This is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
When I argued for a moratorium on Holocaust remembrance a few days ago, I was unaware of the call by the Joint List Chairman Ayman Odeh’s call for Palestinian citizens of Israel to observe Holocaust Remembrance Day. I was likewise unaware that the Director General of Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, is now serving military duty in the West Bank.
The Times of Israel quotes Odeh: “The Holocaust is an event without parallel. Anyone who denies any part of it is directly connected to a mechanism of evil.” The following day Oppenheimer posted on his Facebook page: “I passed Saturday at an outpost in Samaria (northern West Bank – AIC), this is my civic duty. I want to believe that when the order changes from guard duty to (settlement) removal, that my friends from the right will act like me.”
When I circulated a comment on both articles calling Odeh’s and Oppenheimer’s perspectives dead ends, a friend responded: “Your comment jolted me. But then I realized very reluctantly that it was accurate. This being said, any act of kindness or movement in the right direction while it may amount to nothing now — provides the compost needed for growth that will happen in the future.”
My friendly interlocutor may be correct in some instances but this particular moral arc of the universe, unlike Martin Luther King’s assertion, is already bent toward permanent injustice. For Odeh’s constituency the Nakba is almost seventy years old and continuing. Oppenheimer’s comment seems to miss the fact that Jerusalem and the West Bank have experienced almost fifty years of continuing and increasingly harsh occupation.
Is there a time limit for a justice that might come to fruition in the future? Is there a time limit to realize that the various ideas of justice for Palestinians within Israel and in the occupied territories are stillborn?
The arguments of Odeh and Oppenheimer are quite old. For decades now progressive Jews have asserted that if only Palestinians would assure Israelis of security and acceptance, Israelis would come around to a real Palestinian state. Yet even there in the details, a real Palestinian state wasn’t being offered. Talk of land swaps and a demilitarized Palestinian entity abounded. As Odeh and Oppenheimer counsel empathy and loyalty the same language is still being employed.
Palestinian-Israelis commemorating the Holocaust and Israeli peaceniks serving in the West Bank as a prelude to soldiers being ordered – and obeying – the dismantling of Jewish settlements is a dead end. Taken separately or together the result is decades more of appealing to a Jewish ethical tradition and an inclusive Israeli patriotism that is irredeemable. Such appeals become forms of enablement rather than investments in a just future.
Saluting the Holocaust and Israel is a failed, indeed false, patriotism. Such patriotism is the dead end of Jewish and Palestinian life.
You call for a moratorium on Holocaust remembrance (at a time of rising European antisemitism, no less), and Ayman Odeh does the right thing and calls on Palestinians to acknowledge the Holocaust. Seems to me you’re no Jew of conscience. You’re a Jew of madness.
I have no idea why Arab-Israelis should “respect” any genocide, but I agree that they – along with everyone else in the world – should understand all genocides, embrace the lessons they impart and insist on the universal and consistent application of justice, accountability and equality.
Zio-supremacists love to bray “Remember the Holocaust!” but, sadly, they have chosen to embrace injustice, immorality, supremacism and hypocrisy.
“Seems to me you’re no Jew of conscience. You’re a Jew of madness.”
And you Hophmi, are always a “Gentleman”!
I approve what Odeh did (and what Oppenheimer said). But my opinion, and yours it seems, is that these statements even if widely amplified will do no good. Israel has consistently, over the years, especially since 1988, called on Palestinians to do “one more thing” without which there can be no peace. Must Palestinians recognize Israel? OK, they did. No peace. If they say how important the Holocaust is, it cannot do any harm but will not do any good either. Israel is “on a roll” and doesn’t care — as it so often says — what other people “say”, only care about what Israel “does.” Mere words (such as UNSC 242, UNSC 465) are just that, mere words, and cut no ice with Israel.
Sad. Strong coercion must be used or reliably threatened to be used. The “S” in “BDS” is “sanctions”. Nothing else short of military force — whose ? — will persuade Israel to med its ways. An d every year that goes by, the harder becomes the educational work of persuading the Israeli “man on the street” of the prudence or morality (either) of mending Israel’s ways.
Things will get much worse, for both peoples, before they get better. Otherwise they will just get much worse for Palestinians.
The Holocaust happened more than 70 years ago. Iraqi holocaust, which is what the American invasion urged on and enabled by Israel and neocon zionists in the US started in 2003 and is continuing today. There was a holocaust perpetrated on Russian citizens during WWII that was just as serious and evil as anything done to the Jews (read about the camps for Russians and what was done to Russian citizens, over 6 million of whom perished, not to mention the soldiers that fought the invasion).
Yet, Netanyahu is not going to victory day in Russia presumably because he could care less that it was the Russian army – at a huge cost in blood – that liberated many camps, and indeed allowed the western allies to triumph on their end. Netanyahu is not going because it’s only the fate of jewish victims that really matter to him (if that much) AND many of the Russian civilians who died – the majority in fact, were non-Jews and therefore didn’t count all that much. Just as all the many victims of the Nazis do not matter all that much to the good, oh so moral, israeli citizens, who speak and lament only their perished ancestors, with barely a nod to the many others who died just as horribly and unnecessarily. And I know the one-directional nature of sympathies and empathies in israel all too well, even if lip service is paid to the ‘righteous gentiles”.
I am personally finding it quite tiresome for all the channels in the US to unveil various Holocaust stories and documentaries, almost exclusively about the jews that perished, even while shortchanging the fate of non-Jewish victims. Further ignoring the enormous atrocities perpetrated in Americans’ name in Iraq, and in Syria and ongoing in Ukraine, where the US is arming and abetting essentially neo-nazi groups (US soldiers have arrived to train the banderist, now whitewashed clean from the crimes of their spiritual godfathers of the Nazi era, the ones who participated – enthusiastically in Babi Yar and then some). makes one wonder on behalf of whom and how are Holocausts counted for public consumption.
With scant attention paid to victims who were not jewish in both the US and israel, and the ongoing campaign to vilify Russia for purely geopolitical reasons – now on fully obscene display far and wide, the Holocaust remembrance days come across as a celebration of Jewish power – the power to bend history so it arcs their way, not as a true mourning for victims of wars and genocides of all kinds.
So yes, for my own many reasons, I agree with Marc Ellis. It’s high time to call it quits for this remembrance day unless it takes place in a far more moral universe, rather than the disingenuous one built just for us. So we can properly align our memories in the selective ways chosen for us.
For myself, I’ll choose to remember the victims of many holocausts perpetrated on members of the human race, jewish and otherwise. I try to remember those every day not just on the one day designated by a select group of humans who consider themselves chosen over all others to prioratize their group’s particular sufferings. For me, all are chosen, and all lives taken away wantonly and collectively matter.