Israel finds that the Holocaust is becoming inconvenient when it comes to friendship with far-Right regimes

Netanyahu invites Viktor Orban, Hungary’s racist anti-Semitic Prime Minister for a state visit.

It is no surprise that nearly 3 years after his speech to the World Zionist Congress, when Netanyahu tried to blame the Palestinians for the Holocaust, that he has now gone one step further and exonerated the anti-Semitic leaders of the Polish and Hungarian regimes.  According to Netanyahu it wasn’t Hitler who thought up the idea of exterminating the Jews it was the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al Amin Husseini. In his speech Netanyahu explained

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said: ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’” According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: “What should I do with them?” and the mufti replied: “Burn them.”

You can read about this in my article Rewriting the Holocaust.

Earlier this year Poland’s Senate passed a Holocaust law making it a criminal offence to blame Poland for any crimes committed during the Holocaust.  The bill was proposed by the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) and called for up to three years in prison.   “We have to send a clear signal to the world that we won’t allow for Poland to continue being insulted,” Patryk Jaki, a deputy justice minister, told reporters in parliament.

The legislation criminalised any mention of Poles “being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.” The harshest penalties were reserved for those who referred to Nazi-era concentration camps such as Auschwitz as “Polish death camps.” Only scientific research into the war and artistic work was exempted. To be fair though it is highly inaccurate to describe the Nazi extermination camps as being Polish.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama caused an uproar in Poland when he used the phrase “Polish death camp” while posthumously bestowing a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 on Jan Karski, a Polish World War II resistance fighter. Obama apologized for using the phrase after being denounced by current European Council President Donald Tusk, who was then the Prime Minister of Poland.

PiS is a virulently racist and xenophobic party. Its Defence Minister, Antoni Macierewicz told listeners to the anti-Semitic Catholic radio station, Radio Maryja in 2002 that he had read Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous Czarist forgery, termed a ‘Warrant for Genocide’ a pamphlet that purports to be a Jewish plan to control the world but which has been exposed as a hoax. Whilst acknowledging there was debate about the pamphlet’s authenticity, he told listeners that: “Experience shows that there are such groups in Jewish circles.” Polish defence minister condemned over Jewish conspiracy theory

PiS’s leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski once said Muslim refugees carried “various parasites and protozoa” and the government’s education minister in 2016 discounted two well-documented massacres of Jews, including Jedwabne, by calling it a matter of “opinion ”. Jedwabne was a village in Eastern Poland where up to 1600 Jews were burnt alive after being herded into a barn by fellow Polish villagers. See Jedwabne – The Polish Village Where Up to 900 Jews Were Burnt Alive by Fellow Poles

There has been a resurgence of far-right sentiment in the country. A Polish government pollster found in a survey that more than one in three polled said they supported far-right activities. That same month, far-right nationalists marched in Warsaw, brandishing slogans and signs that said “Clean Blood,” “White Europe, and “Europe Will Be White.” Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski said the march was fueled by “patriotic behavior of Poles” and displays of xenophobia were “incidents” that were “of course, reprehensible.” See Poland Just Passed a Holocaust Bill That Is Causing Outrage. Here's What You Need to Know

Not only has Netanyahu done a deal with the far-Right Polish government that removes prison sentences for mentioning Polish complicity in the Holocaust but he has also invited to Israel the anti-Semitic far-Right Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban from July 18^th-20^th.

This is the same Orban who waged an anti-Semitic campaign against George Soros and who has praised Hungary’s pro-Nazi ruler, Admiral Horthy as an ‘exceptional statesman’.  Given that Horthy presided over the unprecedented rapid deportation of nearly ½ million Jews to Auschwitz between May 15^th and July 7^th 1944 he probably was exceptional.

To those who maintain that opposing Israel is somehow ‘anti-Semitic’ the proof that this is an egregious lie is the support that the Israeli government gives to far-Right and anti-Semitic governments in Europe.  Indeed today, the best friends of Israel are to be found amongst fascists, neo-Nazis and assorted anti-Semites.  This should be our response to allegations that criticism of Israel is ‘anti-Semitic’/

This is from Jews Against Genocide:

 Stop the Lies

Israeli citizens file a freedom of information request regarding the shameful joint Israeli-Polish statement on the Holocaust and its commemoration!

הוגשה בקשה לפי חוק חופש המידע בעניין שיתוף חוקרי/ות שואה בהכנת ההצהרה המשותפת המבישה של ישראל ופולין! עברית להלן

The racist right wing Israeli government has accepted the racist right wing Polish government's position on the Holocaust, apparently for cynical purposes and without consulting Holocaust researchers.

Professor Yehuda Bauer, one of the world's leading Holocaust researchers, called Netanyahu's move "treason", adding that Israel has granted its "stamp of approval to the [right wing] Polish narrative", although it's a "totally fictitious story". Professor Bauer believes that even after the annulment of the Polish penal code clause which makes it illegal to ascribe to the Polish people responsibility for the Holocaust, the current Polish government will use the Polish civil code to prosecute Polish researchers who criticize the government's lie. Bauer summarized: "The Poles have deceived us, they have played a trick on us and we went along, because for the State of Israel the political-economic-military relations with Poland are more important than such a small thing, the Holocaust".

