Israel’s Shame is Germany’s and the West’s Shame

 On the Eve of Holocaust Memorial Day Israel has been Found by the International Court of Justice To Have Been Perpetrating a Genocide

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ICJ interim ruling on genocide case against Israel - Live

It is a comforting myth, not least to the German State, the heir to the Nazi murderers, to believe that the State of Israel was gifted to the Jews in compensation for the Holocaust.

Like all such myths it carries within it the danger that it will imbue those who claim to inherit the memory of those who died, with the power to repeat what happened before. And thus it has come to pass that Israel has been found to have perpetrated genocide in Gaza in the  name of the Jewish Holocaust.

It is a myth that Israel was created because of the Holocaust. If that were true why is there no Roma or Gypsy state? Why have the Gypsies and Roma not been offered compensation equivalent to Germany’s reparations to Israel? The Gypsies continue to be hounded and persecuted in Europe.

In fact the colonisation of Palestine by Zionist settlers began in 1882 not 1945. The Holocaust was, as far as the Zionist leaders were concerned fortuitous in that it enormously strengthened their project. As Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian wrote in The Modern History of Israel:

‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism... In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. ... By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’  

Even now Germany refuses to compensate Namibia for the massacre of more than 70,000 Herero and Nama people between 1904 and 1908, which was the 20^th Century's first genocide.

Namibia: The Price of Genocide | People and Power

It is no surprise that Namibia’s anger boiled over when Germany offered to join Israel’s case at the ICJ. It was in Namibia, then a German colony, that Germany’s extermination program for the Herero and Nama people became the template for the Holocaust.

Eugen Fischer was the Nazi doctor who helped pioneer eugenics in the Third Reich. As director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology (1927-42) Fischer provided the ‘scientific’ rationale for the Nazi’s war of extermination.

On Shark Island in SW Africa Fischer ran medical breeding experiments on the camp’s inmates. Racist ideas developed in the colony were brought back to German institutions along with the Africans’ skulls. In 1939, Fischer declared

When a people wants … to preserve its own nature, it must reject alien racial elements,… The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off.

Fischer conducted medical experiments on children born from the rape of African women. His research inspired Adolf Hitler and in the 1930s, Fischer taught his racist theories to Nazi doctors. One of his students, Joseph Mengele, was responsible for the medical experiments in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

It is therefore appropriate that the German state, which never de-Nazified, has offered its support to Israel at the ICJ.

In March 1988 Professor Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz, wrote an article in Ha’aretz, The Need to Forget. Elkana, who later became Rector of the Central European University in Budapest, before Netanyahu’s friend, Viktor Orban, the anti-Semitic Prime Minister of Hungary, closed it down wrote of:

a profound existential "Angst" fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the Holocaust and the readiness to believe that the whole world is against us, and that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief, shared by so many today, I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, "this must never happen again," and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, "this must never happen to us again."

Elkana described how Israel sent children on repeated visits to Israel’s holocaust propaganda centre, Yad Vashem asking:

What did we want those tender youths to do with the experience? We declaimed, insensitively and harshly, and without explanation: "Remember!" "Zechor!" To what purpose? What is the child supposed to do with these memories? Many of the pictures of those horrors are apt to be interpreted as a call to hate.

Israel also sends thousands of schoolchildren to Poland every year to visit Auschwitz. As Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Levy observed,

Remembering the Holocaust is now for nationalists only. There’s no universal conclusion or moral lesson.

Levy remarked, prophetically:

I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said, Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz.

Elkana told how Thomas Jefferson wrote that democracy and worship of the past are incompatible.

Democracy fosters the present and the future. Too much of "Zechor!" (Remember) and an addiction. to the past undermine the foundations of democracy.

Elkana’s conclusion caused uproar in Israel:

we must learn to forget! Today I see no more important political and educational task for the leaders of this nation than to take their stand on the side of life, to dedicate themselves to creating our future, and not to be preoccupied from morning to night, with symbols, ceremonies, and lessons of the Holocaust. They must uproot the domination of that historical "remember!" over our lives.

If we are going to commemorate the Holocaust every Holocaust Memorial Day then we have to ask ‘to what purpose?’ If the Holocaust is going to be used, as Israel uses it, to justify its genocide in Gaza and maybe the West Bank too, then Elkana is right. It is best forgotten.

