From Auschwitz to Gaza: Holocaust Exceptionalism and Genocide Denial | Tikun Olam |
The Israeli media, generals and university presidents exhorted Israelis to view Palestinians as Amalek: the tribe which "harried" the Israelites as they left Egypt. Its punishment was divinely-commanded genocide at the hands of King Saul. An Israeli rabbi wrote a book approving the murder of Palestinian children because they supposedly would grow up to kill Jews. A retired general wrote in a leading newspaper that Palestinian women should be murdered because they will produce the terrorists of the future.
Israelis were conditioned to hate Palestinians. They were taught it with their mother's milk. Once these attitudes were instilled deeply within Israeli consciousness, it became easy to implement the actual genocide.
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Israel's Gaza genocide has provoked a savage backlash within broader Zionist circles. They've enlisted governments, universities, and NGOs to police, suppress and punish critics of the genocide. In the case of nation states like the UK and Germany, their full power has been unleashed against those who defy such prohibitions, including arrest and even imprisonment.
The premise of this backlash campaign is a false, contrived claim concerning anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. What I call the Anti-Semitism Industry (in this case, the American Jewish Committee), devised the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and succeeded it inscribing in national and state legislatures as the normative narrative regarding this subject. It weaponized anti-Semitism, proscribing any discourse that strayed outside these parameters. This rendered legitimate speech, including activism against genocide and on behalf of its Palestinian victims, as tainted.
This enabled right-wing factions in western countries to exploit so-called anti-Semitism for political advantage. For example, Republicans desperate to divert political discourse away from Trump barreling toward dictatorship, have used this as a cudgel to beat Democrats and the Palestine solidarity movement. Along with manufactured claims about election fraud, the anti-Semitism canard has become the go-to political meme.
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Since the Enlightenment, Jews have considered themselves part of this western civilization. The Holocaust induces not only a sense of trauma, but a deep sense of betrayal. As for non-western genocides, we don't feel or understand the civilizations that bred such hatreds. This only feeds the false sense of the Holocaust as a unique historical event.
Recognition of the Gaza genocide also suffers from the same western supremacist attitudes. Palestinians are alien: Muslim, Arab. They don't look like Europeans. They speak a different language. Their suffering is relatively undocumented thanks to Israel's prohibition against western journalists entering the enclave.
There is a profound difference between a Palestinian stringer reporting on the violence, and Anderson Cooper or Jake Tapper. This otherness plays to Israel's advantage. The less the world knows, the less credible the charge of genocide will be. The easier for Israel to rebut it.
Genocide denial and blood libel
Genocide deniers use various phrases freighted with anti-Semitic connotations to smear those who call Gaza a genocide. Among them, one of the oldest is the "blood libel" claim. Here tweeted by former JDL leader, Yossi Klein Halevi:
It's telling that Klein Halevi recounts his years as a disciple of Meir Kahane, Yossi Klein Halevi Remembers Meir Kahane and the JDL, under the headline: The Ecstasy of Rage. That is what much of pro-Israel rhetoric is: performative outrage. Exploitation of ancient suffering on behalf of Israel and political interests. There are no more blood libels. Jews are not under threat. If anything, it is Israel which poses a threat to Palestinians. Israelis have become the perpetrators, the latter-day Nazis.
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