The statement was apparently drafted in by a closed forum at a meeting at Mossad headquarters, without any serious consultation of the relevant professionals.

Therefore. the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is requested to disclose all relevant information in the case.

Furthermore, Israeli journalist Gili Cohen reports that Netanyahu is pressuring Poland (and Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic) to move its embassy to Jerusalem, and the shameful Israeli-Polish declaration may be Netanyahu's gift in exchange.

Representing the petitioners: Attorney Eitay Mack.

The memory of the Nazi-inflicted Holocaust, and all its victims - Jews, Romani, political dissidents, disabled people, LGBTQ people and others - is NOT FOR SALE!!!

מאת עו"ד איתי מק:

"הוגשה בקשה לפי חוק חופש המידע בעניין שיתוף חוקרי/ות שואה בהכנת ההצהרה המשותפת של ישראל ופולין:

יחד עם פעילות ופעילי זכויות האדם רעיה רותם, רם כהן, תמר להן, ורדה חלד, רוני סגולי, עירית הלביא, ד"ר ניב גורדון, קלאודיו קוגון, גלעד ליברמן, גיא בוטביה, שאול צ'ריקובר, עופר ניימן וד"ר חנה ספרן, הוגשה בקשה לפי חוק חופש המידע בעניין שיתוף חוקרי/ות שואה בהכנת ההצהרה המשותפת של ישראל ופולין.

ביום 27.6.2018 הקריא ראש הממשלה ושר החוץ, בנימין נתניהו, הצהרה משותפת עם ממשלת פולין. בראיון לרון נשיאל ב"כאן ב", פרופ' יהודה באואר, חתן פרס ישראל ומבכירי חוקרי השואה, הגדיר את ההצהרה "בגידה". לדבריו, ישראל קיבלה את הנרטיב הפולני ו"נתנה לו גושפנקה", אף כי הוא "סיפור שקרי לגמרי". באואר העריך כי גם אחרי ביטול הסעיף הפלילי בחוק הפולני האוסר לייחס לעם הפולני אחריות לפשעי השואה, פולין תשתמש בחוק האזרחי כדי לרדוף חוקרים פולנים. באואר סיכם "הפולנים הונו אותנו, סובבו אותנו על האצבע ואנחנו הסכמנו לזה, כי למדינת ישראל יותר חשובים היחסים הכלכליים-ביטחוניים-פוליטיים עם פולין מאשר עסק קטן כזה, כמו השואה".

נוסח ההצהרה גובש במחשכים בהובלת פרופ' יעקב נגל וד"ר יוסף צ'חנובר, כולל לפי הפרסומים בפגישה שהתקיימה בבסיס של המוסד..זאת אף שראוי להחליט על הצהרות היסטוריות מסוג זה רק לאחר דיון מעמיק עם מומחים לנושא והציבור. על פני הדברים, נראה כי ההצהרה גובשה במחטף ומבלי לקיים התייעצות רצינית עם אנשי המקצוע הרלוונטיים.

לכן, משרד החוץ התבקש למסור לנו את פרטי חוקרי/ות השואה והמוסדות האקדמיים ולחקר השואה שהכינו ואישרו את נוסח ההצהרה שפורסם.

כזכור, כדי להעביר את שגרירות פרגוואי לירושלים ממשלת נתניהו הייתה מוכנה לטייח את עברה הנאצי של המדינה. עתה העיתונאית גילי כהן, מתאגיד השידור הציבורי, חושפת כי הטירוף של השבועות האחרונים גם קשור לעניין:
https://twitter.com/kann_news/status/1013481691359465472

Top Holocaust Historian: Netanyahu’s Deal on Poland’s Holocaust Law ‘A Betrayal' That 'Hurts the Jewish People'

Israel agreed to the Polish narrative ‘because to the State of Israel, economic, security and political ties are more important than a little matter like the Holocaust,' Yehuda Bauer says

Ofer Aderet

Jun 30, 2018 9:53 PM

Yehuda Bauer, an Israel Prize-winning Holocaust historian at Yad Vashem, said the Israeli-Polish statement that followed Poland’s revisiting of its controversial “Holocaust law” was a “betrayal” that “hurt the Jewish people and the memory of the Holocaust.”

In a radio interview, the 92-year-old said the backtracking on the law and the signing of a joint statement with Poland was “a small achievement and a very big mistake, bordering on betrayal.”

Bauer said Israel had accepted the Polish narrative and “legitimized it,” even though it was a “completely mendacious story.”

Later in the interview, Bauer repeated his stance, saying “the joint statement is betrayal, betrayal, betrayal.”

On Wednesday, following secret negotiations between Israel and Poland, Warsaw said it would abolish the law’s clauses threatening imprisonment for anyone who claimed that the Polish nation was involved in Nazi crimes.

In the joint declaration, read live on television Wednesday by both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki, only one sentence refers to the part played by Poles in the murder of Jews: “We acknowledge and condemn every single case of cruelty against Jews perpetrated by Poles during World War II.”

File photo: Yehuda Bauer in 2006. Kobi Gideon / GPO

Later the declaration states that “some people” assisted the Nazis, doing so “regardless of their origin.” It also claims that “numerous Poles” risked their lives to save Jews.

