For years now that I have been working for justice and liberation for Palestinians in whatever capacity was available, I have tried to avoid comparisons between Nazis and Israelis. for the most part, despite the fact that Zionism as a movement is intimately tied to the 20th century ethno-nationalist movements of central Europe, of which Nazism was just one, as well as many other salient comparisons, the act of doing so usually has the effect of making a subject which is already shrouded in hysteria and foul displays of bad conscience even more difficult.
But there have been a few exceptions, of course;
This picture was taken in 2005 at the Qalandia Checkpoint, where I took part in a little action of sorts, but more on that later, let's get on with this diary and what I can only describe as my horror at the suffering that is ongoing, and what is to come.
Just read this;
Israeli minister warns of Palestinian 'holocaust'
Staff and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Friday February 29 2008
An Israeli minister today warned of increasingly bitter conflict in the Gaza Strip, saying the Palestinians could bring on themselves what he called a "holocaust".
"The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defence minister, told army radio.
Shoah is the Hebrew word normally reserved to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war, and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.
The minister's statement came after two days of tit-for-tat missile raids between Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip and the Israeli army. At least 32 Palestinians and one Israeli have been killed since the surge in violence on Wednesday.
and just so you know that this is not just some trash talk by the Guradian, here is the Haaretz article that I first saw with this lovely quote (I wish I had saved a screen shot, there seems to be a bit more contextualizing and burying of the quote within the article than at first);
Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai went as far as threatening a "shoah,"
the Hebrew word for holocaust or disaster. The word is generally used to refer to the Nazi Holocaust, but a spokesman for Vilnai said the deputy defense minister used the word in the sense of "disaster," saying "he did not mean to make any allusion to the genocide."
"The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, [the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Vilnai told Army Radio on Friday.
Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said of Vilnai's comments: "We are facing new Nazis who want to kill and burn the Palestinian people."
Palestinians in Gaza fired about a dozen Grad rockets Thursday on the southern port city of Ashkelon, some 15 kilometers north of the Strip. A 17-year-old girl was lightly hurt in the rocket attacks and several others suffered from shock. The day before, a Sapir College student was killed in a rocket attack on Sderot. Fighting in Gaza also continued Thursday, with at least 18 Palestinians, including five boys and a 6-month-old baby, killed in Gaza air strikes.
One can say that this is just a fluke, that this is just one person's slip of the tongue that doesn't mean that much, but in my view, that simply does not wash at all. In addition to this little gem, there are mounting anecdotal signs, as well as the overarching message that this conflict says to us all, whether we want to hear it or not; that yesterday's victims can easily transform into today's killers.
Here's some of the examples from the recent past;
(photo from BBC article, image credit: Horit Herman Peled)
Israel army forces violin recital
The army says the soldiers were reprimanded (image credit: Horit Herman Peled)
A Palestinian man queuing to pass an Israeli checkpoint was forced by soldiers to perform an impromptu violin recital, a human rights group says.
The group's footage of the incident shows the man playing to an audience of border guards and waiting Palestinians.
The Israeli army says the man was asked to play the instrument he was carrying to prove it was not full of explosives.
But, it said, the soldiers' conduct at the West Bank checkpoint had been insensitive and they were reprimanded.
A spokesman said the army tries to teach soldiers the need to show "sensitivity and consideration" as they contend with the "complex and dangerous reality" of policing checkpoints
and lest you think this was just the BBC making a mountain out of a molehill,let's see what some right wing Israelis were saying about the incident;
The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. "What about Majdanek?" he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.
The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem. Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial "not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust".
"Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust... If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps."
So Israel's subjugation, dispossession and oppression of Palestinians, in this writer's mind and in the very premise of Zionism, is justified by the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust; how dare those soldiers do such things... not to the Palestinians themselves, no, but to the Holocaust itself!
And let's move on to another gem from the past years;
on the eve of Operation Defensive Shield, a senior Israeli military officer was quoted by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahranot as stating that in view of the character of the upcoming Israeli operation, the Nazi campaign to subdue the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943 required careful study as an example of succesful urban combat.
and oh how successful those brave Nazis were... I mean those brave freedom fighting resisting Jews in Warsaw were... I mean...can we see the exact quote on that one....
