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“The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”—attributed to Zvi Rex, Israeli psychologist.
Neither, it appears, will much of the world. So, we begin to hear—including placards held in front of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum—about the “Holocaust in Palestine.” The compulsion to turn Israelis into Nazis and self-defense by the Jewish state into “genocide” is methamphetamine for today’s antisemites. It seems to justify the slaughter of Israelis and violence against diaspora Jews.
Germany’s Holocaust against European Jewry epitomized the crime of genocide. Collaboration in it by Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and others and passive enabling by Great Britain, the United States and additional wartime Allies exposed a fundamental Western moral failure. Assistance to the Third Reich from pro-Hitler Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini and pro-Berlin, anti-British, anti-French movements in Iraq, Syria and Egypt—and subsequent wars against Israel—did the same for much of the Arab-Islamic Middle East. Now the post-World War II compulsion to gain absolution from Jew-hatred and genocide accelerates. As novelist Howard Jacobson noted nearly a decade ago, what better way than to invert reality by falsely convicting the Jews and their state of the great crime committed against them?
Hamas, (the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement), rules the Gaza Strip. Its terrorists ecstatically slaughtered 1,200 people in Israel on October 7—the biggest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
Israel went to war against Hamas. So, 1,200 Yale University students and faculty signed a petition accusing Israel of genocide. Yale is still considered an “elite” institution by some status-seekers, but it behaves like non-elite San Francisco State University.
In 2002, a mob at SFSU shouting “Hitler didn’t finish the job!” and “Get out or we’ll kill you!” surrounded pro-Israel students. Campus police, reportedly told not to arrest anyone, eventually marched the pro-Israel students to the Hillel House and posted a guard at the door. In 2017, students at the school filed a federal civil rights suit against it for enabling creation of a hostile—that is, antisemitic—environment. Fifteen years came and went but things didn’t improve. Only in 2019 did the school settle, agreeing to some of the students’ demands.
In a 2016 Washington Post column, David E. Bernstein, professor of law at George Mason University, related that recent Oberlin College alumna Isabel Storch Sherrell had recounted multiple incidents in which other students dismissed the Holocaust as merely “white-on-white” crime. Bernstein found the post not just a “troubling sign of emerging hostility to Jews and Jewish concerns among self-proclaimed social justice advocates on left-wing campuses but as an equally troubling sign of the degradation of intellectual discourse at such campuses generally…”
That degradation requires not denying the Holocaust but misappropriating it. Pretend that Israel commits something similar against Palestinian Arabs. Erase the Jewish Holocaust in favor of Israel’s fabricated “Holocaust of Palestinians,” and one advances erasure of both the Jewish state and those who support it.
An ostensibly “pro-Palestinian” march in Washington, D.C. on November 4 drew tens of thousands. It was, asserted talk radio host Chris Plante, the biggest racist demonstration in the capital since the 1925 Ku Klux Klan march attracted 30,000.
Participants condemned “racist” Israel for “genocide” in the Gaza Strip. News media did not cover the event as a gathering of Jew-hating bigots seeking Israel’s destruction. Instead, they portrayed the rally rather as calling for “freedom” for Gaza.
Where were rallies in support of freedom of Gazans from the theocratic, repressive Hamas or of West Bank Arabs from the corrupt, thuggish Palestinian Authority before October 7? Nowhere, because the hundreds of thousands in the streets of Washington, New York, London, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere aren’t about Gazans or West Bankers. They’re about getting the Jews.
Due to the intellectual degradation—not to mention moral collapse—Bernstein saw, today’s haters of the Jewish state and Jews often are termed progressive. However, by embracing antisemitism they reveal themselves as reactionary.
They haven’t blasphemed about “Israel’s Holocaust of the Palestinians” just yet. One of their number, Rutgers University Prof. Jasbir Puar, promoter of the grotesquery that Israelis shoot-to-maim Palestinians to subjugate but not kill them, used to agree that Israel commits genocide but the term was too “tethered to the Holocaust” to be useful. Not anymore, the new blood libel is invoked incessantly.
What to do? Stop “fighting antisemitism.” Fight the antisemites, their collaborators and apologists instead. Hit them politically, judicially, economically and culturally. Relentlessly.
