Not One Holocaust Memorial Organisation Worldwide Has Condemned the Genocide in Gaza or Said That 'Never Again' Applies to the Palestinians
Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 – DeNazify Israel
The Holocaust Memorial Day
commemoration we have just held is the fourth to be organised by Jewish Network
for Palestine. It also had a record
attendance. 624 people registered for the meeting and 420 attended with a
maximum of 357 at any one time.
The meeting was chaired by Haim Bresheeth, an
Israeli anti-Zionist academic and author of ‘An
army like no other’. The speakers were:
Ø Rania Khalek, a Lebanese-American
journalist who hosts Breakthrough News.
Ø Ghada Karmi, the author In Search of Fatima and many other books. Ghada is one of the original 1948 Palestinians, who and Professor of History at Exeter University and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Ø Suzanne Weiss is a child survivor who was hidden by the Communist Resistance in France. Suzanne’s memoir, From Holocaust to Resistance – my journey is well worth getting.
Ø Stephen Kapos is a child survivor of the Hungarian holocaust who was hidden by the Holy Family Church in Budapest. Stephen is a well known figure on Britain’s Palestine solidarity demonstrations who was questioned by the Metropolitan Police about a public order offence!
Ø Lastly Tony Greenstein, is author of Zionism During the Holocaust and a long-standing Jewish anti-Zionist .
Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio) - The Fight Against ICE is the Fight for Palestine
The
theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day webinar was The Nazification of Israel. When I chose this title I wasn’t aware
of an article
by Orly Noy, in Israel’s +972 Magazine . Orly
wrote:
Gaza City is engulfed
in flames, as the Israeli army embarks on its long-threatened ground
offensive after weeks of relentless bombardment.... I urge you to watch the footage
streaming out of Gaza, and see what this euphemism really means.
Look into the eyes of people gripped by a terror unmatched even in
the darkest moments of this two-year genocide. See the rows of ash-covered
children lying on the blood-soaked floor of what was once a medical center —
some barely alive, others wailing in pain and fear — as desperate hands try to
comfort them or treat them with whatever medical supplies remain. Hear the
screams of families fleeing with nowhere to run. Witness parents scouring the
inferno for their children; limbs protruding from beneath the rubble; a
paramedic cradling a motionless girl, pleading with her to open her eyes, in
vain.
What Israel is doing in Gaza City is not the tragic byproduct of
chaotic events on the ground, but a well-calculated act of annihilation,
executed in cold blood by “the people’s army” — that is, the fathers, sons,
brothers, and neighbors of us Israelis.
How is it that, despite the mounting testimonies from Gaza’s concentration
and extermination
camps, no mass refusal movement has taken root in Israel? That after two
years of this carnage barely a handful of conscientious
objectors sit in prison is truly inconceivable....
Israel is unleashing a holocaust in Gaza, and it cannot be
dismissed as the will of the country’s current fascist leaders alone. This
horror runs deeper than Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, and Smotrich. What we are
witnessing is the final stage in the nazification of Israeli society.
The urgent task now is to bring this holocaust to an end. But
stopping it is only the first step. If Israeli society is ever to return to the
fold of humanity, it must undergo a deep process of denazification....
Denazification must also include the recognition that what was
cannot remain. It will not be enough to simply replace the current government.
We must abandon the myth of Israel’s “Jewish and
democratic” character — a paradox whose iron grip helped pave the way to
the catastrophe we are now immersed in.
This deception must end with the
clear recognition that only two paths remain: either a Jewish, messianic,
genocidal state, or a truly democratic
state for all its citizens.
Orly concludes her article by
saying that ‘Zionism, in all its forms,
cannot be cleansed of the stain of this crime. It must be brought to an end.’ There
is no room for accommodation with Zionism. There is no ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’
Zionism. They are the same creatures.
The process of deNazification must
begin with the recognition that Israel does not inherit the memory of the Jews
who died in the holocaust. On the contrary, Israel mirrors the Nazi racial
supremacy that led to the holocaust.
We must stop bowing our heads in
solemn acquiescence when the Zionists invoke the memory of the 6 million as justification
for the annihilation of the Palestinians. We must not repeat the slogan ‘Never Again’ without emphasising that
today this slogan applies to the Palestinians above all.
Yad Vashem is Israel’s
holocaust memorial organisation. Yad Vashem’s purpose was never to draw
universal lessons from the holocaust. For Zionism the Jewish holocaust was
unique and if its unique then how can one draw universal lessons applicable to
all?