We have seen Israeli politicians proclaim that the breakout from Gaza on October 7 was the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Not only is this factually wrong but it is morally and politically wrong too.

Israel sees October 7 through the prism of the Holocaust because it wants to avoid discussing the real reasons of what happened that day. I leave to one side the question of what actually happened, as opposed to the myth of organized rapes, beheaded babies and all the rest.

It is no wonder that when Antonio Gutterez, the UN General Secretary, said that October 7 did not happen in a vacuum Israel’s leaders went berserk, calling for his resignation. Israeli leaders want people to believe that the events of October 7 happened, not because of Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip for 57 years and its siege of 17 years but because Palestinians are consumed by hatred of Jews. In other words our old friend, ‘eternal anti-Semitism.’

We are supposed, according to the Zionists, to ignore the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the murder of 30,000+ people including 15,000 children, the murder of 120 journalists, hundreds of doctors and health workers, the destruction of hospitals and homes and instead focus solely on the 700 Israeli civilians, the majority of whom appear to have been murdered by Israel as a result of its Hannibal Doctrine.

The decision of the ICJ, despite the fact that it didn’t order a ceasefire, is welcome. Those who, even now, ignore the death of  Palestinians and instead can only remember October 7 should be treated as the racists and genociders that they are.

On a personal note, I have myself put an end to a 40 year friendship with someone who wrote in a local right-wing rag that ‘nothing the Israeli state has done provides justification for the atrocities of that day.’ The whole article concentrated on attacking Hamas comparing it to ISIS as Netanyahu did.

As the video below from two Israeli hostages show, Hamas’s treatment of its captives is incomparably better than Israel’s treatment of Palestinian prisoners, especially given Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza.

Hin & Ajam Were 2 Prisoners of Hamas

The article railed against an anti-Semitic doctor in Durban without mentioning that the South Africa Jewish community wholeheartedly supported Apartheid. South Africa and Israel became close military partners. Those Jews, like Ronnie Kasrils and Joe Slovo, who joined the ANC and opposed Apartheid were ostracized by this right-wing Zionist Jewish community.

Tonight the Socialist Labour Network and Jewish Network for Palestine are holding a meeting on Holocaust Memorial Day. Our message is that Never Again applies to everyone, including the Palestinians currently fighting to live in Gaza.

We should also remember the record of the Zionist movement during the Holocaust when they not merely prioritized the building of a ‘Jewish’ State over the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust but they actively opposed all rescue attempts where the destination wasn’t Palestine.

Historian Christopher Sykes wrote of the 1938 Evian Conference that Roosevelt called to find a solution to the Jewish refugee problem and the Zionist attitude to it, that:

From the start they regarded the whole enterprise with hostile indifference... If the 31 nations had done their duty and shown hospitality to those in dire need then the pressure on the National Home and the heightened enthusiasm of Jews with Palestine would both have been relaxed. This was the last thing that the Zionist leaders wished for…. Even in the more terrible days ahead they made no secret of the fact, even when talking to Gentiles, that they did not want Jewish settlements outside Palestine to be successful... The Zionists wanted to do something more for Jews than merely help them to escape danger…. that such was the basic Zionist idea is not a matter of opinion but a fact abundantly provable by evidence... [my emphasis - Crossroads to Israel]

Nor should we forget the response of David Ben-Gurion to the Kindertransport, a scheme whereby the British agreed, after Kristallnacht in November 1938, to admit 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children to England. He was furious that they weren’t going to Palestine and in a speech to the Israeli Labor Party’s [Mapai] Central Committee on 9 December 1938, he explained his reasoning:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.

Likewise Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel and then President of the Zionist Organisation told Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary that ‘‘We shall fight you - and when I say fight I mean fight.’

We have to reclaim the Nazi Holocaust for everyone, not just for Jews people or the Israeli state.

Tony Greenstein

Holocaust Memorial Day Meeting Friday January 27 6.30 p.m. - all Welcome

 It’s Time To Reclaim the Memory of ALL Those Who Died in the Nazi Holocaust from Zionism and the Supporters of Israeli Apartheid

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Stephen Kapos, Holocaust Survivor, in conversation.

