Remembering is easy: acting to prevent future genocides seems less so

No one should doubt the brute reality of the Holocaust. Dispute over detail is not denial. Was it six million or five or seven? 6,000,000 has become a sacralised number. But to claim it was not several million murdered with the deliberate intent to kill every Jew is to try to excuse crime that we would like to have believed is unimaginable.

I first became aware of Auschwitz in the late 1950s when I was, I guess, 10 or 12. At my Uncle Sim’s house in Edgware, I discovered pamphlets on his bookshelf about the Nazi extermination of the Jews. And at that age, I was fascinated, horrified but also guilty. I was reading stuff I didn’t think I was meant to look at. One booklet, and the one that has stuck with me most clearly, was the first encounter I had with Auschwitz. I have lived with that knowledge for 60 years. Knowing what people are capable of has horrified and haunted me ever since.

My grandparents left Poland at the end of the 19th century. And until 2018 I could never face visiting Poland. I have been to other post-Warsaw block states, to Czechoslovakia, as it then was, and to Hungary. But with my knowledge of the Holocaust and of the fate of my unknown and uncounted cousins, I could not face Poland.

I went with United Against Fascism on a 2018 visit to Auschwitz. I believed I did not need to see Auschwitz but even though I thought I knew about it, both intellectually and emotionally. the sheer scale of Auschwitz II, Birkenau, was a profound shock. It was vast beyond my ability to imagine. To repeat, the brute reality of the Holocaust is beyond denial and argument.

The Holocaust is beyond dispute, its meaning is not

The meaning of the Holocaust and how it is represented, however is a vital and necessary debate. The framing of Holocaust Memorial Day, and I am glad it exists, is problematic. It includes post 1945 Genocide, at least in theory, if not in a great degree in practice. So Rwanda, the Rohingya, Cambodia are recognised to be memorialised in this context. Pre-1945 genocides are not (except sometimes Turkey’s slaughter of the Armenians gets a mention). As a result, the slave trade, USA’s elimination of Native Americans, Australian massacres of their Aboriginal population, Belgium’s atrocities in the Congo, and so on are excluded. The World War 2 victors excluded their crimes from commemoration. This was deliberate politics, not accident.

There is no point in constructing a league table of horror. We should not ask which was worse: Slavery? The Jews? The Native Americans? Rwanda. They were all the worst in one or more dimensions. But essentially they are incomparable and must be recognised in their uniqueness. The slave trade was the most profitable and went on for longest. The Holocaust was the most carefully planned and industrialised, The USA’s is the most celebrated in popular culture of film and book and television, Gaza is the first to be live-streamed into our ever-present phones. And so on.

We must remember that even in the Shoah Auschwitz was distinct. There were camps where people were worked to death like Mauthausen or Nordhausen. There were extermination camps like Treblinka or Sobibor. Only Auschwitz was both. But the camps were not the only places of death. The Einsatzgruppen swarmed across Eastern Europe behind the Wehrmacht shooting hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. But the final solution was the apex, or is that the nadir, of an incremental process. And remember, it was piloted first, not on the Jews, but on the mentally and physically disabled. The assault on the Jews went from exclusion from normal social and economic life and street violence to Kristallnacht to the ghettos and only, finally, to the camps. Each step desensitized the perpetrators and the wider citizenry to the horror and enabled the progression.

The legacies of the Holocaust

There are multiple legacies of the Holocaust. Obviously there was the impetus it gave to the minority Zionist movement and thus to the founding of Israel; and, in the course of that, to the Nakba. But it also gave rise to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. The prime movers of both were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. I’ll come back to them later.

The routes to the State of Israel are many. But perhaps the most important lead through Paris, London and Berlin. And each in that way was about antisemitism. Two in obvious ways, one less obviously. Paris was the home of the Dreyfus affair which undermined the growing security of Jews not just in France but across Western Europe at the end of the 19th century. The route through Berlin was, of course the Holocaust. The route through London was the Balfour Declaration. Why was the declaration written? A number of reasons. Two most important were there was a mistaken belief among the British elite that the Jews were inordinately powerful throughout Europe, part of the classic antisemitic conspiracy theory. The idea was that offering them a homeland in Palestine would buy their support for the war aims of Britain at a time when the outcome of the war was uncertain. Secondly, Balfour himself was a noted anti-Semitic Christian Zionist, himself responsible for the 1905 Aliens Act, designed to keep Jews like my grandparents out of Britain.

