimization.”
RK
This article was originally published by Rootless Cosmopolitan on Wed 22 May 2024. Read the original here.
Has Israel’s 'Holocaust' weapon finally jammed?
Cynical appropriation of a genocide suffered by Europe’s Jews 80 years ago no longer works to shield Israel from accountability for its current genocide
Loading article text…
For the reasons you have so thoroughly outlined, it requires no indoctrination whatsoever to instill in Palestinians the fear that every Israeli is brought
up to threaten their existence. Their indoctrination. Their lavish weapons and training. Their stint in the IGF. The cover they get for their crimes.
I agree with Tony Karon on all the essentials of this article. I say much the same in my own book. Zionism has cynically exploited the memory of the holocaust.
Instead of drawing universal lessons, such as the need to fight racism wherever it manifests itself, Zionism used the holocaust as a justification for its racial project.
What Karon doesn’t mention is the attitude of Zionism itself towards the holocaust and the survivors. During the Holocaust itself the Zionist movement really did not want to know what was happening in Europe. Its goal was the creation of the Jewish State to the exclusion of all else.
When the first reports of Zionist emissaries in Poland in February 1940 came through of how the Jewish population there was ‘‘being mercilessly and cruelly annihilated’ no Zionist body in Palestine even discussed these reports.
Dina Porat, the chief historian at Yad Vashem admits in her book ‘The Blue & Yellow Stars of David’ that ‘these questions are hard to answer’ because ‘Ben-Gurion’s concentration on post-war goals shifted attention away from the present plight of Europe’s Jews.’
Zionism has turned the holocaust into a justification for further genocide rather than its opposite. We see that being played out now where Palestinians in Gaza are called the ‘new Nazis’ as if the Nazis themselves were the victims.
And of course the West and imperialism is happy to go along with this because they too wish to divorce the holocaust from its context, which was that genocide was nothing exceptional for imperialism. At the very same time as Jews were dying in Auschwitz 2 million Bengalis were starving from an artificial famine that Britain had helped cause.
Zionism cynically uses the holocaust at the same time as it keeps the survivors living in poverty because to it, the formation of the Israeli state was a rejection of the ‘accursed Galut’ so yes it has a schizophrenic attitude to the ‘sheep that went to the slaughter’