Is it time to stop invoking the Holocaust re Israel & Palestine?
JVL Introduction
This is an opinion piece that led the Board of Deputies to complain to the Guardian. This web poster thinks it is thoughtful and important to consider. When Israel was attacked by Hamas Joe Biden said that “It has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people. The world watched then, it knew, and the world did nothing. We will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
Naftali Bennet called Hamas “Nazis” (as Putin called many in Ukraine). Language matters and this misuse – almost trivialisation of the Holocaust – masks the reality so that “A powerful state, with powerful allies and a powerful army, engaged in a retaliatory attack against stateless Palestinians under Israeli-settler colonial rule, military occupation and siege, is thus portrayed as powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis”
If Israel remains locked into permanent victimhood, they will be locked in the illusion that everything it does is “self- defence” a claim that is wearing thin across the world, even if, for now, it suits western leaders to accept it.
LL
This article was originally published by Guardian Opinion on Tue 24 Oct 2023. Read the original here.
Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust
Scholars of genocide are criticizing the dangerous use of the Holocaust to justify Israeli mass violence against Palestinians
Loading article text…
There’ve been repeated hideous episodes of genocide in relatively recent human history (eg 80% Herero tribe wiped out by German colonials in the 1880s; Pol Pot’s massacres in Indo-China; and the industrialised murder of 6 million in the Holocaust). Each mass murder had its own unique features, yes, but these points of difference hardly matter, do they? It’s the human suffering and the human failures that caused it which matters. It’s the importance of stopping such evil happening again that counts.
The Holocaust used as an excuse to justify doing similar wrongs to others is blasphemy and utter betrayal of its victims, in my view.
The right way to remember the Holocaust, I feel, is to remind ourselves how evil grows; and the importance of doing whatever we can to stop it taking root.
Stopping the “small” Holocaust of 2.3 million Palestinians today is an important way of honouring the 6 million Jews and others whom the world should have protected in the Nazi period – and didn’t.
‘….the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett expressed, in typically unashamed terms, in an interview on Sky News on 12 October: “We’re fighting Nazis.”’ Well, the IDF and the settlers are just engaged in mass projection and much of the rest of the world just sees them as a failed state held up only by US military and financial support, and whose citizens are fighting as Nazi nihilists perfectly happy to drown the land they are usurping in Palestian blood. And the hell of it is, they seem to relish the abhorrence with which the world regards them and seem incapable of realising Israel has become a increasingly dark and tragic place, and I can no longer imagine how it can possibly survive once the US finally abandons it, which it will have to do if the US is to find it’s own position in a multi-polar world based firmly on international law with 5 or 6 (or more) Great Powers, and which will have no place for an ethno-theocratic genocidal state.
I forgot to add that I hope to God that Raz is right and gentler myths which reflect the vast positive Jewish contribution to world culture and that a shifting view of the Holocaust and its centrality to the Jewish story becomes less significant and a modern secular state which can live peaceably with its neighbours and all other countries in the world.
I very rarely agree with friends about everything. Some of them even vote Conservative!
But the Board of Deputies is doing something very destructive and calculated to cause the very thing that the BoD claims to fear most.
By saying that “the Jewish Community” is deeply offended by the mildest criticism of the State of Israel, it turns Israel into a defining issue in relationships between Jews and non Jews. Israel isn’t the first topic of conversation when I make a non Jewish friend and it shouldn’t be when I meet a Jew for the first time. Making Israel “the elephant in the room” is calculated to isolate the very Jewish community that the BoD claims to want to protect.
I may start a friendship with someone who happens to be Jewish because of a shared interest in Art. Israel shouldn’t necessarily be a topic of conversation, I don’t talk about it with all my friends.
In my opinion the BoD shoots itself in the foot by an uncritical and obsessive defence of the Jewish State.
Couldn’t the BoD at least express some sympathy for the infants being blown apart in Gaza ? Don’t they recognise that a two year old is not mature enough to be a Hamas supporter ?
I don’t want a Britain where Jews are permanently othered.
The BoD seems incapable of understanding that while I hate what the State of Israel does to the Palestinians, that doesn’t at all mean that I hate Jews. Human beings are multi faceted and should not be defined by just one issue.
Brilliant and measured consideration of the dreadful opportunistic genocide being meted out to defenceless Palestinians stripped out if every means of survival by the 17 year ling siege and ever present occupation. Once again, the colonial Western world stands by and even reinforces and supports the perpetrator of the dreadful in itself, a holocaust, whose mass destruction is intended to obliterate the Palestinian people.