The Holocaust explains much about the Israeli psyche. You might say it is a nation in PTSD. Although it explains, it does not justify; just as a child abuser’s actions can be explained at least in part, but not excused by their own experience of abuse. The Holocaust is, thankfully, in the past, although its legacies are in the present. This does not prevent Israeli politicians and their apologists worldwide claiming Jews face an imminent reprise. Thus, they claim, Israel must always be there as a safe haven.

Antisemitism is real, do not imagine it is not but it is not dominant. While we might believe it is a possible future, the likelihood of a repeat Holocaust of Jews is neither imminent nor great. We can understand that history allows many (how many?) Jews to lack that conviction. But it is not just history that undermines that assurance. There is a concerted effort by Zionists and their allies to keep that fear alive and thriving in order to bolster their claims of the necessity of a Jewish supremacist state..

We should contrast Jewish daily experience to that of black people for whom oppression and discrimination is not just something in the past but is a present everyday lived reality. Nobody has been stopped by the police for DWJ, driving while Jewish.

The need for international law

This brings us back to genocide and the necessity of recognising that the true legacy of the Holocaust must be never again for anybody. Why was the Genocide Convention essential? The Nuremberg trials were morally necessary, but legally dubious. There was no code of international law that says the Holocaust was criminal. In a strict way, the Holocaust was legal. It was conducted in accordance with German Nazi law. There was no international code to override that inhumane structure of laws. The Holocaust was far from the centre of the Nurenberg trials; they were far more concerned with crimes against ‘us’, the victorious Allied Powers, than about ‘them’, the Jews. The Genocide Convention changed that. So, the murders of Australian First People would now be a crime, even though it wasn’t when it was perpetrated.

We have to recognise that the structure of international law is fragile. For most of the past 80 years countries have nurtured and cherished it, even when it was constraining of individual governments’ desired actions. This approach underpins the whole system of protecting human rights in those countries where human rights are protected. This is why the attacks on the European Convention on Human Rights by Tory populists and the Daily Mail is so dangerous. It threatens the fragile flower and so lowers the bars to future genocides.

Gaza Genocide, the ICJ and complicity

We see the fragility in the contempt of Israel for the International Court of Justice and Netanyahu’s recent statements like “Israel will pursue its war against Hamas until victory and will not be stopped by anyone, including the world court”, No matter what the court may say, Israel will ignore it. We see this vandalism in the US determination to veto any Security Council motion that might enforce an ICJ judgement and give teeth to international laws.

The 84 pages of the South African case at the ICJ consists of detailed expert legal argument and a massive accumulation of evidence and is, to me and very many more expert than me, compelling. It shows how Israel has breached key parts of the convention:

• genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group
  • Killing members of the group;
  • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
  • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
• The following acts shall be punishable:
  • Genocide;
  • Conspiracy to commit genocide;
  • Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
  • Attempt to commit genocide;
  • Complicity in genocide

Israel would have us believe that the world started on the 7th of October. Much of what Hamas and Islamic Jihad did on October 7 was criminal. It was, even though it was compounded by brutal and even criminal implementation of the Hannibal directive by Israel which resulted in many extra and unnecessary deaths.

But October 7 was the result of a history that goes way back. To 2005, to 1967, to 1948, to 1917 and earlier. It was violent resistance when the nonviolent Great March of return had resulted in the deliberate shooting of hundreds of Gazans by well entrenched Israeli snipers who were at no personal risk. Similarly, the violence of the Second Intifada with its suicide bombings was the reaction to the violent suppression of the largely non-violent civil protest of the First Intifada.

Israel and its supporters demonise non-violent resistance like boycott, divestment and sanctions or even trying to use the international legal system. Such demonization induces frustration and consequent violent resistance, which is used in turn to justify genocide.

This is not just an issue for the Israeli government, all its enablers are involved in a form of global joint enterprise.

Article I of the convention states:

The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.

Under the convention the UK Government has a duty to act where it sees genocide, not wait for others, failure to fulfil its obligations means it is guilty under the convention of complicity in genocide.

The genocide of the 1940s was the Holocaust. Today’s genocide is called Gaza. Like all genocides, it is particular and incomparable. But it must be judged under the international law created to prevent another Holocaust for anyone.

Other articles on our blog for HMD 2024

• If I am only for myself, what am I? – Robert Cohen
• Rabbis say Remember the Holocaust: stop the genocide in Gaza – Rabbi Brant Rosen
• Three statements for Holocaust Memorial Day