Forget the Holocaust

What Israel is trying to do is erase Gaza from the map, wipe it from history.

For decades, Gaza has been the world’s largest open air prison (even David Cameron used those words after he visited). It is a source of profound shame precisely because it replicates the ghetto conditions Jews were forced to endure under Nazism. And now, after a year of unimaginable destruction, the Israeli Parliament has voted to make the UN agency for Palestine, UNRWA, illegal. There can be no doubt any more that Israel is and has been deliberately targeting the entire population of Gaza including civilians, and not just with bombardment and large scale military destruction but with mass starvation. They have repeatedly said as much, despite the simultaneous rebuttals in the international media; and that is what they have been doing.

Of course, their pretext is, as usual, their claim (with no evidence) that UNRWA is somehow tied to Hamas. This too they learned from the Nazis, who likewise labelled anyone they disliked “terrorists”. No, really, I am not making this up - the US army actually developed their counterinsurgency tactics after WWII by consulting Wehrmacht officers and copying and adapting Nazi manuals. And then they trained the Israelis. There is one recurring theme here, taken directly from the Nazis - anything you want to target or destroy, you label it as “terrorist”. A hospital becomes a “terrorist base”. A UN school becomes a “terrorist hideout”. A refugee camp becomes a “terrorist training camp”. A freedom fighter legitimately exercising their rights under ethical principle as well as international law by engaging in armed struggle against an illegal occupation and an apartheid state? “Terrorist”.

But the real fact of the matter is that the thousands of civilians in Gaza who have been killed, the millions who have been left homeless as entire buildings have been levelled to the ground, are actually being targeted - not for anything they have done, but for what they are, what they might one day become, and what they might do one day in the future, in their legitimate struggle against oppression. For any of you who watched ‘Minority Report’ or know the Philip K. Dick story, this is ‘precrime’ - something straight out of dystopian science fiction. (Something along these lines has in fact been part of secret US policy for years, including drone strikes on children and family of “terrorists”, which have been well documented by investigative journalists.)

Some Israelis get upset at such comparisons and hurl accusations of anti-semitism precisely because the comparisons ring true, because in fact the irony could not be more palpable, that Jews are perpetrating on another group of people the inhuman conditions once imposed on them by the Nazis, and have been doing so for decades, maintaining an illegal occupation and a brutal apartheid police state (while also deliberately funding and supporting extremist factions like Hamas in order to radicalise Palestinian leadership and undermine moderates, and derail any possibility of a peace process).

I think it is time to strip from Israel the veil of perpetual victimhood and consign the Holocaust to history where it belongs. It does not belong to any one nation, and Jews weren’t the only victims of Nazism - tens of millions of others died in WWII. Israeli leaders, of whatever political persuasion, clearly have not learned the lessons of history, certainly not the lessons I learned from my own grandparents’ struggle against Nazism, the lesson that almost any genuine Holocaust survivor would surely agree with: “never again” means never again. Not just “never again” for Jews, but “never again” for anyone.

Or as one great writer put it, “when you fight monsters, beware that you do not become a monster yourself. When you gaze deep into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

Treating Israel as the perpetual victim in today’s context, where they clearly are the oppressor and aggressor, far worse than Putin and the Russian invasion in Ukraine - applying double standards in this way, just because of the Holocaust and European historical guilt, is not much different from excusing a serial child rapist murderer just because he was molested as a child himself. The historical facts of the Holocaust do not exempt Israel from the principles of international law and morality and ethics that apply to other nations.

Forget the Holocaust, which the Palestinians had nothing to do with anyway - look at what is happening now, in Gaza and the West Bank, what has been happening for 70 years and is still happening, and the devastating consequences for the whole world if the conflict in the Middle East escalates further. This is genocide. This bloody mess was created by European colonialism (not much better than Nazism); and it will not be fixed by shipping more weapons from the US and UK and Germany to Israel and providing them military and logistical support - this will only make it worse in the long run.

