Israel’s Genocide in Gaza has Nothing to Do with the Holocaust & Everything To Do with the Shock That Comes When The Oppressed Rise Up

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, Avinoam Patt and Liat Steir-Livny lazily claim that

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 20^th 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]. 

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

Register in advance for this webinar here

http://tinyurl.com/mr49ufvh

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