I do not agree that the invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked. The inclusion in Europe and, therefore, NATO, of all of the countries lining the border of Russia was an amazing provocation to which Russia did not respond but, stated without question that, due to the number of those who considered themselves to be Russian and due to the Russian naval fleet being contained in Sevastopol, Crimea, Ukraine would be a red line. In my opinion that was a fair consideration. The war could have been avoided if the American NATO representatives would have agreed to discuss the matter of dividing Ukraine into Russian and Ukrainian land.
As well as it being time for Israel to stop weaponising the Holocaust, Israel should also stop exploiting Holocaust and using the murder of Jews by the Nazis as a club with which to beat and murder Palestinians. It’s also time to confront the odious Netanyahu when he keeps repeating that the IDF is the most moral army in the world. In fact, from the testimony of ex members of the IDF it wouldn’t be too far off the mark to call them the most savage army in the world. Even in what passes for peacetime, the IDF has metered out brutal beatings and killings to innocent Palestinians and destroyed their homes and crops. However, the genocide they are now inficting in Gaza on innocent men, women and children far surpasses the crimes they have committed in the past. Moral??? Netanyahu and the IDF have no morals.
About time the Board of Deputies and the Campaign against Anti-Semitism are called out for what they are….crying wolf to delegitimise the voice of, and the lives of Palestinians,whose land they have stolen, and continue to do so. They are the biggest threat to human rights in the UK, censoring through richly funded lobby’s,lawfare. When I was first called an anti-Semite, I was deeply hurt. These days I wear it as a badge of honour
So glad to read this very balanced and sensible article dealing with this tragic situation. I hope it offers clarity and help to others
Yes, and judging by the increasingly anti-Palestinian stance the German government are taking, they suffer with historical guilt.
Reference to the holocaust is always so loaded. Israel is happy to use its history as an excuse for mass slaughter of people who had nothing to do with the holocaust. The Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s response result from Israel’s policies of settler colonialism, expansionism, violence, disdain for human rights and apartheid, nothing to do with the history of nazi holocaust. Meanwhile if anyone other than Israel or Jews uses the term holocaust to describe genocide anywhere in the world they are immediately labelled antisemitic. Its as if there is some sort of exclusive copyright protection on the word which only allows its use by descendants of its original Jewish victims.
I will, forever, hold in my heart, a place of sorrow for what happened during The Holocaust, of the Second World War.
To the Jews. To the Sinti. The Roma, the Poles, the Russians(Soviet citizens), the Homosexuals, the Disabled, Communists, Socialists – all the opponents of the Nazi regime.
Yes, we should remember them all – always – but we should never let others commandeer the memory for their own political ends, as is happening with the Zionists, and, specifically, the Israeli Zionists.
Zionists use the memory of The Holocaust as a propaganda tool – a form of emotional blackmail/emotional abuse, to give a false legitimacy to their own twisted political philosophy.
Norman Finkelstein has spoken out about this false legitimacy, recently, and I’m so pleased he did. I’ve had these thoughts for some time – have wanted to speak out – but felt it was not my place, as a gentile. I felt uncomfortable, even, having those thoughts.
Now, Professor Finkelstein has spoken, the floodgates can open. The debate can begin.
“Ukrainians facing a brutal and unprovoked Russian attack became Nazis.” There is, unfortunately, a long history of Ukrainian Nazis, going back to Bandera before the Second World War. The unprovoked 2014 coup organised by the American Neocons put the Ukrainian Nazis in de facto control, even though they had little electoral support. This resulted in eight years of bombardment of Russian speaking areas such as the Donbass. The Russian attack was therefore not unprovoked – more like eight years too late.
The greatest evil committed by the Apartheid Jewish State of Israel is the holocaust of our common language
Play the how low can they go with their propaganda and misinformation game
A wonderful compassionate article.. and such knowledgeable & Humanitarian comments… makes me hopeful for a better future BUT time is running out and evil is winning.. Israeli “ceasefires” in the past have been heinous shams and the violence continued but the Western media wiped their hands.. and ignored it. Even yesterday BBC were interviewing zionists and repeating the same old propaganda in the early hours International news..3am…I was babysitting a teething baby , with a breaking heart and disgust at the Biased Broadcasting Corporation. The Zionist was the Israeli ambassador, whose name escapes me now , but I did Google him..I Read his interviews & tweets.. he’s so filled with hate and a sense of his Supremacist elitism h
The victims of abusers, whether individuals, or communities become abusers of other weaker victims. The only successful way to break the chain of abuse is by love for the abusers. Condemnation just emphasises their terror. Abusers are driven by fear. That is what we are seeing in Israel. They know this abuse of Palestinians is going to rebound on them. They know the only way out for them is death, as it is for individual abusers, unless they are loved and taught to love others. No matter how odious that seems at first.
