I remember how our Israeli Prime Minster, Benjamin Netanyahu, told Holocaust survivors at an elderly home, “The Holocaust happened because there was no State of Israel. If there had been a Jewish state before, there would have been no Holocaust.”
Later, he would tell the whole world while speaking from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum that “the Jewish state has learned the lessons of the Holocaust. Has the world learned the lessons of the Holocaust?”
What lesson has the Jewish state learned?
That we, ourselves, can commit a Holocaust in Gaza in 2024, and then deny that it exists. Indeed, we have even decried sober UN appraisals of our genocide as an “obscene inversion of reality.”
We haven’t even seen the worst of it. As Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa reports from her visit to Gaza, “the reality on the ground is infinitely worse than the worst videos and photos that we’re seeing in the West.” Israelis generally avoid seeing any of it — what do we care?
“People first resorted to eating horse and donkey feed, but that’s gone. Now they’re eating the donkeys and horses,” Abulhawa writes. “Some are eating stray cats and dogs, which are themselves starving and sometimes feeding on human remains that litter streets where Israeli snipers picked off people who dared to venture within the sight of their scopes. The old and weak have already died of hunger and thirst.”
“What I see is a holocaust.” she summarizes. “The incomprehensible culmination of 75 years of Israeli impunity for persistent war crimes.”
I second that.
But most Israelis are holocaust deniers. Oh, how we hate the Holocaust deniers, so oblivious to the total destruction of European Jewry. How could they be so utterly callous in questioning the numbers, saying that it was “just a war?”
That’s what we do. We downplay it, call it a war of self-defense, and erase history — it all started on October 7. Over 13,000 dead children, some starved to death, do not seem to alter our perception. It’s just collateral damage.
This is possible because the Palestinians are Nazis now. If you ask about “civilians,” Israelis will, in the words of former Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, say: “What is wrong with you?!” Or, like Israeli President Isaac Herzog, they would assert that there are no “uninvolved” in Gaza.
They’re all Nazis.
But you know what? We are the Judeo-Nazis now. It’s never been so clear. Oh, yes, there are right-wing Judeo-Nazis, who have spoken of “wiping out” Huwwara before October 7, but now there are the many kibbutzniks who openly speak of wiping out Gaza. Two-thirds of us, including nearly 40% of the “left wing,” literally want to deprive Gazans of the most basic humanitarian aid (it’s 80% on the right wing, by the way, and they constitute about two-thirds of Israeli voters).
In other words, most of us literally want to starve Palestinians.
Others opt for a more “proportionate” genocide, simply bombing them by the hundreds, ostensibly for the purpose of killing one Hamas leader.
We have learned nothing. Our morality is dust.
Should I be more nuanced? Yes, perhaps there were some more sensible Nazis. I hear Hitler was generally quite polite in his familiar circles. But not to the human animals. They could be exterminated, and the world would be a better place without such vermin.
Now the Palestinians are the “human animals,” in the words of our Defense Minister, Yoav Galant. I haven’t heard many Israelis rebuff his words. After all, he’s been critical of Netanyahu from inside the government — he’s nuanced!
The depths to which we have sunk leave me wondering how there still are countries on our side. What the hell is wrong with them? Don’t they see that, by supporting Israel economically and militarily, they are abetting a genocide?
Clearly, Israelis aren’t the only ones who haven’t learned the lessons of the Holocaust.
History Will Record That Israel Committed a Holocaust
March 25, 2024
By Susan Abulhawa
“IT’S 8 P.M. in Gaza, Palestine right now, the end of my fourth day in Rafah and the first moment I’ve had to sit in a quiet place to reflect.
I’ve tried to take notes, photos, mental images, but this moment is too big for a notepad or my struggling memory. Nothing prepared me for what I would witness.
Before I made it across the Rafah-Egypt border, I read every bit of news coming out of Gaza or about Gaza. I did not look away from any video or image posted from the ground, no matter how gruesome, shocking or traumatizing.
I kept in touch with friends who reported on their situations in the north, middle and south of Gaza—each area suffering in different ways. I stayed current on the latest statistics, the latest political, military and economic maneuverings of Israel, the U.S. and the rest of the world.
I thought I understood the situation on the ground. But I didn’t.
