Israel’s Holocaust Survivors are hungry

Israel’s early years were characterised by largely ignoring the Holocaust, a distancing born of contempt for European Jews who were said to have walked compliantly into the gas chambers. Survivors who arrived in Israel found a harsh, each-for-themself environment. Some thrived – we see them in interviews with Holocaust survivors, as personifying two fingers up to the Nazis. But the ones who didn’t thrive were merely an embarrassment, evidence of the effeteness of pre-war diaspora Jewry. Israel’s later opportunist Holocaust remembrance has no reason to include policies for guaranteeing the subjects of that remembrance decent and dignified lives. The poverty that many survivors inhabit is both astounding and outrageous. But that’s Israeli anti-antisemitism for you.

You say ‘We cannot fathom how those who constantly invoke the experience of the Holocaust as justification for their actions can so neglect its survivors.’

The answer is easy. Israel and the Zionist movement was never concerned about the victims of the holocaust – either during the holocaust or after it.

German reparations went to the ‘collective Jew’ i.e. Israel to fund its armaments programme. The holocaust survivors were looked down on. They were ‘sapon’ (soap) and treated with contempt for ‘going like sheep to the slaughter’.

I have tried to counter this Zionist narrative with my new book but it’s important to understand that the Zionist movement is and always was a Quisling movement that only used the holocaust to justify its oppression of the Palestinians. At least Ben Gurion was honest when he made it clear that he didn’t care a damn about the survivors or the victims.