The US is the most advanced and powerful military in the world, and together Israel and its backers can in theory easily achieve military supremacy in the short term. And yet, will that make the world a safer place in the long term? Will we be safer, friends, when bombs start exploding in New York and London as a result of this debacle? Look what happened in Afghanistan - the US, for all its military might, failed. 20 years on, they withdrew and the Taliban is back in power. The world is not a better or safer place. And this is the effect that Western meddling in world affairs and military intervention generally has in the world, especially the Middle East - it leads to more chaos and violence and destruction and horror. The kind of chaos that opens up a power vacuum and leads to the emergence of more and more extreme factions. Ever wonder why we have a refugee crisis in Europe? Well, it has a lot to do with the massive doses of pointless violence unleashed by our governments in the west on less fortunate parts of the world (e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan), which destabilised the whole region.

Recently, in response to demands from Caribbean leaders, our prime minister said that he won’t engage in any discussions about Britain paying reparations for slavery or even making an official apology, for the millions of Africans who were brutally enslaved and transported across the world as forced labourers (another thing the Nazis liked to do, and not just to Jews, to feed their war machine); not to mention the millions killed by colonisation, by Europeans illegally migrating and occupying and pillaging and plundering across Africa and Asia for centuries.

How ironic, given that, as I recall, Diane Abbott was suspended from the Labour Party last year for making comments to the effect that the racist discrimination suffered by black people is worse than the discrimination suffered by white people such as Irish and Jews. A bit tactless, but I’d say she has a point.

Just think, how often we hear from politicians and commentators talk about the Holocaust and anti-semitism and so forth, how much money and technology has been poured into Israel by the US and UK and Germany and other western countries, how all the world leaders get together for Holocaust Remembrance Day every year, and so on. But the millions of Africans who were brutally enslaved, or the millions murdered by colonial rampages? Nada. Keir Starmer doesn’t even wanna talk about it, because he’d rather “look to the future”.

It’s not as if this is all ancient history. It was more devastating, and the African continent has yet to recover from the ravages of slavery and colonialism.

The Holocaust is easy, when it comes to political point-scoring, because it is easy for politicians today to distance themselves from the Nazis (well, most of them anyway). But colonialism and empire and slavery, not so much. Emmanuel Macron stands pretty much alone among western leaders (certainly among those from former colonial powers) in denouncing European colonialism as “barbarity”. This is because of widespread and deeply institutionalised racism, and because the wealth of many western nations was built on colonialism, on theft and murder and genocide, it was built by hordes of illegal immigrants from Europe, armed and dangerous, plundering and pillaging across Asia and Africa, rampaging and then pretending they were bringing ‘civilisation’ to the ancient civilisations they had ravaged. This is the bedrock of the current world order and the key reason for the pre-eminent position of Europe and the United States in it. What is alarming in what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for the past 70 years is not just how much it resembles Nazism, but how much it resembles what Europeans did in Africa and Asia and the Americas. That is ultimately another reason why the key European powers and the US are so closely aligned with Israel - the sympathy of fellow genocidal settler colonialists. Western European and American wealth is built on the enslavement and murder of Africans and Native Americans, Israeli wealth is built on the ghettoisation and imprisonment and murder of Palestinians. Israel is a criminal enterprise built on the blood and crushed bones of Palestinian children.

Sure, the Germans may have lingering historical guilt over the Holocaust, which may be why they support Israel as part of their ‘staatsraison’ - but it’s not as if they only killed Jews in World War II. They killed a lot more Russians, for instance - a lot more. Around 20 million, including at least 13 million civilians (of whom only around 10 percent were Jews). Yet that somehow doesn’t bring Russian interests to feature anywhere in Germany's ’staatsraison’ nor lead to any special German-Russian relationship based on historical guilt. On the contrary, the Germans have taken a very different stance toward Russia’s territorial pretensions in Ukraine, versus Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine which is far more brutal. But oh, you might say, the Nazis didn’t gas the Russians or burn them in the ovens like the Jews, they just used brutal military tactics, bombardment, starvation policies, mass executions, forced labour, and so forth - so that makes it somehow less tragic or less reprehensible? I don’t think so. I think the real reasons for this double standard and for Germany’s pro-Israel ‘staatsraison’ have less to do with logic or ethical or moral principles or even history, and more to do with ideology.