Nothing can truly prepare you for this dystopia. What reaches the rest of the world is a fraction of what I’ve seen so far, which is only a fraction of this horror’s totality.
Gaza is hell. It is an inferno teeming with innocents gasping for air.
But even the air here is scorched. Every breath scratches and sticks to the throat and lungs.
What was once vibrant, colorful, full of beauty, potential and hope against all odds, is draped in gray-colored misery and grime.
BARELY ANY TREES
Journalists and politicians call it war. The informed and honest call it genocide.
What I see is a holocaust—the incomprehensible culmination of 75 years of Israeli impunity for persistent war crimes.”
https://www.wrmea.org/israel-palestine/history-will-record-that-israel-committed-a-holocaust.html
Speaking of learning the right lessons from history, here’s a breaking story with some relevance to the current situation – archeologists have uncovered a network of tunnels used by the Jews to hide out from their occupiers! When you’re occupied by genocidal forces you seek any protection you can, that should be the lesson of history. Emphasis mine:
Archeologists in Israel have uncovered a huge labyrinth used by Jewish rebels to hide from the Roman legions, Reuters reports….The underground refuge in northern Israel was dug nearly 2,000 years ago during a revolt against the Roman Empire….The archeological discovery echoes some of the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict issues….In a video by Al Jazeera, Uri Berger of the Israel Antiquities Authority said the network was dug “for families to hide while the Romans were here, because they feared for their lives, for their children.”….While the tunnels being excavated in present-day Huqoq confirm the Jewish ancestral relationship with ancient Israel, they are close to land that includes the former village called Yaquq, once home to over 200 hundred Palestinian Arabs who farmed wheat, barley, olives, goats, and honey….Yaquq was depopulated in the Israeli War of Independence, an event Palestinians call the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic and refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of more than half the Palestinian population from the territory established as the Israeli state in 1948.
https://www.businessinsider.com/israels-labyrinth-used-rebel-jews-against-roman-legions-opened-up-2024-4
“Roman general Yoavus Gallantus spoke today at the Temple of Jupiter, saying that the Jewish rebels must understand that Palestine belongs to Rome and Rome only, and unless they surrender they will be mercilessly crushed.”, according to the Imperial News Agency.
For the defenders of Israel’s war on Gaza, the game is up
Staunch allies calling themselves friends of Israel are beginning to realise they are also friends of the murderers of western aid workers, friends of genocide and friends of fascism
By David Hearst
“Six months on, the entire edifice that allowed Israeli forces to kill more than 33,000 Palestinians and wound another 75,000, displace a population of over 2.3 million and then starve them, demolish the north of Gaza, dismantle the health service and signal that it would do the same in Rafah for the next six months, is tumbling down.
Political leaders who framed this carnage as Israel’s right to defend itself, journalists who peddled fictional horror stories about beheaded babies and mass rape on 7 October, and editors who day in, day out ignored stories about aid convoys being targeted by Israeli forces are rushing for cover.
All the arguments they used to maintain this slaughter are crumbling in their hands – that this is a just war, that Israel must be allowed to finish the job, that the action taken is proportionate, that the legal process in the International Court of Justice hinders peace talks and can be ignored, that the UK and US can simultaneously admonish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and continue to arm him.
The dam has burst. The Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron can no longer play cat and mouse with Foreign Affairs Select Committee chair Alicia Kearns, who revealed a few days ago that government lawyers knew that Israel had breached international humanitarian law.”
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/04/06/for-the-defenders-of-israels-war-on-gaza-the-game-is-up/15/
Rather simplistic but it boils down to RACE!!! The European Jews looking down on the Arab Jews and anything else with brown skin.
Jonathan Ofir’s obscene comparison of Israel to the Nazis is an insult to the survivors and to the memory of the victims. Do we need to remind ourselves that the Jews never perpetrated an attack on Germany, murdering ,raping and kidnapping. I’m no supporter of Yoav Gallant , but what’s wrong with his reference to “human animals” (חיות אדם)? He was referring to perpetrators of the atrocities, not all Palestinians.
The worst point is what Mr.Ofir omits: no mention of our 133 kidnapped hostages. Children and women and men, Jews and Arabs and foreigners, civilians and soldiers, sick and wounded…our sisters and brothers….starved and abused and neglected. Who knows how many are still alive?
Free them now!!