Yad Vashem’s aim has
always been to harnesses the memory of the holocaust dead to the Zionist project
and the building of a ‘Jewish’ state. How could it therefore condemn that very
state for perpetrating its own genocide?
Yad Vashem was never
intended as an anti-racist or anti-fascist institution. It was a Zionist
organisation. It has rebuffed many invitations in the past to widen its remit and
condemn particularly flagrant examples of Israeli and Zionist racism.
Yad Vashem had no
intention of changing its past practice now that Israel was becoming an openly
genocidal state. So when 50 holocaust researchers asked Yad
Vashem to condemn the genocidal statements made by Israeli politicians,
military and other public figures, including Israeli government ministers and Prime
Minister Netanyahu himself, its Chairman, Dani Dayan refused.
Where Yad Vashem led,
the world’s holocaust memorial organisations followed. Not one holocaust
organisation has condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Not one has declared that
the lesson of the Nazi holocaust was that the slogan ‘Never Again’ applied to
all people, Jewish and non-Jewish, Palestinians included.
When the Los Angeles
Holocaust Museum posted
a graphic on Instagram with the message ‘Never again can’t only mean never
again for Jews’ there was a backlash from Zionist organisations. Their
complaint, that the statement might be interpreted as referring to Israel’s
genocide in Gaza, resulted in the post being deleted. The museum issued
a new statement:
We recently posted an item on social media that was part of a pre-planned campaign intended to promote inclusivity and community that was easily open to misinterpretation by some to be a political statement reflecting the ongoing situation in the Middle East. That was not our intent.
The LA Holocaust Museum promised to ‘do better’ next time. Thus proving that ‘Never Again’ in the eyes of Zionists excludes Palestinians and those that the West considers its enemies. Never Again is only applicable to the Jews.
Karen Pollock of Britain’s Holocaust Education Trust went even further. She condemned the ‘shameful’ comparisons between the holocaust in Gaza and the Nazi genocide.
We should take on board what Primo Levi and his interviewer concluded in an interview in 1982 after the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps.
Joan Acocella, writing in
the New Yorker in April 2013 recalled
how Primo Levi, the famous Italian Jewish survivor of Auschwitz told a
reporter, Filippo Gentiloni, from the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto,
that
“Everybody is somebody’s Jew,”.... At that point in the interview, printed on June 29, 1982, Gentiloni closed the Levi quote and added a sentence of his own: “And today Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”
Although Primo Levi didn’t actually
say the words they were clearly in accord with his views and he never raised an
objection to them.
Today the Palestinians are suffering
at the hands of Israel what Jews experienced at the hands of European
anti-Semites.
Comparisons Between Nazi Germany and
Israel
The IHRA misdefinition of
anti-Semitism states
that ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary
Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ is anti-Semitic.
It is instructive therefore to list a
few comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel today and then ask ourselves
whether the truth itself is anti-Semitic.
1.
A good place to
start with is Arwa Mahdawi article
‘Gaza must be eliminated’: Israel’s airwaves are filled with pro-genocide
propaganda.’ She quotes Nissim Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset
stating that
“The children and women must be separated and the adults in Gaza must be eliminated. We are being too considerate,”
Vaturi
said this during an interview with Kol
BaRama radio in February 2025, when he also
called Palestinians “subhumans” and said the West Bank would be turned into
Gaza next.
Elad
Barashi, a TV producer with Channel 14, wrote
on 27 February 2025.
Gaza deserves death. The 2.6 million terrorists in Gaza deserve death! … Men, women, and children – in every way possible, we must simply carry out a Holocaust on them – yes, read that again – H-O-L-O-C-A-U-S-T! For me, gas chambers. Train cars. And other cruel forms of death for these Nazis. Without fear, without hesitation – simply crush, eradicate, slaughter, flatten, dismantle, smash, shatter …. Gaza deserves death. Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza
2.
On 1 August 2025 Shimon
Elkabetz, Chairman of the Israel Film Council, urged
the extermination of the Palestinians ‘it’s just like using a lice comb’. Hitler in Mein Kampf compared Jews to lice.
Gallant on Palestinians as human animals
3.
Israel’s Defence
Minister, Yoav Gallant, on 9th October 2023, described Palestinians as
‘human animals’. On October 4, 1943 Himmler
had described the Untermenschen in
exactly the same terms.
Heinrich Himmler Addressing the SS Generals
Gallant
went on to say that
I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.
