In Gaza today we find ways of justifying the bombing of hospitals, the annihilation of families at dinner, the killing of pre-adolescents playing soccer on a beach. Whether in Vietnam or Rwanda or Syria, humanity stands by either complicitly or unconsciously or helplessly, as it always does. It was a naïve question, that of a child. “As a Jewish youngster growing up in Budapest, an infant survivor of the Nazi genocide, I was for years haunted by a question resounding in my brain with such force that sometimes my head would spin: ‘How was it possible? How could the world have let such horrors happen?’ Hajo Meyer, ‘ An Ethical Tradition Betrayed’, Huffington Post, 27/1/10.
This century-long process of oppression means unimaginable suffering for Palestinians.”ĭr. The various forms of collective punishment visited upon the Palestinian people – coerced ghettoization behind a ‘security wall’ the bulldozing of homes and destruction of fields the bombing of schools, mosques, and government buildings an economic blockade that deprives people of the water, food, medicine, education and the basic necessities for dignified survival – force me to recall the deprivations and humiliations that I experienced in my youth. I cannot help but hear echoes of the Nazi mythos of ‘blood and soil’ in the rhetoric of settler fundamentalism which claims a sacred right to all the lands of biblical Judea and Samaria. “I am pained by the parallels I observe between my experiences in Germany prior to 1939 and those suffered by Palestinians today. Israel Shahak was a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Israel Shahak, Middle East Policy Journal, Summer 1989, no.29. In addition to all the Arab considerations, I would like to see Israel, by renouncing the desire for domination, including domination of the Palestinians, become a much nicer place for Israelis to live.”ĭr. When Germany and Japan renounced the wish for domination, they became much nicer societies for the Japanese and Germans themselves. What happened in Japan after the attack on China is that they wanted to dominate a huge area of Asia. Not only the Germany of Hitler and the Nazis but even the former German Empire wanted to dominate Europe. “Israel, in order to survive, has to renounce the wish for domination and then it will be a much better place for Jews also. The immediate analogy which a lot of people are making in Israel is Germany. Marika Sherwood is a survivor of the Budapest ghetto. Marika Sherwood, ‘How I became an anti-Israel Jew’, Middle East Monitor, 7/3/18. I will not allow the confounding of the terms ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘anti-Zionist’ to go unchallenged.”ĭr. Of course, Israel’s geo-political position has a greater bearing on this, at the moment. I will not remain silent in the face of the attempted annihilation of the Palestinians the sale of arms to repressive regimes around the world the attempt to stifle criticism of Israel in the media worldwide or the twisting of the knife labelled ‘guilt’ in order to gain economic concessions from Western countries.
I have to say to the Israeli government, which claims to speak in the name of all Jews, that it is not speaking in my name. I felt let down, as if I was being robbed of a part of what I had thought was my heritage. … Weren’t the Israelis also Jews? Hadn’t we – they – just survived the greatest pogrom of our history? Weren’t camps – often euphemistically called ‘settlement camps’ by the Nazis – the main feature of this pogrom? How could Jews in any measure do unto others what had been done to them? How could these Israeli Jews oppress and imprison other people? In my romantic imagination, the Jews in Israel were socialists and people who knew right from wrong. “Sometime after I heard a news item about Israelis herding Palestinians into settlement camps. In one case, the author – again a Holocaust survivor (Rudolf Vrba, pictured above) – compares key policies of the wartime Zionist movement to those of the Nazis. Here we publish extracts from Holocaust survivors who oppose historical and recent Israeli policies, in some cases connecting them with those of the Nazis. But in many cases, even where we might dispute the conclusion, it seems far-fetched to attribute it to anti-Semitism. It is true that, at times, such comparisons can be crude and ahistorical. One of the more worrying aspects of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism is its suggestion that ‘drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis’ is necessarily anti-Semitic.
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