Bauer came out harshly against these words. “This is a complete lie,” he said. “What is ‘regardless of their origin’? Were they born on the moon? It’s Poles, and not one or two.”

Regarding Poles who saved Jews, and the fact that the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial has recognized around 6,700 Righteous Among the Nations, Bauer said this number was far from “numerous.”

“Even if we assume that the real figure is 200,000, out of 21 million Poles, that’s only 1 percent,” he said. “What about the other 99 percent?” According to Bauer, the joint declaration “devalues the true Righteous Among the Nations and minimizes the value of their heroism.”

Bauer said the Poles “cheated us, twisted us around their finger and we agreed to it because to the State of Israel, economic, security and political ties are more important than a little matter like the Holocaust.”

Bauer said that by signing the declaration, Israel had betrayed Polish historians who had been persecuted by the Polish government because they “tell the truth.” He was referring to scholars such as Prof. Jan Tomasz Gross and Jan Grabowsky, who research the role of Poles’ involvement in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

Bauer said Poland would still use civil law to persecute Polish scholars who “tell the truth.”

“They will demand money from them, they will impoverish them, they will keep funding from them. And we are legitimizing [this] . They will say: ‘What do you want, the Israelis agreed to this, why are you making noise?’” 

George Habash - Founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - a Hebrew Biography

Gideon Levy Reviews Eli Galia's Biography of Habash which makes it clear that the Leftist Leader was right

George Habash speaking in Beirut, 1979. AP

 

Although Zionist apologists and Israeli propaganda (hasbara) make hypocritical attacks on Hamas, Hezbollah and ‘Islamic extremism’ Zionism has always considered its main enemy to be secular and in particular left-wing Palestinian nationalism. 

This is as true today as it was in the period of the British Mandate when the Zionists always preferred to deal with Haj Amin al Husseini, who later collaborated with Hitler, to his secular opponents in the Istiqlal (Independence) Party.  Indeed it was the Zionist and first British High Commissioner Sir, later Viscount,  Herbert Samuel who appointed Husseini to the post of Mufti despite him having come fourth out of four in the elections to the post.

Today Israel demonises Hamas as a Nazi genocidal, Jew hating group rather than the conservative Islamic group that it actually is. Israel glosses over the fact that it virtually created Hamas, the Gazan offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers singlehandedly.  I have covered this in a number of posts in How Israel Created Hamas and HAMAS - When Israel & Netanyahu Sang from a Different Songsheet. If you Google ‘Israel created Hamas’ you will find a wealth of evidence that in the late 1980’s, whilst Netanyahu was Prime Minister, Israel helped nurture Hamas as a means of undermining secular Palestinian nationalism.  See in particular the admission of the Military Governor of Gaza at the time, Itzhak Segev, that he helped fund Islamic groups to counter the PLO.  A particularly good article is How Israel Helped Spawn Hamas which was published by the Wall Street Journal (now behind its pay wall).

What happened with Hamas of course is nothing new.  The USA virtually created the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in order to overthrown the then Soviet backed government.  Reactionary. Conservative Islamic parties or groups have always been seen by Israel and imperialism as a bulwark against socialist or left-wing parties.  The same was true in Iran where Ayatollah Khomeini had close links to the Americans who were most fearful of a socialist revolution.

Below is an excellent review in Ha’aretz by Gideon Levy of a new autobiography of the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, George Habash.  The PFLP were a left-wing, Marxist group.  They still have support amongst the Palestinians, in Gaza in particular.  If only, as he says, Habash had triumphed over Arafat and the Oslo Accords had not been agreed with Israel then the situation could have been very different today for the Palestinians.

Israelis considered George Habash a cruel airline hijacker, but Eli Galia's new Hebrew-language book shows that the PFLP chief's views would have been better for the Palestinians than Arafat's compromises

Gideon Levy

  Apr 13, 2018 6:16 PM

George Habash was Israel’s absolute enemy for decades, the embodiment of evil, the devil incarnate. Even the title “Dr.” before his name — he was a pediatrician — was considered blasphemous.

Habash was plane hijackings, Habash was terror and terror alone. In a country that doesn't recognize the existence of Palestinian political parties (have you ever heard of a Palestinian political party? — there are only terror groups) knowledge about the man who headed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was close to zero.

What’s there to know about him? A terrorist. Subhuman. Should be killed. Enemy. The fact that he was an ideologue and a revolutionary, that his life was shaped by the expulsion from Lod, changed nothing. He remains the plane hijacker from Damascus, the man from the Rejectionist Front who was no different from all the rest of the “terrorists” from Yasser Arafat to Wadie Haddad to Nayef Hawatmeh.

Now along comes Eli Galia's Hebrew-language book “George Habash: A Political Biography." It outlines the reality, far from the noise of propaganda, ignorance and brainwashing, for the Israeli reader who agrees to read a biography of the enemy.

Presumably only few will read it, but this work by Galia, a Middle East affairs expert, is very deserving of praise. It's a political biography, as noted in its subtitle, so it almost entirely lacks the personal, spiritual and psychological dimension; there's not even any gossip. So reading it requires a lot of stamina and specialized tastes. Still, it's fascinating.

