The Holocaust should be a lesson not a template

Written By: - Date published: 10:52 pm, November 11th, 2023 - 19 comments
Categories: israel, Palestine, Peace, war, Zionism - Tags:

Cross posted from Pearls and Irritations for Armistice Day.

“Jewish people exterminating men, women and children in a concentration camp is _______.”

How do you finish a sentence like that? The words should fall like acid into your ear drums. It should be an impossible sentence. And yet, not so. We are witnessing it today in Gaza – the world’s largest open-air prison, home and hell to 2.3 million brutally repressed human beings – carried out by the Jewish State of Israel. Genocide.

If the word seems excessive, then listen to leading Israeli politicians in their own words. Israeli government minister Amichai Eliyahu endorses using a nuclear bomb against Gaza – and told the Times of Israel that the whole Gaza Strip should be conquered and resettled.

A senior member of Likud and recent minister Galit Distal Atbaryan said Israel must invest all its energy “in one thing: erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the coded word Amalek in a recent speech. He said: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”

Netanyahu was sending a message of genocidal intent from the Prophet Samuel:

“I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called the people of Gaza (over 1 million of whom are children) “human animals”. It was he who ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza, cutting off water, food, fuel and electricity.

Moshe Feiglin, a former deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset, calls for a “non-nuclear” Hiroshima. The President of Israel says anyone left in the north of Gaza is either a terrorist or a terrorist sympathiser. Israel has so far slaughtered over 4000 terrorist babies and children.

Unlike the Six Million, these victims are in our midst, are right here, right now. Hundreds of jurists and genocide scholars worldwide have signed letters declaring Gaza a genocidal siege. Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal calls it a textbook case of genocide.

Many thousands of Jewish people all over the world are putting their bodies on the line, and are raising their voices to say Not In Our Name. Four hundred Jewish Americans were arrested in the US Capitol, hundreds more in Grand Central Station New York, hundreds in Wall Street, hundreds of Jewish Voices for Peace protesters in Canada. Heroic Israeli Jews are doing the same at great personal risk within the borders of the Jewish State.

It now appears clear that the Highest Stage of Zionism is Genocide for the Palestinians. The Oslo Accords, signed exactly 30 years ago, was a hollow promise of a two-state solution. PLO/Fatah renounced war with Israel in 1993 and what have they got in return? Blockades, dispossession and repression. Settlers are stealing more land and shooting Palestinians at will in the West Bank, hospitals are being bombed in Gaza, refugee camps flattened under heavy bombardment.

Hamas today is the bitter fruit of US-Israeli betrayal of the Palestinians.

When he spoke at the UN in September this year, Netanayahu showed a map of a “New Middle East”. Absent from the map was Palestine – Gaza, the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights were all incorporated into Greater Israel.

Mekomit, an Israeli news site, released a leaked Israeli Ministry of Intelligence “concept paper” a couple of weeks ago. Key points: drive the Gazans to the southern end of the Strip. Clear an opening at Rafah. Establish tent cities in the Egyptian Sinai. In other words: kill or ethnically cleanse 2.3 million Palestinians, ending their long life in Gaza. Netanyahu’s office says it only represents “initial thoughts”.

Where will it end? What depths of depravity will the Western World, including influential parts of the Jewish community, tolerate?

Silence is complicity.

Worse, the Western World is sending bombs, bullets, shells and missiles to enable the dark night of the Palestinian people to get darker. We are witnessing the unmasking of America, the scraping out of the last flesh of decency from the dark heart of Europe and the settler colonies like New Zealand, Canada, Australia. We’re turning a blind eye to what Al Jazeera is showing us daily. We are turning a deaf ear to the screams of dying children.

I was taught a long time ago that if we deny evil, we deceive ourselves; and there ends up being no truth, no decency in us. We become empty nobodies. We become our own punishment. Look at what Israel itself has become.

If Gaza becomes a charnel house for the Palestinians, it won’t just desecrate all memorials to the Six Million, it will be a collective and eternal stain on our entire generation.

On the front page of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is displayed the oft-quoted words of Pastor Martin Niemoller urging us to not ignore the persecution of others because, as he himself found out when the Gestapo sent him to Sachsenhausen, then Dachau concentration camps, your turn may soon follow. I would update his poem with just one stanza:

Then They Came for the Palestinians

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Palestinian.

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service.  His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War.

19 comments on “The Holocaust should be a lesson not a template ”

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  1. UncookedSelachimorpha 1
    12 November 2023 at 3:05 am

    Well, that is one side of the story. And very much only one side.

    The fighting in Gaza is terrible – but it isn't the holocaust. Both sides are fighting and are committed to continue to fight.

  2. joe90 2
    12 November 2023 at 7:25 am

    Netanyahu’s office says it only represents “initial thoughts”.

    More initial thoughts..

    5Pillars

    @5Pillarsuk

    While the world debates the legality of what Israel is doing in Gaza, Israeli leaders themselves have been crystal clear about their intent. But is anyone listening?

    https://twitter.com/5Pillarsuk/status/1722564050154840439

  3. barry 3
    12 November 2023 at 9:01 am

    Netanyahu is recruiting for Hamas, but he doesn't care because it keeps Israelis living in fear and voting for him, and those like him. Hamas doesn't care either, as they know they will win in the end and the sacrifices are necessary.