Eric Rozenman is communications consultant for the Jewish Policy Center. He is author of Jews Make the Best Demons: “Palestine” and the Jewish Question.
thanks for info
or just hit them….wherever it hurts. Fighting an information war is exhausting and they have the bigger megaphone.
I’m suggesting pulling funding from universities, convicting those in charge such as college administrators or other serious consequences. A money settlement from a very wealthy institution (where does some of that wealth come from, anyway`?) is fine for those collecting but solves nothing for future students or for the culture.
When “Palestinians” (indistinguishable from Arabs in neighboring countries, and having one of the highest population growth rates in the world) speak of “genocide” it is pure projection. They’re imagining what they’d do to Jews if given half a chance. To use a phrase favored by pro Palestinian antisemite Susan Sarandon, October Seventh was “just a taste” of what they’d do to Jews. We’re supposed to feel sorry for them because they’ve been thwarted thus far?
If a 700% INCREASE in the “Palestinian” population over the past 75 years isn’t genocide, then I don’t know what is.
Just think what the population of the Gaza strip would be without the alleged genocide….
I am just beginning my study of these issues. Why is the Soviet holocaust never mentioned when it had more deaths and extermination camps than Germany?
There are a couple of reasons that I can think of – one is that the Russian holocaust wasn’t due to the moral failure of the West, whereas there were things that we could and should have done to stop Hitler. If we knew enough to recognise the need for the Kindertrains, we knew enough to do more than we did, sooner than we did. Another is that we know more about Germany – we have the testimony of the survivors, who actually live among us, and footage of the camps – whereas much of our knowledge of Russian atrocities comes from Solzhenitsyn and writers like him. That doesn’t mean it isn’t accurate, but it doesn’t have the same immediacy. Making films about World War II is a lot easier than making them about Russia. Russian genocide may also be off-limits for many people because it is a fruit of Marxism – even if you think that this is the abuse of Marxism rather than the real thing, it still raises questions as to how it could lend itself to such abuse. And there’s context – the Jewish Holocaust belongs with the current situation in Israel, whereas the Russian slaughter may illuminate the Ukrainian war, but does not help us to relate to the Middle East. In a way, there’s something of a continuum – we hear most about the Jewish Holocaust, and maybe Armenia, then Russia, and last of all China.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply! It helps me to think and put things in context. As I said, I am only now beginning my studies and so my opinions are not well-formed or informed and are loosely held.
What you call the “Jewish Holocaust” was not limited only to Germany. The Soviets killed more Jews and had more death camps than all of Europe.
And the Holocaust was not limited to killing Jews. Many others also suffered and died. This is not a reason to lessen or ignore anti-semitism, but only to put all into context without which our understanding cannot be right of strong.
I’m of Jewish belief heritage and ask the same question. All I get is shushed or called a self-hating Jew
Being accused of self-hatred or forcibly silenced is cause for strong suspicion. I am studying this issue because it has become something of a sacrament in western thinking – perhaps in Jewish (liberal?) thinking.
The killing of millions of people, Jewish and otherwise, is something that must be understood in all its evil fulness. Evil advances upon deception, and so we must endeavor to be undeceived.
How else can we even hope “never again”?
YOU NEED TO COMMENT HERE PLEASE ON THE “OPEN LETTER” BY OMER BARTOV, RAZ SEGAL &c &c ON WEAPONISING THE HOLOCAUST.
Never would I have thought that after my escaping with my life as a child survivor now again hatred is flourishing with vigor in the ” educated world ” the signs of Concentration Camp are being erased , in Europe in the east even ancient cemeteries are being defiled & converted one would be hard put to find mass graves ancient synagogues are being transformed into a variety of purposes but to what it was originally meant. Even Auschwitz has buildings and tracks pulled up. Eventually all this murderous elimination of Jews & others will become a myth no reminder of the lives of those murdered yet today Hitler still keeps sway in the Muslim world ,much money has been spent to create a storm of murderous anti semitism like a black storm to harm the Jewish remnant. Where is the world of reason, righteousness & civilization. Base Idolatry which requires human sacrifice seem to show it head & fangs .