Galia has written a nonjudgmental and certainly non-propagandistic biography. Taking into consideration the Israeli mind today, this isn't to be taken for granted.

Galia presents a wealth of information, with nearly a thousand footnotes, about the political path of Habash, a man who was considered dogmatic even though he underwent a number of ideological reversals in his life. If that's dogmatism, what's pragmatism? The dogmatic Habash went through more ideological changes than any Israeli who sticks to the Zionist narrative and doesn’t budge an inch — and who of course isn't considered dogmatic.

The exodus from Lod following an operation by the Palmach, 1948.Palmach Archive / Yitzhak Sadeh Estate

In the book, Habash is revealed as a person of many contradictions: a member of the Christian minority who was active in the midst of a large Muslim majority, a bourgeois who became a Marxist, a tough and inflexible leader who was once seen weeping in his room as he wrote an article about Israel's crimes against his people. He had to wander and flee for his life from place to place, sometimes more for fear of Arab regimes than of Israel.

He was imprisoned in Syria and fled Jordan, he devoted his life to a revolution that never happened. It's impossible not to admire a person who devoted his life to his ideas, just as you have to admire the scholar who has devoted so much research for so few readers who will take an interest in the dead Habash, in an Israel that has lost any interest in the occupation and the Palestinian struggle.

The book gives rise to the bleak conclusion that Habash was right. For most of his life he was a bitter enemy of compromises, and Arafat, the man of compromise, won the fascinating historical struggle between the two. They had a love-hate relationship, alternately admiring and scorning each other, and never completely breaking off their connection until Arafat won his Pyrrhic victory.

What good have all of Arafat’s compromises done for the Palestinian people? What came out of the recognition of Israel, of the settling for a Palestinian state on 22 percent of the territory, of the negotiations with Zionism and the United States? Nothing but the entrenchment of the Israeli occupation and the strengthening and massive development of the settlement project.

In retrospect, it makes sense to think that if that's how things were, maybe it would have been better to follow the uncompromising path taken by Habash, who for most of his life didn't agree to any negotiations with Israel, who believed that with Israel it was only possible to negotiate by force, who thought Israel would only change its positions if it paid a price, who dreamed of a single, democratic and secular state of equal rights and refused to discuss anything but that.

Unfortunately, Habash was right. It's hard to know what would have happened had the Palestinians followed his path, but it's impossible not to admit that the alternative has been a resounding failure.

Members of the Palestinian National Council in Algiers, 1987, including Yasser Arafat, left, and George Habash, second from right.  Mike Nelson-Nabil Ismail / AFP

The Palestinian Che Guevara

Habash, who was born in 1926, wrote about his childhood: “Our enemies are not the Jews but rather the British .... The Jews’ relations with the Palestinians were natural and sometimes even good” (p. 16). He went to study medicine at the American University in Beirut; his worried mother and father wrote him that he should stay there; a war was on.

But Habash returned to volunteer at a clinic in Lod; he returned and he saw. The sight of the Israeli soldiers who invaded the clinic in 1948 ignited in him the flame of violent resistance: “I was gripped by an urge to shoot them with a pistol and kill them, and in the situation of having no weapons I used mute words. I watched them from the sidelines and said to myself: This is our land, you dogs, this is our land and not your land. We will stay here to kill you. You will not win this battle” (p.22).

On July 14 he was expelled from his home with the rest of his family. He never returned to the city he loved. He never forgot the scenes of Lod in 1948, nor did he forget the idea of violent resistance. Can the Israeli reader understand how he felt?

Now based in Beirut, he took part in terror operations against Jewish and Western targets in Beirut, Amman and Damascus: “I personally lobbed grenades and I participated in assassination attempts. I had endless enthusiasm when I was doing that. At the time, I considered my life worthless relative to what was happening in Palestine.”

“The Palestinian Che Guevara” — both of them were doctors — made up his mind to wreak vengeance for the Nakba upon the West and the leaders of the Arab regimes that had abandoned his people, even before taking vengeance on the Jews. He even planned to assassinate King Abdullah of Jordan. He founded a new student organization in Beirut called the Commune, completed his specialization in pediatrics and wrote: “I took the diploma and said: Congratulations, Mother, your son is a doctor, so now let me do what I really want to do. And indeed, that's what happened” (p. 41).

Habash was once asked whether he was the Che Guevara of the Middle East and he replied that he would prefer to be the Mao Zedong of the Arab masses. He was the first to raise the banner of return and in the meantime he opened clinics for Palestinian refugees in Amman. For him, the road back to Lod passed through Amman, Beirut and Damascus. The idea of Pan-Arabism stayed with him for many years, until he despaired of that as well.

He also had to leave medicine: “I am a pediatrician, I have enjoyed this greatly. I believed that I had the best job in the world but I had to make the decision I have taken and I don't regret it .... A person cannot split his emotions in that way: to heal on the one hand and kill on the other. This is the time when he must say to himself: one or the other.”

