There may be some readers who find it questionable how I am still educating others on the Shoah while the Middle East’s neocolony continues to harm Palestinians. Some may think that I am trying to distract from the Palestinians’ oppression by meanwhile looking back on the Jews’ oppression under the Axis.
On the contrary, I see no contradiction at all.
Make no mistake: the Palestinians’ oppression is not a perfect copy of the Shoah. I myself, along with others, have noted some important differences (as well as similarities) between the Third Reich and the neocolony before, and ideally any comparisons between the two tragedies should be made with caution.
Even so, for many of us it is difficult to simply not think back to the Shoah when we look at neocolonialism’s victims, because in both cases we are dealing with victims of oppression, and specifically victims of settler–colonialism. To quote Elias Khoury in The Holocaust and the Nakba, page XVI:
The Holocaust and the Nakba are not mirror images, but the Jew and the Palestinian are able to become mirror images of human suffering if they disabuse themselves of the delusion of exclusionist, nationalist ideologies. The oppressed Jew [under the Axis] is not only the mirror image of the Palestinian but that of every human everywhere, just as the Palestinian is the mirror image of all expelled and oppressed peoples everywhere.
In fact, he is the mirror image of the refugee tragedy playing out in the footsteps of the third decade and the painful cries for help emanating from Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan, Somali, and Afghani refugees as they wade through the sea of suffering and death once called the Mediterranean Sea.
I have no doubt that upper‐class Zionists fund Shoah education with the intention of generating sympathy for the neocolonists, which is why some Shoah educators like to grossly overrate the importance of the Mufti and other Islamists who collaborated with the Axis (all while denying, trivializing, or overlooking the Muslims who aided Jews and the Fascists who aided Zionists). Quoting Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir on page 8:
Zionism and [its neocolony] have made cynical political use of the Holocaust in order to divest themselves of responsibility for their actions toward the Palestinians and to suspend the latter people’s collective and individual rights.38 Indeed, this instrumental use of the Holocaust has been identified and critically explored by the research of scholars such as Idith Zertal, Moshe Zuckermann, and Avraham Burg, among others.39
Their results, however, are mixed, which is why they want to criminalize or at least strongly discourage comparisons between the Third Reich and the neocolony. While I am a gentile, the notion that the Shoah was so unique that it should not even be compared to the Porajmos, let alone an atrocity in another context entirely (e.g. the Meds Yeghern), is something that I regard with utmost suspicion. What good is ‘never again’ if we must suppress or deny any possible similarities in a contemporary tragedy?
If, indeed, all comparisons without exception must be condemned, then these people have quite a bit of work ahead of them. Pages 9 & 11:
A case in point is Golda Meir (Meyerson), who was in fact one of the more hawkish leaders of the Yishuv. On May 6, 1948, following a visit to Arab Haifa only a few days after its conquest and the flight and expulsion of the city’s Arab population, Meir reported to the Jewish Agency Executive that “there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe during World War II].”42
Within Mapam—a left‐[leaning] Zionist party that was part of the state’s first government headed by David Ben Gurion—the expulsion of Palestinians was the subject of intense debate. For example, Eliezer Pra’i (later Peri), editor of the Mapam daily al‐Hamishmar, wrote: “Among the best of our comrades the thought has crept in that perhaps it is possible politically to achieve our ingathering in the Land of Israel by Hitlerite‐Nazi means.”43
Following the atrocities committed during Operation Hiram by the [neocolonial] army (IDF) who conquered the central-upper Galilee pocket, the [neocolonial régime] established a three‐person investigation committee. At a cabinet meeting on November 17, 1948, convinced that the army and defense establishment were being evasive, Mapam representative Aharon Cisling stated: “I couldn’t sleep all night. […] This is something that determines the character of the nation. […] Jews too have committed Nazi acts.”44
[…]
In “Pesah ʻAl Kukhim,” Yeshurun implicitly but unequivocally linked the destruction of European Jewry to the destruction of the Arabs of Palestine. The poem sparked considerable controversy, and in 1958 he published another poem that explained his position.
The second poem, “Hanmakah” (“Reasoning”), includes the following lines: “The Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust of the Arabs of the Land of Israel are one Holocaust of the Jewish People. Both look [one] straight in the face. These are my words.” No more powerful words have ever been written in Hebrew on this subject.
(Emphasis added.)
The Zionist ruling class has no right to claim the Shoah as their own. This class may be closer to the Shoah victims in terms of genealogy, but in all of the most important aspects—situations, experiences, circumstances, spirit—they may as well have nothing in common at all. Personally, I believe that even Palestinian gentiles still have more right to claim the Shoah as part of their history than does the Zionist ruling class, which can sip its champagne safely at home while its armies massacre Palestinians and even some Jews, in addition to its police abusing gentiles of color and lower‐class Jews. I would rather thousands of Palestinians liken their suffering to the Shoah than anybody deny either.
Should any Palestinians read this subcommunity and see a reflexion of theirselves, rather than their oppressors, as they learn more about the Shoah, I’ll consider my subcommunity to have exceeded its goals.
ETA: From Zehavit Gross’s Holocaust education in Jewish schools in Israel: Goals, dilemmas, challenges:
In fact, several scholars have found that Holocaust education increases Jewish students’ empathy for the Palestinians (Gross 2000; Romi and Lev 2007; Shechter 2002).
Click here for events that happened today (November 28).
1887: Ernst Röhm, moderate Fascist, was born.
1932: Imperial luxury ocean liner Hikawa Maru departed Kobe for Seattle (marking her fourteenth round trip across the Pacific).
1934: Berlin promoted Rudolf Höss to the rank of SS-Unterscharführer, and Tōkyō promoted Kenkichi Ueda to the rank of general.
1935: Mussolini dismissed General Emilio de Bono as the Fascist Commander‐in‐Chief in East Africa and replaced him with Pietro Badoglio.
1936: Three thousand Mongolian and Chinese irregulars loyal to the pro‐Imperialist Mengjiang régime launched an offensive toward Bailingmiao, Suiyuan Province.
1938 The Third Reich’s police issued orders restricting Jews’ movement.
1940: Axis destroyers Pigafetta, Da Recco, Pessagno, and Riboty bombarded Greek positions on the island of Corfu. The Axis’s submarine U‐103 sank two Allied ships and U‐95 damaged another, but it lost U‐104 somewhere off Ireland’s northern coast. The Axis also deployed its Reserve Police Battalion 101 to the Łódź ghetto and gave it orders to shoot anyone who came too close to the fence.
Here is an essay I wrote on a similar theme. It compares the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the struggle of the Palestinian people.
I saw a great post about Shoah-proof to debunk idiot Holocaust deniers, unfortunately it was a Pro-Israel account, but their response was too good for me to not give a like despite their shitty views on modern politics. They debunked the “wooden doors” myth, (yes, certainly some concentration camps had wooden doors in gas chambers, they were still effective enough to be lethal, but Nazis later replaced these with airtight doors.) the chimney with nothing attached to it (this was a recreation, not the actual chimney. The actual chimney was destroyed in parts and hidden to hide Nazi atrocities and it was rebuilt as proof later) and the account even did the thankless work of looking through German documents to disprove false claims of the number of deaths in these camps. I’ll make it clear that what is happening in Palestine is outright Genocide, anyone who denies it is a fucking disgusting snake, but I have a lot of respect and compassion for people who debunk myths about the Shoah. So many innocents were systematically killed, that’s why I respect Norman Finklstein so much, he sees that both genocides are disgusting and awful and calls out both.
