In the name of the holocaust

Khalid Amayreh

"This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto." - German Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke during a visit to Ramallah in March 2007


At left: captive Jewish boy from the Warsaw Ghetto marches off, in 1943, to an uncertain fate -- a widely circulated image of Jewish victimhood that became an iconic Holocaust photograph. Like most interned Jews, the famed "Ghetto Boy" (Tsvi Nussbaum) emerged unscathed from World War II. He eventually emigrated from Israel to the United States.

At right: captive Palestinian boy brutalized by armed (and nazi-like) IDF soldiers.

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Last week, Israel marked the "Holocaust Day" in West Jerusalem amid the usual fanfare of sanctimonious rituals, never-again speeches and glorification of Zionism.

The solemn but also highly propagandistic occasion is manipulated to the fullest by Zionist leaders in order to justify the crime against humanity, otherwise known as "the state of Israel." -This year, too, Zionist leaders preyed on the memories of holocaust victims by seeking to blackmail the collective conscience of the world into recognizing the "uniqueness of Jewish pain" " as if non-Jews were children of a lesser God and their pain was unimportant.

Thus we had the political and ideological gurus of Zionism, from the morbidly sanctimonious Elie Wiesel to the pathologically duplicitous Ehud Olmert berate the world for the "reincarnation of anti-Semitism," a deliberately twisted reference to legitimate criticisms of nefarious treatment of Palestinians, including the adoption of such policies as apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the use of brutal tactics for the purpose of forcing the victims of Zionism to leave their ancestral homeland.

Nobody does or should question the enormity of the holocaust. Doing so, besides being morally unconscionable, serves the interests of Zionism, which has morphed the Holocaust Industry into a virtual religion that encompasses even Judaism itself.

However, manipulating the holocaust to justify the treatment Israel has been meting out to millions of helpless Palestinians is no less obscene and no less outrageous than the utilization by the Third Reich of the outcome of the First World War to wage war on Europe and cause the death of tens of millions of people.

All humanity had suffered through history, recent, past and distant. Nobody, not even Jews, could claim that the suffering of one group is more special and more unique than the suffering of others.

Russia, for example, lost tens of millions to the Nazis in the course of the Second World War. The same thing applies to other European peoples, who too, suffered immensely. The Gypsies were also incinerated and gassed in great numbers in Hitler’s liquidation chambers, but we see no holocaust memorials perpetuating the memory of these hapless and unwept victims as if they were lesser and insignificant human beings.

Of course, nobody objects to Jews commemorating the holocaust and reminding humanity of its evils. I, too, would join conscientious Jews in remembering the victims of Nazism. However, remembering, when done in the wrong way, can be worse than forgetting.

The world, including Jews, doesn’t have to choose between "remembering" or "forgetting" the holocaust or any other enormous crime against humanity. Instead, the choice should be between learning the "right" or "wrong" lessons.

Today, in the name of the holocaust, Israel wants the world to give her a carte blanch to commit another holocaust against the helpless and virtually completely unprotected Palestinians.

In the name of the holocaust and the "never-again mantra," Israel wants the world to allow it to commit every conceivable crime and every abominable violation of human rights in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, from murdering school children on their way to school "for security reasons" to shooting pregnant women on their way to hospital (also for security reasons) to dumping tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians into modern-day concentration camps deep in the Negev desert.

Indeed, in the name of the holocaust, Israel has been hounding, brutalizing and tormenting four million impoverished Palestinians, barring them from accessing food and work, and utterly ravaging their lives and livelihood as well destroying their streets, colleges, bridges, and power stations. And, as if these obscenities were not enough, the Israeli state has augmented its oppression with an Satanic wall that is effectively reducing the bulk of Palestinian population centers into updated versions of the Ghetto Warsaw.

In short, the holocaust and the memory of its victims, have been used and are being used outrageously and relentlessly by Israel in order to justify and legitimize crimes against humanity that, while not as enormous as the holocaust in their magnitude, have non the less many similarities with it in terms of their brutality, insidiousness and criminality.

The holocaust, we all know, didn’t start with Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen. It started with a book, some sporadic acts of harassment, a Kristalnacht, and some discriminatory laws against Jews, things very much like what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians

Today Israel is on its way to being a fully-fledged apartheid state. It systematically discriminates against its non-Jewish citizens in ways reminiscent of the overall German discourse against Jews in the mid 1930s.

One ominous portent is the fact that a majority of Israeli Jewish citizens, who are bombarded 24 hours per day by virulent anti-Arab propaganda, readily support the deportation of non-Jewish citizens who make up nearly a quarter of Israel’s population. Needless to say, this state of affair is very similar to the state of affair that prevailed in Germany prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Unfortunately, the holocaust, which was perpetrated by Europeans, has caused European states to go morally blind, a blindness that, even today, is preventing most Europeans from seeing the outrageous crimes committed by their former victims against the Palestinians, Germany’s and Europe’s victims’ victims.

Europe has been either completely silent, or blithe, or actively and enthusiastically supportive of crimes against humanity Israel has been perpetrating against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples.

Last year, Israel dropped as many as 3.000.000 cluster bomb-lets throughout Lebanon as, we were told, a " defensive action" against Hizbullah.

The three million bombs, for those who still don’t know, are sufficient to kill three million children. In other words, they could cause a holocaust, or at least half a holocaust by Jewish calculations.

Unfortunately, this outrage drew only sporadic, shy or half-hearted criticism from European leaders who never stop lecturing the Third world, especially the Muslim world, about human rights and terror.

This is no less than a moral whoredom on the part of Europe. Allowing Israel to turn the holocaust into a propaganda asset, as Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote recently, enables the Israeli state to further oppress the Palestinians and legitimize the oppression.

"Turning the holocaust into an asset," wrote Hass, " allows Israel to present all the methods of the Palestinian struggle (even the unarmed ones) as another link in the anti-Semitic chain whose culmination is Auschwitz. Israel provides itself with the license to come up with more kinds of fences, walls and military guard towers around Palestinian enclaves."

Indeed, Europe’s, especially Germany’s, obsequious, even acquiescent, reactions to Israel’s unmitigated crimes against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples shows that Europe has not learned the right lesson from the holocaust.

It shows that Europe is atoning for one holocaust by adopting policies that effectively encourage and facilitate the perpetration of another holocaust.

If this is not moral whoredom, then what is it?

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© 2007 Khalid Amayreh
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