Militants from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Jordan, 1969. Thomas R. Koeniges / Look Magazine Photograph Collection / Library of Congress

The only remaining weapon

This book isn't arrogant and it isn't Orientalist; it is respectful of the Palestinian national ideology and those who articulated and lived it, even if the author doesn't necessarily agree with that ideology or identify with it. This is something quite rare in the Israeli landscape when it comes to Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. Nor does the author venerate what's not worthy of veneration, and he doesn't have any erroneous romantic or other illusions. Galia presents a bitter, tough, uncompromising, very much failed and sometimes exceedingly cruel struggle for freedom, self-respect and liberation.

And this is what is said in the founding document of the PFLP, which Habash established in December 1967 after having despaired of Palestinian unity: “The only weapon left to the masses in order to restore history and progress and truly defeat enemies and potential enemies in the long run is revolutionary violence .... The only language that the enemy understands is the language of revolutionary violence” (p.125).

But this path too met with failure. “The essential aim of hijacking airplanes,” wrote Habash, “was to bring the Palestinian question out of anonymity and expose it to Western public opinion, because at that time it was unknown in Europe and in the United States. We wanted to undertake actions that would make an impression on the senses of the entire world .... There was international ignorance regarding our suffering, in part due to the Zionist movement’s monopoly on the mass media in the West” (p. 151).

The PFLP plane hijackings in the early 1970s indeed achieved international recognition of the existence of the Palestinian problem, but so far this recognition hasn't led anywhere. The only practical outcome has been the security screenings at airports everywhere around the world — and thank you, George Habash. I read Galia's book on a number of flights, even though this isn't an airplane book, and I kept thinking that were it not for Habash my wanderings at airports would have been a lot shorter. In my heart I forgave him for that, for what other path was open to him and his defeated, humiliated and bleeding people?

Not much is left of his ideas. What has come of the scientific idealism and the politicization of the masses, the class struggle and the anti-imperialism, the Maoism and of course the transformation of the struggle against Israel into an armed struggle, which according to the plans was supposed to develop from guerrilla warfare into a national war of liberation? Fifty years after the founding of the PFLP and 10 years after the death of its founder, what remains?

Habash's successor, Abu Ali Mustafa, was assassinated by Israel in 2001; his successor’s successor, Ahmad Saadat, has been in an Israeli prison since 2006 and very little remains of the PFLP.

During all my decades covering the Israeli occupation, the most impressive figures I met belonged to the PFLP, but now not much remains except fragments of dreams. The PFLP is a negligible minority in intra-Palestinian politics, a movement that once thought to demand equal power with Fatah and its leader, Arafat. And the occupation? It's strong and thriving and its end looks further off than ever. If that isn’t failure, what is?

A mourning procession for George Habash, Nablus, January 2008. Nasser Ishtayeh / AP

To where is Israel galloping?

Yet Habash always knew how to draw lessons from failure after failure. How resonant today is his conclusion following the Naksa, the defeat in 1967 that broke his spirit, to the effect that “the enemy of the Palestinians is colonialism, capitalism and the global monopolies .... This is the enemy that gave rise to the Zionist movement, made a covenant with it, nurtured it, protected it and accompanied it until it brought about the establishment of the aggressive and fascistic State of Israel” (p. 179).

From the Palestinian perspective, not much has changed. It used to be that this was read in Israel as hostile and shallow propaganda. Today it could be read otherwise.

After the failure of 1967, Habash redefined the goal: the establishment of a democratic state in Palestine in which Arabs and Jews would live as citizens with equal rights. Today this idea, too, sounds a bit less strange and threatening than it did when Habash articulated it.

On the 40th anniversary of Israel's founding, Habash wrote that Israel was galloping toward the Greater Land of Israel and that the differences between the right and left in the country were becoming meaningless. How right he was about that, too. At the same time, he acknowledged Israel’s success and the failure of the Palestinian national movement. And he was right about that, too.

And one last correct prophecy, though a bitter one, that he made in 1981: “The combination of a loss of lives and economic damage has considerable influence on Israeli society, and when that happens there will be a political, social and ideological schism on the Israeli street and in the Zionist establishment between the moderate side that demands withdrawal from the occupied territories and the extremist side that continues to cling to Talmudic ideas and dreams. Given the hostility between these two sides, the Zionist entity will experience a real internal split” (p. 329).

This has yet to happen.

Imad Saba, a dear friend who was active in the PFLP and is in exile in Europe, urged me for years to try to meet with Habash and interview him for Haaretz. As far as is known, Habash never met with Israelis, except during the days of the Nakba.

Many years ago in Amman I interviewed Hawatmeh, Habash’s partner at the start and the leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which split off from the PFLP in 1969. At the time of the interview, Habash was also living in Amman and was old and sick. I kept postponing my approach — until he died. When reading the book, I felt very sorry that I had not met this man.

A member of the International Solidarity Movement with the Palestinians visits Yad Vashem – the Zionist Propaganda Museum

A member of the International Solidarity Movement visits Yad Vashem – the Zionist Propaganda Museum

Yad Vashem's attempt to use the agony of the holocaust to justify Palestinian agony

An interesting take having visited Yad Vashem, the Zionist holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem by an ISM member. Just a couple of comments.

 i. no mention of the fact that Yad Vashem is situated about ½ mile from the massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948 when over a hundred Palestinian civilians, women and children included, were butchered by the Irgun and Stern gangs.

ii. No mention of how the far-right today also pays homage at Yad Vashem whilst still denying the holocaust

Yad Vashem demonstrates why it is first and foremost a propaganda institute - the Mufti was a minor war criminal and his Muslim SS battalions were the only example among the SS to rebel against the Nazis

iii. No mention of the special wall devoted to the British and Zionist appointed Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al amin Husseini, who later collaborated with Hitler. He was a minor war criminal, but has a special section devoted to him nonetheless. The obvious linkage Yad Vashem’s Zionist historians are trying to create is between today’s Palestinians and neo-Nazi supporters.