Friday 27^th March is Holocaust Memorial Day and the Socialist Labour Network is holding a meeting to remember and commemorate ALL the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

Not only did 6 million Jews die during the Nazi Holocaust but so too did 1 million Roma Gypsies, half a million Disabled, over 3 million Russian POWs and up to 3 million Poles as well as millions of Russian civilians who the Nazis decided should not be kept alive.

But to the Zionists only the Jews were victims of the Holocaust. The Jewish Virtual Library wrote, quoting Yad Vashem

By the 1950s, the English term Holocaust came to be employed as the term for the murder of the Jews in Europe by the Nazis. Although the term is sometimes used with reference to the murder of other groups by the Nazis, strictly speaking, those groups do not belong under the heading of the Holocaust, nor are they included in the generally accepted statistic of six million victims of the Holocaust.

According to Yehuda Bauer, the principal Zionist holocaust historian,

The problem… is not that non-Jews were not victims [of the Nazis]; they were. It is that Wiesenthal’s arbitrarily chosen tally of non-Jewish victims diminishes the centrality to the Nazi ideology of systematically wiping any trace of the Jewish people from the planet.

In fact, he said, the term “genocide” could accurately be applied to the 2 million to 3 million Poles murdered and millions more enslaved by the Nazis. But the mass murder of the Poles, Roma and others should not come under the rubric “Holocaust,” a term that Holocaust historians generally dislike because of its religious connotations but nonetheless have accepted as describing only the annihilation that the Nazis hoped to visit on the Jews.

“All Jews of the world had to be annihilated,” Bauer said. “That was the intent. There was never an idea in Nazi minds to murder all the Russians

As my book explains the uniqueness of the fate of the Jews compared to anyone else is central to Zionist distortion of holocaust history and underpins the racial nationalism of Zionism. It selects Jews out of all other victims as unique.

Bauer is in any case wrong. It was not part of Nazi ideology that all Jews had to be annihilated. Up to 1941 the Nazis wanted to expel not annihilate the Jews of Europe. Annihilation came with war when deportation was no longer an option.

The Warsaw Ghetto burning after the Nazis set it alight

Bauer argued, in a debate with Sybil Milton, that the Roma were not victims of the holocaust because they were singled out by the Nazis because of their wandering, asocial and criminal lifestyle. Milton’s reply was withering:

Defining an entire ethnic group as anti-social and criminal is a classic example of racism. I do not know why Mr. Bauer does not understand this.

Idith Zertal, Professor of History at the Hebrew University, wrote in Israel’s Holocaust – The Politics of Nationhood that there hasn’t been a war involving Israel ‘that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the Holocaust.’ Israel has mobilised the Holocaust ‘in the service of Israeli politics.’

 ‘The transference of the holocaust situation on to the Middle East reality… not only created a false sense of the imminent danger of mass destruction. It also immensely distorted the image of the holocaust, dwarfed the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, trivializing the unique agony of the victims and the survivors, and utterly demonizing the Arabs and their leaders.

Zionism’s leaders have sought to equate Palestinian hostility to Zionism with the Nazis’ hatred of the Jews. Socialist Labour Network Yad Vashem Sybil Milton, Benjamin Netanyahu went even further. In a speech to the World Zionist Organisation Congress in 2015 he blamed the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al Amin Husseini, (who the Zionists and British   High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel appointed in 1921) for the Holocaust. Netanyahu  exonerated Hitler in the process.

When Israel laid siege to Beirut, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler in his bunker. In 2008 Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened to give ‘Gaza a taste of the 'shoah’. Abba Eban compared the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank as the ‘Auschwitz borders’.

Israel and its Holocaust propaganda museum Yad Vashem specialises in escorting fascists and Hitler admirers such as Bolsonaro and Duterte, Presidents of Brazil and the Philippines, around it, to say nothing of welcoming South Africa Prime Minister John Vorster in 1976. Vorster had been interned during the war for Nazi sympathies.

Nothing gives more encouragement to holocaust deniers than the Zionist attempt to use the holocaust to sanitise Israel’s war crimes. Israel has used the murder of 6 million Jews to intimidate the opponents of Zionism, including Jewish opponents.

