Holocaust marketers preserve Israel as the perpetual victim
JVL Introduction
Yom HaShoah or Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day took place on 6th May this year.
Here Akiva Eldar and Daniel Bar-Tal show how that day has been instrumentalised to whip up fear.
October 7 is now folded into the story as part of “the Iranian threat”. The Holocaust is no longer a one-time event in the history of the Jewish people.
“The Holocaust has no time and no place. It can happen at any time, anywhere and in any context. The common denominator of all those “Holocausts” is the desire to destroy the Jewish people. Beginning with Pharoah, continuing with the kings of Babylonia and Persia, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Nazis, and ending with the Arabs.”
Psychoanalyst Vamik Vokan defines our Holocaust as “a chosen trauma”, the Jewish public in Israel always suffering from a sense of collective victimhood which entitles it to ignore all moral norms when dealing with “the enemy”.
It will not be easy to wean Israeli society from its sense of perpetual victimhood…
RK
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Tue 7 May 2024. Read the original here.
Holocaust marketers preserve Israel as the perpetual victim
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I just shared this on my Facebook page and it was instantly removed!
See my recent article for Electronic Intifada ‘Israel’s Holocaust trauma is a myth’ https://tinyurl.com/3newcfxa
and my interview with Rania Khalek ‘ How Israel Weaponizes the Holocaust to Justify Killing Palestinians ‘ https://tinyurl.com/tuvsn87j
In essence Israel doesn’t suffer from holocaust trauma although it may fool itself that it does. Its existentialist fears are those of a settler colonial population that fears that the indigenous population will rise up and take their revenge.
THis was common to all settler colonial populations except Israel has channelled this through the holocaust prism.
That is why so much effort is made to spin a narrative around October 7 when Hamas behave extremely humanely when compared to Israel’s savagery in Gaza.
The holocaust that Zionism wasn’t interested in at the time has now become their main justification for genocide
“It’s enough to mention the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who repeated the claim that the grand mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini, advised Hitler to commit genocide against the Jews.”
Some years ago, Netanyahu also said:
“They are the leaders of Iran who called for a new Holocaust and who vowed to wipe Israel off the map.”
This statement was then picked up by the western media and continually reported as if it were true.
However, in an interview with Al Jazeera on 14 April 2012, Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor contradicted this claim:
“They [Iranian leaders] all come basically ideologically, religiously with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive,” Meridor says. “They didn’t say ‘we’ll wipe it out’, you are right, but ‘it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumour, it should be removed’. They repeatedly said ‘Israel is not legitimate, it should not exist’.”
The Iranian in question said the regime will be deleted from the pages of history. The regime. No wiping. No map. There wasn’t even a call for actual regime change – considered quite de regueur at the time. He simply stated his opinion that the regime would not last. So it was just another big stinking one from the mouth of one of the world’s most renowned liars. Hero to some. Not a good look. But hey, if Netenyahu got them singing “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” again, what not to like?
A profoundly deep analysis, a horrifying sense of imprisonment in a past trauma, whose reiteration seems so harmful and lacking in a therapeutic resolution. In a sense we non-jews who in the past did not defend the jews bear a load on our shoulders and now another load as we watch in horror as one traumatised group traumatises another. Only a Jewish person could make this analysis. It is powerful and offers a way forward which I suspect will take a very long time to have its effect.