It’s almost as if all the Holocaust remembrance, all the incantations and incitements to remember, the mantras of “never again” repeated by Holocaust survivors, it’s as if the real point here, the real effect of all this “remembering” is actually to induce a sort of collective amnesia, to make us forget - to obscure all the other genocides and atrocities throughout history, before and after, to ignore or pardon in particular the atrocities committed by Jews or the Jewish Israeli state, to preserve the Holocaust as an exceptional event like no other and to put the suffering of Jews on a pedestal as being somehow exceptional. If you follow only the mainstream corporate media, you might be forgiven for thinking the Israelis are now somehow suffering just as much as the Palestinians in Gaza (who, even before the latest round of conflict, had been living in prison conditions under an illegal occupation for 70 years, routinely targeted by extrajudicial killings and indefinite detention without trial, dispossession, land theft, etc). On CNN they even feature sympathy pieces about the trauma that Israeli soldiers experience (poor sods) from crushing Palestinian civilians alive under their tanks (all “terrorists” of course).

Why is it the Irish and South Africans and their governments, regardless of political persuasion, who see no issue with supporting Palestine and calling for a ceasefire, and condemning Israel’s actions? They are both as nations historic victims of European colonialism, apartheid and genocidal policies. That’s why.

On the scale of suffering, what is actually exceptional in history is the sheer destruction wrought upon the world by mainly western imperial and neo-imperial powers, from the early colonial exploits and genocides and the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the world wars and the Vietnam war and the various US military rampages and coup d'etats particularly across Latin America, the murder of millions, along with the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention the occupation of Palestine for the past 70 years and the current genocide being broadcast in real time on social media. All this has gone on far longer and has had far wider repercussions, and is rooted in a far deeper racism. Just look at all the outpouring of support for Ukrainian refugees from the British public and politicians alike - can you even imagine anything like that for Syrians or Iraqis? On the contrary, with non-European refugees, even those from wars the UK itself has caused (or especially those) far more has been done to keep them out and malign them in the tabloid press and government PR than to welcome them.

Just the other day, a court handed down a verdict in the criminal trial of a police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man during a routine stop and search in Streatham, South London, where I work - not guilty. Of course, the policeman was just “doing his job” as a firearms officer, which is to shoot people, even if they are unarmed, apparently. The jury took just 3 hours to reach a verdict. I’ll bet that if the victim, instead of an unarmed black man, was white - the outcome would have been very different. The jury would have had a very different interpretation of what a firearms officer’s job is.

I’d say Diane Abbott has a point. The reason why these things keep happening and the reason so little is done about it (except when protests like Black Lives Matter break out into the open, or the 2011 riots), is the same reason why there is so much concern with the Holocaust in officialdom or among our political leaders, and so little concern with slavery and colonialism, or the genocide taking place right now in Gaza. So little concern for the latter, that they banned any reference to genocide at the recently-held Labour Party conference here in the UK. So much for free speech.

So let us forget the term “Holocaust” and speak instead of holocausts and genocides and atrocities, of racism and slavery, of crimes against humanity, of crimes that no nation or group can commit with impunity and for which any nation must be judged harshly, and equally so.

And history will judge Israel and the US and their allies harshly, in the long run - not least because, when you label all your enemies and your victims “terrorists”, you risk the fate of the proverbial ‘boy who cried “wolf”’ - when you actually do get attacked by real terrorists, nobody will believe you.