For Zionism the Holocaust is unique, a Jewish-only affair. Drawing universal lessons from the Holocaust meant the ‘plunder of [Jewish] moral capital’ according to the American Jewish Committee. Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress declared that

‘Auschwitz was not only a national memory belonging to the Jewish people… it was also an important political asset.’

The question most often asked is how is it that Jewish people, who have themselves been victims of fascism and racism, can now do to others what they themselves experienced. My answer has always been that any group of people, given the right set of circumstances, are capable of racism, murder and ethnic cleansing.

It is time to call a halt to Israel’s defiling of the name of the Holocaust victims. As my new book Zionism During the Holocaust explains, during the Holocaust the Zionist movement was not interested in what was happening in Europe.  Indeed it actively fought rescue attempts for Jewish refugees that weren’t directed at Palestine.

In a speech David Ben Gurion gave on 9 December 1938 regarding the Kindertransport scheme which rescued 10,000 Jewish children:

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.

Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, explained his thinking in a memo to the Zionist Executive of 17 December 1938:

If the Jews are faced with a choice between the refugee problem and rescuing Jews from concentration camps on the one hand, and aid for the national museum in Palestine on the other, the Jewish sense of pity will prevail and our people's entire strength will be directed at aid for the refugees in the various countries. Zionism will vanish from the agenda and indeed not only world public opinion in England and America but also from Jewish public opinion. We are risking Zionism's very existence if we allow the refugee problem to be separated from the Palestine problem.

Rudolf Kasztner, the leader of Hungarian Zionism, was the most notorious Zionist collaborator with the Nazis

In other words whenever rescue of Jewish refugees was raised it must be immediately linked to the question of Palestine. On more than one occasion, this resulted in the collapse of rescue schemes. As historian Christopher Sykes wrote about the 1938 Evian Conference which Roosevelt called to try and deal with the Jewish refugee situation:

From the start they [the Zionists] regarded the whole enterprise with hostile indifference... If the 31 nations had done their duty and shown hospitality to those in dire need then the pressure on the National Home and the heightened enthusiasm of Jews with Palestine would both have been relaxed. This was the last thing that the Zionist leaders wished for…. Even in the more terrible days ahead they made no secret of the fact, even when talking to Gentiles, that they did not want Jewish settlements outside Palestine to be successful... The Zionists wanted to do something more for Jews than merely help them to escape danger…. that such was the basic Zionist idea is not a matter of opinion but a fact abundantly provable by evidence... [my emphasis - Crossroads to Israel]

On Friday we have a wonderful line-up of speakers including two Jewish holocaust survivors, Suzanne Weiss and Stephen Kapos.

Suzanne Weiss

Suzanne Weiss was born to immigrant Jews in Paris in 1941 and targeted for death by the Nazis. Suzanne was hidden by a French farm family between 1943 and 1945. After losing her parents in the war, Suzanne was adopted by a New York family in 1950.

Suzanne has been active throughout her life in a variety of social justice movements. She has spoken on the Holocaust and her support for Palestinian freedom to faith communities, community and activist groups, and high school and university gatherings.

Suzanne’s memoir, Holocaust to Resistance: My Journey, was published by Fernwood in October 2019.

Stephen Kapos was a small child when the Nazis came to Budapest. His early life was spent hiding from the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Fascists who would round up Jews and shoot them into the Danube. Separated from both his parents during the Siege of Budapest, Stephen was hidden in children's homes on false papers. His father was on the Kasztner train and ended up in Bergen Belsen and Tieresenstadt. Because of his early experience of extreme racism, Stephen is an activist for the Palestinian cause.

Dr Adrian Marsh

Dr Adrian Marsh is a Researcher in Romani Studies at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII).  

Ali Abunimah has been described as a ‘Lightning Rod of the Boycott Israel Movement’. He is also the Founding Editor of the much-loved Electronic Intifada, the premier Palestinian web site.

Tony Greenstein is a long-time Jewish anti-Zionist and Palestine solidarity activist. He has just brought out a new book Zionism  During the Holocaust.

Please come to the meeting and help make it a success. By coming you help ensure that the days when the Zionists used the holocaust as a weapon against the Palestinians have come to an end. Coming to hear the wonderful line up of speakers is a basic act of solidarity.

Tony Greenstein