The well-known Israeli daily Ma’ariv has also quoted an Israeli officer exhorting his men to study the tactics adopted by the Nazis during the Second World War: “If our job is to seize a densely packed refugee camp or take over the Nablus Casbah, and if this job is to be given to an Israeli officer to carry out without casualties he must before all else analyse and bring together the lessons of past battles, even — shocking though this might appear — to analyse how the German Army operated in the Warsaw Ghetto.”
oh boy... I think I'll let Sara Roy sum up how horrifying the nexus of the Holocaust, Israel, and the Palestinians has become;
As with the Holocaust, I tried to remember my very first encounter with the occupation. One of my earliest encounters involved a group of Israeli soldiers, an old Palestinian man, and his donkey. Standing on a street with some Palestinian friends, I noticed an elderly Palestinian walking down the street, leading his donkey. A small child no more than three or four years old, clearly his grandson, was with him. Some Israeli soldiers standing nearby went up to the old man and stopped him. One soldier ambled over to the donkey and pried open its mouth. "Old man," he asked, "why are your donkey's teeth so yellow? Why aren't they white? Don't you brush your donkey's teeth?" The old Palestinian was mortified, the little boy visibly upset. The soldier repeated his question, yelling this time, while the other soldiers laughed. The child began to cry and the old man just stood there silently, humiliated. This scene repeated itself while a crowd gathered. The soldier then ordered the old man to stand behind the donkey and demanded that he kiss the animal's behind. At first, the old man refused but as the soldier screamed at him and his grandson became hysterical, he bent down and did it. The soldiers laughed and walked away. They had achieved their goal: to humiliate him and those around him. We all stood there in silence, ashamed to look at each other, hearing nothing but the uncontrollable sobs of the little boy. The old man did not move for what seemed a very long time. He just stood there, demeaned and destroyed.
I stood there too, in stunned disbelief. I immediately thought of the stories my parents had told me of how Jews had been treated by the Nazis in the 1930s, before the ghettos and death camps, of how Jews would be forced to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes and have their beards cut off in public. What happened to the old man was absolutely equivalent in principle, intent, and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize. In this instance, there was no difference between the German soldier and the Israeli one. Throughout that summer of 1985, I saw similar incidents: young Palestinian men being forced by Israeli soldiers to bark like dogs on their hands and knees or dance in the streets.
Within the Jewish community it has always been considered a form of heresy to compare Israeli actions or policies with those of the Nazis, and certainly one must be very careful in doing so. But what does it mean when Israeli soldiers paint identification numbers on Palestinian arms; when young Palestinian men and boys of a certain age are told through Israeli loudspeakers to gather in the town square; when Israeli soldiers openly admit to shooting Palestinian children for sport; when some of the Palestinian dead must be buried in mass graves while the bodies of others are left in city streets and camp alleyways because the army will not allow proper burial; when certain Israeli officials and Jewish intellectuals publicly call for the destruction of Palestinian villages in retaliation for suicide bombings or for the transfer of the Palestinian population out of the West Bank and Gaza; when 46 percent of the Israeli public favors such transfers and when transfer or expulsion becomes a legitimate part of popular discourse; when government officials speak of the "cleansing of the refugee camps"; and when a leading Israeli intellectual calls for hermetic separation between Israelis and Palestinians in the form of a Berlin Wall, caring not whether the Palestinians on the other side of the wall may starve to death as a result.
And let's also not forget that a few brave souls that said clearly, quote recently, that the situation in Gaza has been coming to that of genocide; let's pick two Jews, just to be fair, (because for some the words of Palestinians have no value at all of course) one Israeli and the other American;
Genocide in Gaza
Ilan Pappe, The Electronic Intifada, 2 September 2006
A genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun. This is the morning reap, before the end of day many more will be massacred. An average of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed.
The Israeli leadership is at a loss of what to do with the Gaza Strip. It has vague ideas about the West Bank. The current government assumes that the West Bank, unlike the Strip, is an open space, at least on its eastern side. Hence if Israel, under the ingathering program of the government, annexes the parts it covets -- half of the West Bank -- and cleanses it of its native population, the other half would naturally lean towards Jordan, at least for a while and would not concern Israel. This is a fallacy, but nonetheless it won the enthusiastic vote of most of the Jews in the country. Such an arrangement can not work in the Gaza enclave -- Egypt unlike Jordan has succeeded in persuading the Israelis, already in 1948, that the Gaza Strip for them is a liability and will never form part of Egypt. So a million and half Palestinians are stuck inside Israel -- although geographically the Strip is located on the margins of the state, psychologically it lies in its midst.
