Israel suffers, not from Holocaust Trauma but the Trauma of Self-Induced Victimisation
Electronic Intifada has
just published my article Israel’s
Holocaust trauma is a myth. It looks at the claims
of Israel’s supporters and Zionism that October 7 represented a ‘second
Holocaust’.
In the article I argue that it is not Holocaust
trauma but the trauma of settler-colonials, for whom the rising up of the
indigenous Palestinians, is their nightmare scenario. I compare Israel’s
situation with that of the Caribbean slave owners and South Africa’s Whites.
In the Times of Israel two Israeli holocaust academics,
Just as the
Nazis aimed to annihilate the Jews, Hamas and affiliated terrorist
organizations share the same objective: the destruction of Jews.
White 'trauma' in Kenya led Britain to set up a series of concentration camps
It
is an evidence free assertion. What do they base this claim on? The 1988 Hamas Charter. It is true that the 1988
Hamas Charter referred to Jews and was anti-Semitic but the point is that it
never informed the practice and politics of Hamas and in 2017 was discarded in
favour of a ‘“Document
of General Principles and Policies’.
Of
course the think tanks of US imperialism have done their best to suggest that
the changes are cosmetic. As Mandy Rice-Davies of Profumo fame once said,
they would say that wouldn’t they. It is in the interests of Zionism to portray
Hamas as a genocidal, anti-Semitic organisation.
Matthew
Levitt and Maxine Rich of the neo-con Washington Institute for Near East Policy
argue
in ‘Hamas's
Moderate Rhetoric Belies Militant Activities’
The
international community should judge Hamas not by any moderation in the group's
rhetoric but by its actions on the ground. So long as the latter remain
militant and extreme, the relative moderation of the former means not much at
all.
What
concerned them was not that Hamas had abandoned its anti-Jewish rhetoric but
that they were still militantly opposed to Israel’s occupation, siege and
subjugation of the Palestinian people.
This
is typical of the dishonesty of western academics who conflate the Nazi’s extermination
of Jews with opposition to Israeli settler colonialism. The suggestion being that
Hamas and the Palestinians oppose Israel’s Jewish Supremacist regime not because
of what it does but because their oppressors happen to be Jewish!
Amira
Hass in Ha’aretz explained
the background to the original Charter and how it came to be adopted and the fact
that it had little influence on Hamas’s day to day practice or ideological
outlook.
The
new document contains none of the anti-Semitic articles and sentences that
characterized the charter. Supporters of the movement, especially in the West,
advised it long ago to change these provisions.
One
Hamas member told Haaretz that almost immediately after the charter was
published in 1988, people in the movement urged that these sections be changed.
The charter wasn’t written in a cooperative process, he explained, and it isn’t
“scientifically or legally” accurate.
He
said the Hamas members deported to Marj El Zhour in Lebanon in 1992-93 were the
first to seriously discuss the need for changes. But the changes were never
made because doing so required a lengthy, complex process of thought and
consultation during difficult periods of military escalation.
The
charter itself hasn’t been canceled. It’s a historic document that relates to a
particular moment in the organization’s history, and Hamas isn’t renouncing it;
nor is the new document called a “charter.” Cancelling the charter would repeat
the humiliation undergone by the PLO when it had to announce the repeal of
certain provisions of its 1968 charter because they contradicted the Oslo
Accords. But the Hamas charter is no longer the organization’s official
ideological platform.
As
I said in my article
‘Presumably
if Gaza’s occupiers had been Christians then the Palestinians would have
happily accepted their fate!’.
Levitt
and Rich typify the superficiality of the ‘academics’ that adorn American think
thanks and universities. To say nothing of Israel’s fake holocaust ‘scholars’ such
as Patt and Steir-Livny.
Nazi
anti-Semitism targeted Jews because they were Jews and extermination was a
culmination of a process that began with ethnic cleansing. When Hamas attacked Jews
it was understandable because Israel’s soldiers came to their homes to kill them
in the name of ‘the Jews’. That is why Palestinians refer to Yahud (Jew)
because that is how their oppressor appears to them.
However
Hamas matured in the 30 years between the 1988 Charter and the 2017 document.
They learnt to distinguish between Jews and Zionists. Nor was this simply a
matter of rhetoric or verbal accommodation.
No less than the Times of Israel quoted a statement of senior Hamas official Basem Naim that the group was “sorry to hear about the terror attack” in 2018 on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh which claimed 11 lives. Naim explained that
As Palestinians and victims of the terror of Israeli occupation, we know the meaning of terror and its horrific outcomes. This heinous attack, especially in a place of worship, proves that terror has no religion or nationality.
Can one
imagine the Nazi party condemning an attack on Jews? The attack was perpetrated by Robert Bowers, a supporter of
Donald Trump, an ardent supporter of the Israeli state.
In an article
in the Guardian Hamas
condemns the Holocaust Naim made this explicit:
at the same
time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the
Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by
the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of
the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against
us - to the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan
Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a "holocaust".
The Nazi state
had journals and papers devoted to propagating anti-Semitism. It established
and funded ‘scientific’ institutes whose task was to ‘prove’ that Jews were subhuman.
Pivotal to the attempts to set Nazi ideology on a scientific basis was the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. The
Institute was founded with money from America’s Rockerfeller Foundation whose
money kept it going during the Great Depression.
Eugen Fischer - from genocide in Africa to the Holocaust
Eugen Fischer, who first began with medical experiments on the Herero and Nama
people at Shark Island concentration camp in SW Africa (Namibia), the first
genocide of the 20th century, went on to train SS doctors such as
Joseph Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor.
Hamas has never sought to establish ‘academic’
institutions whose purpose was to theorise anti-Semitism. Hamas make a sharp
distinction between Jews and Zionists. Many of the released captives testified
to their humane treatment at the hands of Hamas. These are very strange Nazis!
Those who equate Hamas with the Nazis or suggest
that their goal is the elimination of Jews are projecting their own genocidal thoughts
onto their victims. In is one more case of serial Zionist dishonesty.
I quote in my article
Hannah Starman, who as a child was baffled at Israel’s portrayal of the people
they were bombing in Beirut as Nazis. Hannah was only 7 but as she said:
when I looked among the
images of people in Beirut to find the Nazis, all I could see were people who
looked poor, quiet or scared.
Nothing like the tall and
erect Nazis, shouting out orders in their uniforms and shiny boots. I was confused.
And this confusion bred a lifelong interest in what was really going on in
Israel. How could a people that had suffered so much cause so much suffering?
Why were they telling the world that they were fighting the Nazis? And why did
the world believe them?
What a child could see with her own eyes, Biden,
Sunak, Starmer, Scholtz and the other war criminals are unable to see. Not because
they are blind but because they have deliberately created a narrative that
portrays the victims of genocide as ‘Nazis’.
What western leaders are unwittingly doing is
normalising the Nazis which is one reason why so many neo-Nazis today, like the
White Zionist Richard Spencer and Dutch
political leader Geert
Wilders, adore the Israeli state.
It is also the reason why Germany’s leaders have
fallen over themselves in the rush to endorse Israel’s genocide. It is ironic
that the ‘Jewish state’ is helping to rehabilitate the Nazis but when one looks
at the history of the period, alone amongst the Jews the Zionists saw only good
coming out of the Nazi rise to power.
As David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister remarked ‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.” ‘ [Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, p. 18].
