by Oui
Sun Nov 16th, 2025 at 11:53:10 AM EST
Arnon Grunberg wants to know how the genocide in Gaza could happen after Auschwitz | NRC |
Author Arnon Grunberg wonders if there's a connection between the Holocaust and the genocide in Gaza. He travels to Tel Aviv, where he asks: how could Zionism have degenerated so badly?
On the second Wednesday of September this year, I landed in Tel Aviv, and the city has become even more of a metropolis since my last visit in 2018. The restaurants were packed until midnight, the prices were comparable to those in New York, and you wondered: where's the war? When I asked an acquaintance, she replied: "I can show you the spot where an Iranian missile hit, right here. A direct hit."
"No, thank you," I reply, "that's very kind, but you don't have to."
I came here for a series of articles on the degeneration and history of Zionism, an investigation into the birdcage called identity and the history of the nation-state so closely linked to that birdcage.
Of course, this history doesn't begin on October 7, 2023; it begins much earlier. But the genocidal act of revenge that followed on October 7 revealed what could long have been swept under the rug: that the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe that began in 1948, is linked to the Holocaust, and that just as the German has been linked to the Jew since 1945, the Jew will, for the time being, be linked to the Palestinian, and vice versa, if only because for many, it's too much to ask to distinguish the Jew from the Israeli.
Yes, where does "Israeli" end and "Jew" begin? Is "Zionist" merely a synonym for "Israeli"? Should the decent Jew apologize for the atrocities of the state of Israel, even if that Jew doesn't have an Israeli passport? Just as it was once written and thought after 9/11 that decent Muslims should distance themselves from Bin Laden? If I have any worldview or view of humanity at all, it can be summed up in one sentence: ultimately, when push comes to shove, you are someone else's fantasy, and it is others who can most deeply fathom our identity. Yahya Sinwar, who initiated and led the October 7th attack, who had learned to speak fluent Hebrew in Israeli prison, who was addicted to Israeli news broadcasts, understood Israeli weaknesses, perhaps the Israeli soul, better than many an Israeli general.
[...]
Dog Groomer
My first appointment is with Avner Gvaryahu, former director of the NGO Breaking the Silence, which collects testimonies from Israeli soldiers about abuses, initially primarily in the West Bank, but now also in Gaza. We're sitting in the courtyard of Ya'akov Coffee on Montefiore Street. Gvaryahu is wearing a T-shirt and is leaving for England in a few days to pursue his doctorate. He has two children, two boys, one of whom is three weeks old. His dog is missing; he just took it to the groomer.
"What exactly are you doing here?" he asks.
I begin to explain that this all actually began with a 1979 novel by the philosopher George Steiner, The Portage of Adolf H. to San Cristobal. Hitler appears to have survived the war, is captured by the Mossad, and is put on trial in the Brazilian rainforest for various reasons. Hitler defends himself by arguing that the Jews have saddled humanity with a guilty conscience three times (through monotheism, Christianity, and Marxism) and that he merely wanted to rid people of this. He concludes his plea before his Jewish judges with some thoughts about Israel: "It was the Holocaust that gave you the courage to commit injustice, that made you drive the Arab out of his house and his field because he was crawling with lice and stood completely alone, because he hindered you on your God-ordained path." And he concludes with: "The Reich gave birth to Israel."
To Gvaryahu, I paraphrase the quote, and then I say: "With those last words of this fictional Hitler, my journey began, which I will call From Auschwitz to Gaza. That is why I am here. That is why I am speaking to you now."