The inhuman living conditions in the most dense area in the world, and one of the poorest human spaces in the northern hemisphere, disables the people who live it to reconcile with the imprisonment Israel had imposed on them ever since 1967. There were relative better periods where movement to the West Bank and into Israel for work was allowed, but these better times are gone. Harsher realities are in place ever since 1987. Some access to the outside world was allowed as long as there were Jewish settlers in the Strip, but once they were removed the Strip was hermetically closed. Ironically, most Israelis, according to recent polls, look at Gaza as an independent Palestinian state that Israel has graciously allowed to emerge. The leadership, and particularly the army, see it as a prison with the most dangerous community of inmates, which has to be eliminated one way or another.
he took some heat, gave it some thought, and still stands by his analysis;
The Israeli Recipe For 2008: Genocide in Gaza, Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank
From the June 23, 2007 issue of The Indypendent
An Israeli soldier searches a child in the West Bank city of Hebron. Photo: pcdc.edu
Not long ago, I claimed that Israel is employing genocidal policies in the Gaza Strip. I hesitated before using this very charged term and yet decided to adopt it. The responses I received indicated unease in using such a term. I rethought the term for a while, but concluded with even stronger conviction: it is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip.
On Dec. 28, 2006, the Israeli human rights organization Betzelem published its annual report on Israeli atrocities in the occupied territories. In 2006, Israeli forces killed 660 citizens, triple the number of the previous year (around 200). Most of the dead are from the Gaza Strip, where Israeli forces demolished almost 300 houses and have slain entire families. Since 2000, almost 4,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, half of them children, and more than 20,000 wounded.
The point is not just about escalating intentional killings but the strategy.
and here's the American Jewish 2 cents on the matter;
Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust
Richard Falk, TFF Associate
June 29, 2007
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
There is little doubt that the Nazi Holocaust was as close to unconditional evil as has been revealed throughout the entire bloody history of the human species. Its massiveness, unconcealed genocidal intent, and reliance on the mentality and instruments of modernity give its enactment in the death camps of Europe a special status in our moral imagination. This special status is exhibited in the continuing presentation of its gruesome realities through film, books, and a variety of cultural artifacts more than six decades after the events in question ceased. The permanent memory of the Holocaust is also kept alive by the existence of several notable museums devoted exclusively to the depiction of the horrors that took place during the period of Nazi rule in Germany.
Against this background, it is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as ‘holocaust.’ The word is derived from the Greek holos (meaning ‘completely’) and kaustos (meaning ‘burnt’), and was used in ancient Greece to refer to the complete burning of a sacrificial offering to a divinity. Because such a background implies a religious undertaking, there is some inclination in Jewish literature to prefer the Hebrew word ‘Shoah’ that can be translated roughly as ‘calamity,’ and was the name given to the 1985 epic nine-hour narration of the Nazi experience by the French filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann. The Germans themselves were more antiseptic in their designation, officially naming their undertaking as the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Qestion.’ The label is, of course, inaccurate as a variety of non-Jewish identities were also targets of this genocidal assault, including the Roma and Sinti(‘gypsies), Jehovah Witnesses, gays, disabled persons, political opponents.
Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy. If ever the ethos of ‘a responsibility to protect,’ recently adopted by the UN Security Council as the basis of ‘humanitarian intervention’ is applicable, it would be to act now to start protecting the people of Gaza from further pain and suffering. But it would be unrealistic to expect the UN to do anything in the face of this crisis, given the pattern of US support for Israel and taking into account the extent to which European governments have lent their weight to recent illicit efforts to crush Hamas as a Palestinian political force.
Let's get back to that action I mentioned in the beginning;
So, back when I was in Palestine in 2005-06, the occupation was (and still is) entrenching itself deeper and depper into the very land of Palestine, with Qalandia Checkpoint, and many others like it, were becoming a snarled maze of walls, towers, junk, wire and guns; a post-post modern nightmare that evoked something out of a George Orwell retelling of the Lorax, it was truly horrible to see.