    Likud and Hamas need each other. The more suffering they inflict, the better for their movements.

    • bwaghorn 3.1
      12 November 2023 at 9:38 am

      Doodling round on you tube yesterday I found Netanyahu telling me that before the jeep returned to Isreal it was an uninhabited wasteland,? And that Palestine never actually existed, till they all came back to suckle on the teeth of Isreal!(my words)

      Any truth in it?

      • barry 3.1.1
        12 November 2023 at 10:28 am

        At the beginning of last century Palestine was occupied by the Ottoman empire, but the Turks never colonised as much as the British. The majority of the population were arabs. There were muslim arabs, and christian arabs and jewish arabs. Hebrew was only spoken in worship/study, (like latin or coptic in christian churches). Most of Palestine would have been like the west bank now (at least the areas undisturbed by Israeli settlers) with olive trees, and small farms. The different religious groups squabbled but mostly tolerated each other and lived in relative harmony.

        The jewish immigrants (mostly from Europe) during the British occupation after WW1mostly did not like what they found and set about changing it to look more like Europe. One group's "wasteland" is another's paradise.

        • bwaghorn 3.1.1.1
          12 November 2023 at 10:49 am

          One group's "wasteland" is another's paradise.

          Aaagh I see, if you not a progressive aspirational ring the death out of it kinda winner you don't exsist

        • Visubversa 3.1.1.2
          12 November 2023 at 11:10 am

          If you go back to the so called "Crusades" of the 13th Century etc, the "infidels" who the European Christianists were seeking to remove from the "Holy Lands" were not the Jews. They were Arabs.

          • SPC 3.1.1.2.1
            12 November 2023 at 11:17 am

            A bit misleading given what happened with the First Crusade 1096-1100CE

            https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/the-first-victims-of-the-first-crusade.html

            • Visubversa 3.1.1.2.1.1
              12 November 2023 at 12:59 pm

              Except – that was not in the "Holy Lands".

              • SPC …
                12 November 2023 at 1:02 pm

                They killed Jews at Jerusalem when they arrived. The non Christian civilians Jewish and Moslems.

                It began that way and continued.

            • adam 3.1.1.2.1.2
              13 November 2023 at 3:07 am

              Pay walled link.

              So did it say Orthodox Christians were the first to get it in the neck by the western crusaders? Because they dressed different, and the Greek was hard to understand.

              • SPC …
                13 November 2023 at 2:07 pm

                A later crusade sacked the Byzantine capital and looted the treasury and reduced the population from 500,000 to 50,000 (they had done something similar just before – sacking and looting a city and been excommunicated for it, so did that an established kingdoms for themselves in Anatolia instead of attacking Moslems in Palestine).

                However the first crusade occurred because a Byzantine Emperor asked the west for help, so no.

                • adam …
                  16 November 2023 at 12:11 am

                  The writer from the New York Times is an idiot. When the first crusaders came out of Byzantine into the holy lands, it was Orthodox Christians who they slaughtered on mass all the way to Jeruslium. The crusaders were classic idiots.

                  Yes, they killed the Islamic leaders and military in the area as well. At this point many in the population were still Christian. They paid more tax, but not much. Plus the wars between Byzantine and Abbasids, made the boarder feel more flexible than they were.

                  The fourth crusade is a text book operation in abject stupidity.

    • SPC 3.2
      12 November 2023 at 11:24 am

      Sure Hamas and Likud both want to be government of a nation from the river to the sea.

      Thus neither are part of the/a peace process.

      The problem is they each have support from sectors of the two populations.

  4. Adrian 4
    12 November 2023 at 10:17 am

    My father was in Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine with the NZEF in WW2 and said of all the peoples around that area the Kiwis got on very well with the Palestinians as they were generally the friendliest, most honest and trustworthy of all the people of that area. They are being badly served by the UN.

  5. SPC 5
    12 November 2023 at 11:12 am

    The President of Israel says anyone left in the north of Gaza is either a terrorist or a terrorist sympathiser. Israel has so far slaughtered over 4000 terrorist babies and children.

    The only thing I can find on the net related to the words is this

    "Being in the north of the Gaza Valley puts your lives in danger," it said, adding that "anyone who does not go to the south of the Gaza Valley and chooses not to stay in the northern area" will be considered "as an associate of the terrorist organization."

    Israeli army spokesperson Avichay Adraee confirmed that the statements written on the flyers belonged to the Israeli army.

    https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/civilians-who-dont-leave-northern-gaza-to-be-considered-associate-of-terrorists-israel/3028638

    The President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, is from the Labour Party not Likud.

    And the article claim is untrue.

  7. adam 7
    13 November 2023 at 3:00 am

    War begets war

    Fun times for worshipers of death

    Scum rises to the top

  8. georgecom 8
    13 November 2023 at 9:22 pm

    might be wise for the leaders of Israel to remember what the Nazis did in Warsaw during ww2. some real similarities. regardless of the wrong on both sides, and there are wrongs and atrocities committed by both sides, if the Jewish leaders expect the world to have sympathies for them given what they went through in ww2 and their desire for a homeland, then they should apply the same to Gaza in 2023.

    An alternative is that the religious and hardline leaders of Hamas, Israel and Hezbollah are 'retired' and those who want to give peace a chance replace them.