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
President Joe Biden began his remarks in Israel with this: “Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of Isis, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world. There is no rationalizing it, no excusing it. Period. The brutality we saw would have cut deep anywhere in the world, but it cuts deeper here in Israel. October 7, which was a … sacred Jewish holiday, became the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
“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.”
With this, Biden reinforced the rhetorical framework that 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.”
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. This historical context in no way justifies or excuses the mass murder of 1,500 Israelis on 7 October, which constitutes a war crime and crimes against humanity. This was the single largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, which deeply shocked Jews and many others around the world. The context of the Hamas attack on Israelis, however, is completely different from the context of the attack on Jews during the Holocaust. And without the historical context of Israeli settler colonialism since the 1948 Nakba, we cannot explain how we got here, nor imagine different futures; Biden offered us, instead, the decontextualized image of “pure, unadulterated evil.”
This weaponization of Holocaust memory by Israeli politicians runs deep. In 1982, for instance, in the context of Israel’s attack on Lebanon, the Israeli PM, Menachem Begin, compared the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Adolf Hitler in his bunker in Berlin at the end of the war. Three decades later, in October 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu took this weaponization to new levels when he asserted in a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem that the Palestinian grand mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini planted the idea to murder Jews in Hitler’s mind. And last Tuesday, Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference, together with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as the “new Nazis”.
The Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party, to take another example, called for “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”. There are many other such expressions by Israeli politicians and senior army officers in the last few weeks. The fantasy of “fighting Nazis” drives such explicit language, because the image of Nazis is one of “pure, unadulterated evil”, which removes all laws and restrictions in the fight against it. Perpetrators of genocide always see their victims as evil and themselves as righteous. This is, indeed, how Nazis saw Jews.
Biden’s words constitute therefore a textbook use of the Holocaust not in order to stand with powerless people facing the prospect of genocidal violence, but to support and justify an extremely violent attack by a powerful state and, at the same time, distort this reality. But we see the reality in front of our eyes: since the start of Israeli mass violence on 7 October, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza has surpassed 4,650, a third of them children, with more than 15,000 injured and over a million people displaced.
Israel has also escalated the violence against Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank, including the killing of more than 95 people and an intensification of expulsions, including the destruction of whole communities. Hamas wields no power in the West Bank, but the reality that we can all see means little for Israelis fighting, in their minds, Nazis.
We have seen this sort of use of Holocaust memory in another case of mass violence not too long ago. On 24 January 2020, the Russian president Vladimir Putin was invited to speak at the fifth World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to mark 75 years to the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet forces. In his speech, Putin presented a distorted history of the second world war and the Holocaust, including distorted maps, to fit a Russian narrative that erased the Nazi-Soviet alliance in the destruction of Poland in 1939 and presented Ukrainians, Latvians and Lithuanians primarily as Nazi collaborators.
Putin used precisely this weaponization of Holocaust history when he launched his assault on Ukraine in February last year, explaining it as a campaign of “denazification”. Explicit and unashamed, just like Bennett. Putin thus used the Holocaust to create a world turned upside down: Ukrainians facing a brutal and unprovoked Russian attack became Nazis.
The history of the Holocaust, however, does offer lessons for the current bloodshed.
For one, it reminds us to center the voices and perspectives of those facing state violence and genocide. And the most urgent thing that Palestinians in Gaza now need is a ceasefire and an end to the Israeli bombing campaign. That is also what at least some of the Israeli survivors of the Hamas attack and family members of Israeli civilians killed or in captivity in Gaza want. A top priority now should be stopping the unfolding violence, saving lives, and the release of Israeli hostages together with hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including 160 children, detained by Israel unlawfully, without charges or trial.
The history of the Holocaust also points to the importance of accountability, even as post-Holocaust accountability remained limited. In the case of Israel’s assault on Gaza, accountability needs to begin from what is very clear: incitement to genocide, which is punishable under article 3 of the UN genocide convention, even when genocide does not follow. While the debate about genocide in Israel’s current assault on Gaza will undoubtedly continue for years, perhaps also in international courts, Israeli war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law are beyond dispute.
It will also be important then that Israeli perpetrators of war crimes and those responsible for violations of international humanitarian law in the many years of the siege on Gaza, including during this current assault, will stand trial. Palestinian leaders and Palestinians who perpetrated the mass atrocities on 7 October should also be held accountable. International courts and legal processes are important because they hold potential to become spaces, however limited, for survivors to tell their stories, assert their humanity, and demand truth and justice.
Indeed, no value related to the study of the Holocaust and its memory occupies a more central place perhaps than truth. No justice is possible, not in the short term and certainly not in the long term, without a truthful reckoning of how we got here. This means recognizing fully the long history of Israeli settler-colonial violence against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba.
The world is indeed watching, as Biden said, and it knows, despite Biden’s use of the Holocaust to distort what is clearly in front of our eyes, as more than 800 scholars of international law, conflict studies, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies declared in a statement on 15 October: “We are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. We do not do so lightly, recognizing the weight of this crime, but the gravity of the current situation demands it.” Scholars whose work has shaped the field of Holocaust and genocide studies, such as Omer Bartov and Marion Kaplan, signed the statement.
This is significant. More and more Holocaust and genocide studies scholars are refusing to allow the continuation of the dangerous use of the Holocaust to distort the historical reality of the Holocaust and Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. This provides some hope in these dark days, as it supports the struggle for a different future, beyond the Israeli settler state, a future that should be based on equality, justice, freedom and dignity for all the people who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
-
Raz Segal is an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide
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.