Most of the rest of the essay I thoroughly agree with.

Tony Greenstein

Yad Vashem, Power, and the Politics of History

Michal Kaminski MEP of Poland's Law & Justice Party - opposed any  apology by Poland for Jedwabne, when anti-Semitic Poles burnt alive some 600 Polish Jews

Feb 19 2013 / 10:43 pm

At Yad Vashem. (Photo: David Langstaff/supplied)

By David Langstaff

"I was like other men,
I fed on bread, and on dreams, and on
despair. I too
loved, I cried, I hated, I suffered…
But when you dry this bouquet of nettles,
that once was me, in a future time
when my story seems dated to you
remember that I was innocent
that like you, the bodied of your own day,
I too had a face
defined in anger, in pity, in joy
I had a man’s face." – Benjamin Fondane, who perished in the Nazi gas chambers (displayed inside Yad Vashem) (1)

"In the hymns that we sing, there’s a
flute
In the flute that shelters us
fire
In the fire that we feed
a green phoenix
In its elegy I couldn’t tell
my ashes from your dus." –

Mahmoud Darwish, who was exiled from his homeland by Zionist settler-colonialism (2)

As my friend and I made our way to Yad Vashem, the world-renowned Holocaust memorial museum in West Jerusalem, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of trepidation. I was nearing the end of a two-month stint working with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in the West Bank, and the experience had left me understandably sensitive to the eminently political character of all history-making. After nearly two months of being exposed time and again to the ways in which Zionism wields a particular version of history like a bludgeon against Palestinians, the questions running through my mind were somewhat less than hopeful: What kind of politic should I expect to undergird this museum’s framing of one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies? Would this framing be a worthy tribute to those millions whose lives were extinguished, or would it disgrace their memory by cynically exploiting it for political ends? Would its representation of history help us to deepen our understanding of the forces which generated the Nazi genocide (forces which can hardly be regarded as safely relegated to some fossilized past, but rather which are alive and well in the relations which constitute our present world) or would it instead turn history against us, constructing a portrait of the past which blinds us to the cruelties and perils of the present?

The answers to these questions, as it turned out, were ambiguous, but perhaps not as ambiguous as I might have wished. In fairness, the museum certainly had redeeming qualities. Yad Vashem did manage to capture the humanity –by which I mean the sensuousness and affective texture of human experience which often reveals itself only in the most mundane and idiosyncratic of stories – of those millions of Jews who were slaughtered with the kind of dispassionate calculation that only modernity could have produced, (3) while still giving one some sense of the larger historical forces that were at work. I will grant it that. But, sadly, in many other respects the museum lived up to my worst expectations.


First, while Yad Vashem’s exhibits were not entirely devoid of historicity, the museum largely conformed to an understanding of antisemitism and the Nazi genocide which sees them not merely as unique but as exceptional historical phenomena. From this perspective, antisemitism is regarded as a transhistorical and essentially inexplicable product of some inherent Gentile hatred; it may have had distinct iterations, but has always been and will remain the irrational axis upon which the relations between Jews and non-Jews turn. Similarly, the Nazi genocide is treated as the face of evil itself, an event so (quantitatively) colossal and so (qualitatively) monstrous that no other episode in history can reasonably be compared to it. Second, the museum gave one the impression that the victims of the Nazi genocide were almost exclusively Jewish, in spite of the fact that millions of others perished in the Nazi death machinery.


The third concern with Yad Vashem is, in some regards, the gravitational center around which the museum’s other problematic dimensions revolve: namely its teleological representation of the relationships between the long history of antisemitism, the Nazi genocide, and the formation of the Israeli nation-state, whereby the Nazi genocide appears the inevitable culmination of Gentile hatred towards an allegedly "stateless" Jewry, just as the creation of Israel appears the exclusive means of Jewish redemption. The museum goes so far as to literally walk visitors through this historical sequence step by step, each exhibition of a particular place and time winding in a snake-like movement towards the next, culminating in the creation of Israel and the putative restoration of Jewish dignity. The experience reaches its climax in an unquestionably powerful display: the photos of victims peer down from the center of a circular room, suspended above a dark conical abyss that feels like a pit of despair. Along the walls of the room one can see folder after folder full of the names of those who have been killed (names which are being collected still). Consolation is to be found only upon exiting the museum, when one steps outside to find a scenic viewpoint showcasing a picturesque Jerusalem in all its grandeur, a not-so-subtle symbol of Jewish salvation on Earth.