Here's Bethlehem, along with a message from the Israeli government;
and here's Qalandia
traffic restricted to Palestinian-only roads, with the wall and checkpoint in the background
the wall and artistic resistance
the brand spanking new checkpoint, as illegal as it ever was, and paid for by US aid to the Palestinian Authority
so after some time of being there, when the new terminal is being built (read this entry for more of my experience at Qalandia), they put up this sign, which said in three languages "The Hope of Us All." And I thought to myself, what hope are they talking about, and who is this 'all,' anyhow? How insulting could this be, for Palestinians to have to see in the very sanctuary of their subjugation? What hope could a new and 'improved' version of the same old illegal checkpoint bring anyone? On top of that, the metaphorical similarity to the writing on the gates of Auschwitz, "Arbet Mach Frei," work will set you free, was just chilling, to me and fellow Jewish activists.
So a few of us got together and created a new group, Jews Against Genocide, and we went to work!
and a little more, with the American whitewash/justification for genocide thrown in for good measure
crazy, we even got some press out of it;
J.A.G., the Jerusalem Post & Kalandia
January 28th, 2006 | Posted in Press clippings
Jews Admit Defacing Kalandiya Sign
by MARGOT DUDKEVITCH
Photo: Civil Administration
Members of a group called Jews Against Genocide (JAG) claimed responsibility for defacing the newly erected sign to the Kalandiya terminal checkpoint north of Jerusalem, daubing on it the infamous Auschwitz inscription “Arbeit macht frei” (Work liberates).
Shlomo Bloom, one of the founding members of the organization, said the action was not to say that Kalandiya is equivalent to Auschwitz but to accentuate the frightening similarities between the two. “Kalandiya is not a cheerful place for Palestinians,” he told The Jerusalem Post . “There are disturbing parallels between the tactics used by the occupying forces and those of the Nazis,” he said. The sign, decorated with a painted flower and inscribed in Arabic, English and Hebrew with the slogan “The hope of us all,” is one of many being erected at checkpoints, security officials said.
But Bloom views the move as a degrading and humiliating message for the Palestinians. “If we were talking about a sovereign Palestinian state with a border checkpoint between it and Israel, it would be a different matter,” said Bloom.
Earlier in the week, security officials had suspected that women from the Machsom Watch checkpoint monitoring group were behind the graffiti, a charge that was vehemently denied by the movement’s spokeswoman Adi Dagan.
Bloom refused to accept that the West Bank checkpoints and terminals was a direct outcome of Palestinian terror.
So, with the words of the Israeli minister that the Palestinians will suffer a "bigger shoah," and added to that all the mountains of other evidence, mutterings, frames and horrors, we must begin to come to grips with the ever-present specter of the Holocaust in Israel/Palestine. A Zionist Israel will always look to the Holocaust as the all-purpose justification for their violence towards the Palestinian Other (in defense, of course), and they will always recoil at the process by which the Israeli state comes to resemble its past tormenter in the dishing out of such systematic violence and horror. As Friedrich Nietzsche said "When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
I also like to keep in mind the words ofEric Hobsbawm;
"I have no emotional obligation to the practices of an ancestral religion and even less to the small, militarist, culturally disappointing and politically aggressive nation-state which asks for my solidarity on racial grounds" Eric Hobsbawm on Israel & Zionism (Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life, (NY: Pantheon, 2002, p.24).
I'll end this with a few lines from a book by Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, (page 233) and I do suggest reading is other book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, it is an excellent read and presents information often overlooked in the analysis of terrorism and the middle east.
This quote is in reference to the genocide in Rwanda, and the fact that the long-oppressed Hutus were capable to transform themselves into the murderous killers of Tutsis in the name of their past and potential suffering;
if it is the struggle for power that explains the motivation of those who crafted the genocide, then it is the combined fear of a return to servitude and of reprisals thereafter that energized the foot soldiers of the genocide. The irony is that- whether in Church, in hospitals, or in human rights groups, as in fields and homes- the perpetrators of the genocide saw themselves as the true victims of an ongoing political drama, victims of yesterday who may be victims again. That moral certainty explains the easy transition from yesterday's victims to the killers the morning after.