The Holocaust and Palestine
By Matthew Rothschild, September 2, 2009
Edward Said would not be pleased.
The towering Palestinian American intellectual had no patience for Holocaust deniers in the Arab world or in the Palestinian liberation movement.
He understood the calamity that was the Holocaust, and he believed in telling the truth about it, and about everything else.
Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique in 1998, Said noted: “Whether we like it or not, the Jews are not ordinary colonialists. Yes, they suffered the holocaust, and yes, they are the victims of anti-Semitism.”
He went on to say, quite rightly: “But no, they cannot use those facts to continue, or initiate, the dispossession of another people that bears no responsibility for either of those prior facts.”
But he returned to the necessity of telling the truth.
“We must recognize the realities of the holocaust not as a blank check for Israelis to abuse us, but as a sign of our humanity, our ability to understand history, our requirement that our suffering be mutually acknowledged,” he wrote. “. . . The real issue is intellectual truth and the need to combat any sort of apartheid and racial discrimination, no matter who does it. There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric. One thing must be clear in my firm opinion: we are not fighting the injustices of Zionism in order to replace them with an invidious nationalism (religious or civil) that decrees that Arabs in Palestine are more equal than others. The history of the modern Arab world - with all its political failures, its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetences, its decreasing production, the fact that alone of all modern peoples we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development - is disfigured by a whole series out-moded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the Elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much currency.”
So Edward Said would be especially dismayed this week as leading figures in Palestine are denying the Holocaust and remonstrating about the U.N.’s plans to teach children about the Holocaust in the schools it runs in Gaza.
Hamas’s spiritual leader Yunis al-Astal said this would be “marketing a lie” and a “war crime,” if you can believe that.
A Hamas legislator, Jamila al-Shanti, added, “Talk about the Holocaust and the execution of the Jews contradicts and is against our culture, our principles, our traditions, values, heritage, and religion.”
This insistence by Hamas on denying the reality of the Holocaust is as reprehensible as it is astonishing.
And it will only harden the opposition in Israel to reaching any true peace with the Palestinians.
Denying history gets you nowhere.
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Janet Vaughan was the first doctor to set foot in the liberated Belsen Concentration Camp. I know this to be true because she told me so and the late Janet Vaughan was an honest woman who later became head of Sommerville College, Oxford. The newsreels my father took me to see of scenes that remain vivid in my mind to this day, masses of human bodies being shoveled into graves by bulldozers, walking skeletons in abysmal settings could not have been faked. There might never have been a Joseph Kramer, The Beast of Belsen, but a Joseph Kramer was convicted at The Nuremberg Trials and executed. A man who claimed to have no feelings about the atrocities for which he had been accused because he was doing as ordered. Janet Vaughan said that what she saw in Belsen-Bergen Concentration Camp changed her life forever and I believe that. As I believed those terrible newsreels, the memories of which horrify me to this day.
I was decrying Israeli actions in Gaza recently to a neighbor visiting my home. He did not actually call me an Anti-Semite, he did say that I may not know it but deep inside myself I hated all Jews. I reported this to a Jewish acquaintance I sometimes meet when walking the dog in a nearby valley. He told me not to worry, 'idiots need to give titles.' I thought of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn dubbed self-hating Jews by Zionists and was happy to identify with men I have long admired. I suppose labels are important because they identify us by our differences, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, whatever, Palestinian, Englishman, American, Israeli, Indian, whoever. Labels divide us into recognizable groups; senior and junior, chosen and those not chosen, heaven or hell bound depending on who and what we believe in and defining who we are. It is strange how such definitions deny humanity. Strange how a God made by man in his own image gave us the most amazing gift of humanity for no better reason that to trap us into sin. It is strange how salvation is made to depend on our subservience to His Word as defined by Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, et al. thus separating rather than uniting us. It is strange how the young are forever at the service of the elderly willing to send them to their deaths in the name of democracy or whatever and over a million Iraqis killed in the present incursion according to Lancet the British Medical Journal. Those Iraqis must surely have been longing for democracy that they may worship as and when they pleased. Or was that available to them already? Could this unwarranted invasion have been jihad in reverse, a crusade?
Now Israel is condemning Iran for supposedly creating an atomic bomb. Iran condemns Israel for already having atomic weapons and we know that Israel does have them because they imprisoned the Israeli scientist who informed the world. Uranium tipped ammunition polluted large parts of Iraq and will continue to do so for centuries to come in the Anglo-American attempt to give Iraqis their hearts desire, the democracy that deprives so many Americans of health care, of work, of adequate salaries and pensions for those who have work, of their mortgaged homes and of education for their children. A democracy which offers never ending debt not only to citizens but to their whole country now owing billions of dollars in promissory notes to China. Thereal American dream must surely be the end of apartheid for rich and poor.
When I was in the Royal Navy we were at war with Korea and what a victory was scored from that carnage. Or was it? North versus South continues to this day, atomic weaponry is again used to justify continuing animosity. Aggression meets with more aggression and differences are expounded endlessly.
Supposedly the common state we all seek is democracy. Like it or not we must all subscribe to democracy as defined by Washington. This just has to be beneficial to all, have not atomic bombs, agent orange, the death and mutilation of millions and their descendants plus the destruction of our environment been justified in spreading democracy? Yet all we ever truly had in common was our despised humanity. Sadly we never discovered the courage to value humanity. In which case truth would seem to be the enemy of democracy.
The word holocaust was not invented for Nazi atrocities, the wholesale murder of six million Jews, five million Gipsies and others considered undesirable. Yes the Nazi holocaust did happen as holocausts have happened throughout the ages and continue to this day. The original Greek meaning of holocaust was sacrifice to the gods.
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