In these ways, Yad Vashem proved a quintessential example of what the Jewish social critic Norman Finkelstein has called "the Holocaust Industry," a characterization of the agents and institutions which have produced a hegemonic ideological representation of the Nazi genocide in the service of their narrow interests. For Finkelstein, the development of this industry is essentially a post-1967 phenomenon, one that is closely tied to the US geopolitical alliance with Israel which developed in force after Israel quickly emerged victorious in the 1967 war (and in which Israel plays the role of a crucial, yet subordinate, US partner). The coincident interests were essentially three fold. First, US state and capitalist agencies recognized Israel as a vital outpost for the projection and reproduction of US political-economic power in Southwest Asia and North Africa (particularly as a bulwark against secular Arab nationalism), and came to rely upon the representation of the Nazi genocide as a symbol of the ever-present dangers of antisemitism in an effort to reduce virtually unwavering support for the Israeli state to some kind of absolute moral obligation. Second, in the US, Jewish elites (every ethnic group has its elites, and we Jews are no exception to the rule) saw an opportunity to advance their aspirations of assimilation and upward mobility by embracing Israel and Zionism with renewed vigor, now rationalized by depicting Israel as the only means of escaping an unparalleled and eternal victimhood (even if few had plans to actually emigrate). Finally, Israel was able to repeatedly invoke the Nazi genocide as the justification for the violent constitution of its settler-colonial state, for its original and ongoing ethnic cleansing and subordination of the Palestinian people. (4)


The Holocaust Industry has produced a seductive historical narrative, but it is one which, in my view, both degrades the memory of those who perished in the Nazi Genocide and leaves us incapable of drawing meaningful ethical, analytical, and political lessons from this momentous tragedy. Truly doing justice to all those who lost their lives in the Nazi genocide would mean remembering all of the victims (not only Jews) – and in a manner which does not cynically instrumentalize their suffering – as well as constructing a historical analysis which serves to illuminate the pitfalls and opportunities for advancing the struggle for collective liberation in the present. In order to be ethically viable, then, a Holocaust memorial museum would have to, at a minimum, differ from Yad Vashem in the following respects:


(1) Rather than representing the Nazi genocide as entirely exceptional, as an historical aberration which defies comparison, such a musuem would search out the Nazi holocaust’s commonalities with and differences from other historical events and processes. Incensed at just such exceptionalism in the wake of the Nazi holocaust, and especially the ways in which it ignored comparable European crimes in the colonial world, the Martiniquean poet and social critic Aimé Césaire exclaimed:

"People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: ‘How strange! But never mind-it’s Nazism, it will. pass!’ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack."(5)

Hans Christian Strache of Austria's fascist Freedom Party - they might doubt the holocaust but they certainly support Israel

And, as Finkelstein points out, the US is hardly exempt from the kind of historical parallels upon which Césaire’s moral indictment of Europe is founded:

"In fact, Hitler modeled his conquest of the East on the American conquest of the West…During the first half of this century, a majority of American states enacted sterilization laws and tens of thousands of Americans were involuntarily sterilized. The Nazis explicitly invoked this US precedent when they enacted their own sterilization laws…The notorious 1935 Nuremburg Laws stripped Jews of the franchise and forbade miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews. Blacks in the American South suffered the same legal disabilities and were the object of much greater spontaneous and sanctioned popular violence than the Jews in prewar Germany."(6)

Furthermore, the Nazi legacy of racially delineated forced labor and systematic elimination ought to immediately recall the US history of slavery and the genocide of the Native American population. And while Israel’s sympathizers are quick to dismiss any comparison of the Israeli state with Nazi Germany as antisemitic ranting, it takes considerable intellectual acrobatics to avoid drawing any parallels whatsoever: as Nazi Germany directly and indirectly forced Jews to emigrate from or flee their countries, so too has the Israeli state been founded on the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from their homeland; as Nazi Germany herded Jews into ghettos, so too has the Israeli state constructed militarized spatial enclaves in which Palestinians are confined (relatively or absolutely), exploited, and controlled; and just as Nazi Germany constructed a racist state which formally subordinated Jews, so too has Israel relegated its Palestinian citizens to third-class status and deemed the indigenous population of Palestine a "demographic threat,"going so far as to pass legislation banning thousands of Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens from living in Israel proper, a political move which in some ways resembles the Nazi introduction of miscegenation laws.(7) It is not by any means my intention to equate the Nazi and Israeli states, which would merely be an exercise in intellectual dishonesty, but rather to say that they have some disturbing resemblances– such as the militarized geographical segregation of populations, the massive dispossession of communities from their homes, and the racist subordination of certain groups not only by way of the military and police but through the politico-juridical apparatus – which are in turn specific outgrowths of processes inherent in the modern world. We ought to take stock of such comparisons and ensure that our indignation over the Nazi genocide does not pass over present-day crimes just as worthy of condemnation. Such a comparative approach would also work to de-exceptionalize the history of antisemitism, and thereby ground the particular struggle against anti-Jewish racism in the more general struggle against racism in all its forms.

