Media Analysis

The left has ‘weaponized’ Holocaust against Israel, says advocate

On Thursday, Yossi Klein Halevi, the author and Israel advocate, said that the left has “weaponized” the Holocaust against Israel. Speaking on i24 News on the 75th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation, he said that he “frequently” hears leftwingers saying of Israel, “How can you do the same thing to Palestinians” that was done to Jews during the Holocaust.

I have never heard this charge from the left in the context of European genocide. Many critics of Israel have said that Israelis have internalized the Nazi trauma by making Palestinians into Jews, and therefore subhuman. Many on the left say that Israeli actions mimic certain Nazi persecutions of Jews; I and others have compared the Gaza blockade to the Warsaw Ghetto. But Auschwitz and the extermination? I haven’t heard any rational person argue that Israel is doing the same thing to Palestinians.

Halevi is sounding the new ban on any criticism of Israel the invokes the Holocaust. Such criticism is automatically deemed antisemitic under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition that has now been widely adopted in the west.

Right on time: a BBC reporter is being smeared as an antisemite for criticizing Israel for overplaying the victim card.

Orla Guerin of the BBC

Orla Guerin reported from Jerusalem ahead of the ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz:

“In Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, images of the dead. Young soldiers troop in to share in the binding tragedy of the Jewish people. The state of Israel is now a regional power. For decades, it has occupied Palestinian territories. But some here will always see their nation through the prism of persecution and survival.”

Two former BBC executives and Jewish leaders said the comment was “antisemitic,” according to the Guardian. Danny Cohen, a former BBC television exec, said:

“The attempt to link the horrors of the Holocaust to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply offensive and upsetting. It was unnecessary, insensitive and particularly ugly in the days before Holocaust Memorial Day.”

While

Amanda Bowman, the vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said the report was “crass and offensive” and questioned Guerin’s lack of impartiality on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

This shows how they use even the mentioning of Palestinian oppression as qualifying as antisemitic, Jonathan Ofir points out. They are licensed by the IHRA playbook: “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

P.S. Yossi Klein Halevi has said “there is no Judaism without Zionism,” and anti-Zionist Jews are outside the Jewish community. This is a man of influence. Halevi was the go-to expert for the former New York Times correspondent in Israel, Jodi Rudoren, now editor of the Forward. And Halevi has been sponsored in the U.S. by both the rightwing Israel lobby, AIPAC, and the leftleaning branch, J Street. J Street seems to accept Halevi’s redlines, for it invites no anti-Zionist Jews to speak.

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On Thursday, Yossi Klein Halevi, the author and Israel advocate, said … that he “frequently” hears leftwingers saying of Israel, “How can you do the same thing to Palestinians” that was done to Jews during the Holocaust. …

That’s a valid question:
– about which Zionists can and do get indignant (or feign indignation);
– around which they can and do tiptoe and dance; but
– for which none of them has a valid, morality-based reply.

… P.S. Yossi Klein Halevi has said “there is no Judaism without Zionism,” and anti-Zionist Jews are outside the Jewish community. …

Zionists are disturbingly good at being anti-Semitic.

The truth hurts the tiny Nazi hearts of the Zionists.

I’ve been fantasizing in the past few days about creating a design for a t-shirt or poster campaign that reads “Judaism is not Zionism. Judaism is not racist and apartheidist.”

Or something along those lines.

A righteous Jew steps forth and tells it like it is:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-netanyahu-exploits-the-holocaust-to-brutalize-the-palestinians-1.8437715

“Netanyahu Exploits the Holocaust to Brutalize the Palestinians” Haaretz, Jan. 23/20, by Hagai El-ad, executive director of B’Tselem.

“Netanyahu didn’t invent the idea of leveraging the Holocaust for political gain. Yet he is taking even that low to new depths, stripping Palestinians of basic human rights in the name of the survivors of the Holocaust.”

“Benjamin Netanyahu did not invent the idea of leveraging the Holocaust for political gain. Yet, like so much else in current Israeli politics, he is taking even that low to new depths.

“According to Haaretz, Israel’s prime minister intends to exploit the Fifth World Holocaust Forum – convening this week in Jerusalem to mark 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz – to call on world leaders to publicly back Israel’s self-serving position that the International Criminal Court in The Hague has no jurisdiction in the occupied Palestinian territories.

“Netanyahu began this exercise barely 48 hours after ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda announced last month, after five years of preliminary examination, that she is ready to open an investigation into potential war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza, pending an ICC judicial decision on jurisdiction.

“Wasting no time, Netanyahu responded that ‘new edicts are being issued against the Jewish people – anti-Semitic edicts by the International Criminal Court.’

“This cynical reframing is staggering, both intellectually and morally.

“The Palestinians who live under Israel’s occupation are a people bereft of rights. For decades, their existence has been governed by the arbitrary whims of their occupiers. They cannot vote for the government that controls every aspect of their lives. They have no army to defend themselves. They do not control the borders of their own territory, or their ability to travel abroad, or even how long it will take them to get to the nearest Palestinian town – if even allowed to do so.

“They also have no recourse to justice through Israel’s legal mechanisms. Israeli prosecutors and judges process Palestinians in the occupied territories through a ‘justice system’ that delivers an almost 100 percent conviction rate. At the same time, this system works to ensure impunity for Israeli security forces who kill, abuse or torture them.

“For Palestinians, quite literally, the International Criminal Court is their court of last resort. Yet Netanyahu, backed by Israel’s entire political leadership, is trying to quash even this faint hope.

“How dehumanizing, to insist on denying a people’s last recourse to even an uncertain, belated, modicum of justice. How degrading to do so while standing on the shoulders of Holocaust survivors, insisting that this is somehow being carried out in their name.

“What a lack of historical memory and moral compass it must take to ignore the key lesson the world gleaned from the ashes of the 1940s: that no person should ever, under any circumstance, be left bare of rights, precisely because – as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights tells us – ‘disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.’

“But Netanyahu goes even further, arguing that the very same ashes give rise to the opposite conclusion: that there is a people – the Palestinian people – who should remain bare of rights under all circumstances.

“A bare life with neither land nor ballot, court nor justice. Where freedom of movement extends only as far as the nearest checkpoint. Where soldiers can enter any home, at any time. Where the only constant is how little control one has over one’s life.

“Shame on you, Prime Minister Netanyahu. Shame, also, on any world leader who goes along with the travesty of equating a people’s attempt to achieve justice with anti-Semitism. Taking this cowardly position does not only betray the Palestinians’ hope for freedom and dignity. It joins in the slow death of the lessons that have guided humanity for the past 75 years and are now drowning in the rising authoritarian tide around the world.

“This is not the world that humanity tried to build after World War II, after the Holocaust – but it is the world of Putin and Trump, Modi and Orbán, Netanyahu and Bolsonaro. Indeed, we are already living in their cowardly new world. Yet it remains in our hands to decide if the past’s painful lessons will be allowed to be turned on their head in order to further oppression – or remain loyal to a vision of freedom and dignity, justice and rights, for all.”

Phil hasn’t visited MW’s Facebook page. Commenters put forward the noxious equation right there, repeatedly–up front or in cowardly innuendo form (“It’s a good question”; “It’s my First Amendment right”). Or is he merely disputing the wingedness of these cretins?

“Amanda Bowman, the vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said the report was “crass and offensive” and questioned Guerin’s lack of impartiality on the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

Eli Wiesel

… source for the goose perhaps but not the gander?