My dearest friends of JVL,
During the first days of the recent Hamas attack, I could have imagined, that you had been shell-shocked, not in the least because of the very nature of this attack : Completely Contrary to all your former premises and perceptions about “Yisrael” and its strengths, its safety and its future.
Therefore I did not complain, when you decided not to publish, one of my earlier contributions on the current subject.
However, speaking almost three weeks later, I really cannot find any reasonable consideration, why you decided, to – for example – NOT to publish my latest comment on the situation.
You may not agree with all the analyses and comparisons that I make on this issue, but even the recent past does prove, that you indeed at that time, did allow a more dissent kind of view of the current situation in the ME in general, and of the latest developments (and the interpretation of the historic causes and the right context behind those developments) in particular.
So tell me please why you do so brutally turn away – with no arguments given from your side for doing so – my fundamental criticism of subjects like the Jewish ID (stemming exclusively from nurture (indoctrination / self-deception) rather than nature (genetics), for we have to agree, that there is no such thing as a Jewish gene, as Zoossman-Diskin has thought us, and/or the Dutch scholar, Jits van Straaten has scientifically established and affirmed).
It are these kind of fundamental existential questions, that have to be urgently addressed, because they do form the heart of the matter.
Another aspect of the very same approach is my criticism of the centennial old process of brutal ethnically cleansing – with the Nakba of 1948 as a new depth in an continuing process – of the autochthonous Palestinians by the allochthonous Zionist jews.
Yes I have given the very nature of this process, the (well-deserved) name of a (reverse of the) Great Replacement (Le Grand Remplacement), a concept, that the White supremacists are using in their abject struggle to also found a mono-ethno-state (in their case) for Caucasians, just as the Jew supremacist leaders like Netanyahu are doing.
If we do not dare to stare the inconvenient truths in the eyes, and to consider the unthinkable, we will never ever reach a solution in the Middle East, a region, that has tremendously suffered the last centennial, (mostly) because of the settler colonial Zionist Project.
Next to my greetings, are my thoughts of my deepest sympathy and empathy for your courageous political choices and stances in the all too troubled present…
JVL asks “Is it time to stop invoking the Holocaust re Israel & Palestine ?”
Yes, and perhaps the next question is how. For however many years, theres been an attempt to assert that anti-Zionism is the new antisemitism, so Israel or Zionism critics get labelled as such. Proponents of this view (that the left are antisemitic) believe that Israel critics conflate Zionism, Israel, and Jews, which has meant that any challenge to Zionism or Israel, is met with accusations of antisemitism.
How thoughtful of Biden. Meanwhile, the US had/has no problem supporting actual Nazis in the Ukraine, and western leaders were more or less silent about the standing ovation the Canadian parliament gave to an SS veteran just weeks ago, where they all stood, including Zelenksy, clapping like seals for an actual antisemite.
Hamas’ actions were horrific, but the comparisons to Nazism and the Holocaust are a reach, and while trauma is difficult to forget, there do need to be steps to not project it, which I think Germany also need to do with theyre collective guilt, something we’re seeing manifest in militant anti-Palestinianism, where they equate all forms of pro-Palestinian sentiment with antisemitism.
A lot to talk about. The bottom line for Israel is, it’s committing Genocide and should be called out and told so, Netanyahu and his Government should be charged with war crimes but the US will no doubt veto this action. I Agree with other commentators, Russia was forced to take action, apart from the Nazi Azov Battalion killing and torturing Russian speaking Eastern Ukrainians, the US built BioLabs right across Ukraine, initially the US denied it but when it was proven, they said, they were working on Vaccines for viruses like Covid (which was a ridiculous lie). There was a minimum of 26 US BioLabs and when Russia invaded, it was not after taking Kiev, it went there to blow up the BioLabs in and around Kiev, it didn’t get beaten back, as told by the Western Media inc’ the BBC, once the BioLabs were all destroyed, it backed off and worked its way across Ukraine taking out the rest. Finally it fought to push the Ukrainian Army, which included the Azov Battalion out of Eastern Ukraine.
It should never of been conflated to begin with. Its also time to stop looking at Israel-Palestine like it was exclusively Jewish in antiquity, and using said selective part of ancient history to try legitimising crimes in the present. Yes, Jewish people have origins in the Levant, but other groups also lived there, both before and after any ‘Ancient Israel’. History and I-P discourse need to be de-Zionized.