“That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally,” Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, wrote in a diary entry. Today, more than two million Palestinians in Gaza are being forced, by design, into famine.”https://t.co/6ITI8Fh5Ih pic.twitter.com/OlEThwtEIM
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) June 3, 2025
In
June 1941, as Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, began the
Nazis implemented Der
Hungerplan, the starvation of those they conquered. 4.2 million Soviet citizens died as a result.
In
his diary Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, wrote, that ‘we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of
hunger should be noted only marginally.’
Destroying
food and the production of food was core to Israel’s strategy from the start. ‘Israeli bulldozers and heavy machinery have
systematically razed fields, reducing them to dirt.’ See ‘How Israel destroyed Gaza's ability to feed
itself’. More than 90% of cattle and more than half of sheep and goat herds
in Gaza were killed whilst more than three-quarters of Gaza’s orchards have
been destroyed. A UN survey in September 2024 found that 70% of agricultural
land had been destroyed or damaged according to an analysis of satellite
imagery.
4.
Rabbi Eliyahu Mali,
head of the pre-military Bnei Moshe Yeshivah in Jaffa, told
a conference of yeshivas on 27 March 2024 that:
Today's terrorists are the children of the prior [military] operation that left them alive.... It's not only the 14- or 16-year-old boy, the 20- or 30-year-old man who takes up a weapon against you but also the future generation.
5.
Tzemach Yehudah
Richter wrote
in the Times of Israel about Himmler’s
second speech at Poznań on 6 October 1943 along exactly the same lines.
I ask of you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard and not ever discussed. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth.
And so we see how the ‘logic’ of
extermination in Nazi Germany has made its way over into the thinking of
Israel’s rabbis and soldiers.
6.
The most
popular car bumper stickers in Israel are those urging the IDF to ‘finish them,’
Friendship Song 2023 - Israeli Schoolkids Sing
of the Annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza – Public broadcaster Kan TV Played
the Video
7.
Israel’s public
broadcaster Kan showed
a video of a group of school children urging the ‘annihilation’ of the people
in Gaza.
Israeli
politician says ‘any child’ born in Gaza is ‘already a terrorist’
Nissim
Vaturi, said
every child born in Gaza is “already a
terrorist, from the moment of his birth” and that Gaza must be erased from
the face of the earth.
8.
Amichai Eliyahu,
the Heritage Minister, openly
called for the starvation of the population.
9.
Rabbis like Dov
Lior, the
spiritual mentor of Israel’s neo-Nazi Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, during
Operation Protective Edge in 2014, published
a letter saying that Jewish law permitted destroying the entire Gaza Strip to
bring peace to the south of Israel. Lior also praised the ISIS
attacks on Paris in 2015 when 137 people died.
"Other findings were grim: A majority of 56% of Jews supported the "transfer (forced expulsion) of Arab citizens of Israel to other countries." To put this in perspective, a 2015 large Pew poll in Israel found 48% of Jewish Israelis supported expelling Arab citizens from Israel. https://t.co/wYCgDifERw
— Shibley Telhami (@ShibleyTelhami) June 4, 2025
10.
A poll
Professor Tamir Sorek of Pennsylvania State University in May 2025 82% Israeli
Jews supported the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip, 56% supported the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel and nearly
half, 47% supported
killing all Palestinians in Gaza, rising to 60% when a further question about
the relevance of Amalek was asked.
What are we to make of this? It is
clear that all the holocaust education in the world has had no effect
whatsoever in Israel. On the contrary, holocaust education has enabled Israelis
to see themselves as victims at the very time that they are enforcing an
apartheid system and committing genocide. Holocaust education has reinforced
their sense of righteousness and entitlement. Israeli settler colonialism is
unique in the settlers seeing themselves as the victims of those they are
exterminating.
‘Never Again’ has enabled Israelis to
see the Palestinians as the Nazis and to therefore justify all measures,
including genocide, taken against them.
And this is the mark of the stupidity
of left groups like the Socialist Workers Party who mouth the same slogans here
without ever asking themselves why it is that the supporters of genocide in
Gaza also mouth ‘never again’ and what that might mean in the mouths of racists
and genocidaires. This why I have sent an open letter to the local SWP/SUTR.
I hope that Tuesday night’s HMD
webinar went some way to helping people understand that holocaust memorial
remembrance, which does not include the Palestinians and other victims of
holocausts and take a clear position against Zionism, ends up reinforcing the Zionist
victimisation complex that enables genocide to take place.
Tony Greenstein