(2) Rather than emphasizing the victimization of Jews during the Nazi holocaust to the exclusion of all other communities, such a museum would identify the Nazi violence towards myriad groups, and refrain from situating each group’s suffering in some arbitrary hierarchy of worthiness. There were countless non-Jewish victims of Nazism, from communists to queers. As Finkelstein notes, both Romanis ("Gypsies") and those who were differently-abled were targeted for systematic elimination. Romani communities suffered causalities which were proportionately comparable to those suffered by European Jews, and there is evidence that the Nazi machinery of genocide was designed first with the differently-abled, rather than the Jews, in mind.(8) In addition to honoring the memory of these communities which similarly suffered a profound tragedy, this more holistic approach serves, like the de-exceptionalization of antisemitism, to open up greater possibilities for using the history of the Nazi holocaust to advance the cause of collective liberation.

(3) Finally, rather than situating the Nazi holocaust within a teleology which leads from the victimization of the European Jewish diaspora under antisemitism to national Jewish redemption within the Land of Israel, such a museum would be attuned to the role of historical contingency in both the development of Nazism and Israeli settler-colonialism. Such a museum would also recognize that Zionism was but one of many Jewish responses to antisemitism. The Nazi genocide was no more a historical inevitability than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and if we treat it as such, we are left unable to determine its actual roots and dynamics. Meanwhile, Zionism has by no means had the fealty of Jews since its inception. Zionism was and remains contested. In fact, when Zionism first emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, few Jews identified with its obsession with national consciousness building and its aspirations for building a territorial nation-state as a "Jewish homeland." Alternative Jewish responses to antisemitism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included that of the Bund, a Jewish socialist organization which recognized the particularity of the Jewish struggle against racism and the need for some degree of Jewish autonomy and self-determination, but which simultaneously grounded this struggle in more universal aspirations for collective liberation. Even today, though Zionism is admittedly hegemonic within most Jewish communities, there are also those, such as myself, who regard Zionism as a deplorable and irredeemable enterprise, which shares more in common with Nazism (from its antisemitic precepts to its wider embrace of racism, militarism, authoritarianism, and colonialist expansionism) than it does with any genuine liberation struggle. By bringing contingency and contestation back into the analysis of the relations between antisemitism, Nazism, and the founding of Israel, it becomes possible to fundamentally question the Israeli project of state-building – to ask whether Israel has in fact provided an ethically viable answer to the so-called "Jewish question," or whether it has merely displaced this question, along with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

The moral weight of the Nazi genocide cannot be overstated, but let us work to ensure that our engagement with its memory advances the cause of collective liberation, rather than an illusory liberation for some gained only through the imposition of violence, indignities, and suffering upon others.

"The unspoken terror permeating our collective memory of the Holocaust (and more than contingently related to the overwhelming desire not to look the memory in its face) is the gnawing suspicion that the Holocaust could be more than an aberration, more than a deviation from an otherwise straight path of progress, more than a cancerous growth on the otherwise healthy body of the civilized society; that, in short, the Holocaust was not an antithesis of modern civilization and everything (or so we like to think) it stands for. We suspect (even if we refuse to admit it); that the Holocaust could merely have uncovered another face of the same modern society whose other, more familiar, face we so admire. And that the two faces are perfectly comfortably attached to the same body. What we perhaps fear most, is that each of the two faces can no more exist without the other than can the two sides of a coin." – Zygmunt Bauman(9)

"Although it is so often taught that Israel became a historical and ethical necessity for the Jews during and after the Nazi genocide, [Hannah] Arendt and others thought that the lesson we must learn from that genocide is that nation-states should never be able to found themselves through the dispossession of whole populations who fail to fit the purified idea of the nation. And for refugees who never again wished to see the dispossession of populations in the name of national or religious purity, Zionism and its forms of state violence were not the legitimate answer to the pressing needs of Jewish refugees. For those who extrapolated principles of justice from the historical experience of internment and dispossession, the political aim is to extend equality regardless of cultural background or formation, across languages and religions, to those none of us ever chose (or did not recognize that we chose) and with whom we have an enduring obligation to find a way to live. For whoever"we" are, we are also those who were never chosen, who emerge on this earth without everyone’s consent, and who belong, from the start, to a wider population and a sustainable earth. And this condition, paradoxically, yields the radical potential for new modes of sociality and politics beyond the avid and wretched bonds of a pernicious colonialism that calls itself democracy. We are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together. On this basis one might begin to think the social bond anew." – Judith Butler (10)Politics of Power: Burying Truth through Resolutions

- David Langstaff is a Jewish-American radical organizer from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He recently graduated from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, where he studied political economy and global history. He is passionately committed to building a more just, equal, and democratic world, and has been a participant in movements for liberatory social transformation for a number of years, most recently in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) and Occupy movements. In late 2012 he spent two months working with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in the West Bank. This article was contributed to the PalestineChronicle.com. Visit:

Notes:

(1) Benjamin Fondane, "Preface in Prose," Exodus [1942-43].
(2) Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
(3) On the relationship between modern beaucratic organization and the Nazi genocide, See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
(4) Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2003).
(5) Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1972), 3.
(6) Finkelstein (2003), 145.
(7) Israel has also recently admitted to injecting migrants of Ethiopian origin with long-acting birth control, according to many Ethiopian women who received this treatment, against their will. See, e.g., Talila Nesher, "Israel admits Ethiopian women were given birth control shots," Haaretz (27 January 2013).
(8) Finkelstein (2003), 75, 76.
(9) Bauman (1991), 7.
(10) Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 24-25.
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