By Miri -
Obviously, using the Nazi
analogy is a very potent discursive strategy since "anything
associated with the Nazis is condemned with unconditional moral
indignation in most contemporary Western societies".
One of our main goals at
Green Olive Tours is to point out the complexity of the situation in
Palestine and Israel. We therefore avoid using generalisations which
represent Israelis and Palestinians as homogeneous entities and
therefore also strongly condemn comparisons between Nazi Germany and
Israel as simplistic and historically inadequate. We would further
like to emphasise that such a comparison is essentially unproductive
for the Palestinian cause and can further have severe consequences
which unfortunately also amount to anti-Semitic acts and the
slandering of the memory of victims and survivors of the Holocaust,
both Jewish and non-Jewish.
Many evils were committed
throughout human history, and some of those events exceeded the
Holocaust in terms of the number of deaths involved, yet many
historians and other scholars claim that the Holocaust committed by
Nazi Germany and its allies was an unparalleled event and is
therefore beyond comparison. Kundnani persuasively points to three
features of the Holocaust which, taken together, make it unique. The
first one is the scale of the killing: six million Jews and countless
others were executed due to their religion, ethnicity, physical
ability, sexual orientation, and political perspective, which brings
us to the second feature: the motivation for the killing. Jews were
exterminated because they were Jews, Sinti and Roma were executed
because they were Sinti and Roma etc.. Finally the method, millions
of people were killed in an industrialised way, in death factories,
which were pretty unprecedented in history. Kundnani continues that
according to his knowledge there is no event "anywhere in the
world at any time in history that possesses this combination of
scale, motivation and method – in other words, an industrialised
genocide on the scale of the Holocaust."
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Cartoon by Carlos Latuff, depicting former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon kissing Adolf Hitler |
But let's take those three
features and apply them to Israel and its treatment of the
Palestinian population.
1) Scale of the Killing
It is admittedly
difficult, if not impossible, to find a reliable source for the total
death toll of Palestinians since the origin of the conflict at around
1917, the year of the issuing of the Balfour Declaration, which
affirmed British support for the establishment of a Jewish national
home in Mandate Palestine, and which thus constitutes the starting
point of increasing tensions between the local Palestinian population
and the Zionist movement. The notion of finding an accurate number is
further complicated by the fact that third parties, such as the
British and numerous other Arab states have been involved in the
conflict since its onset, and that there has also been a considerable
number of fatalities due to intra-Palestinian violence.
According to Heinsohn, the
conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has caused 51,000 deaths
between 1950 and 2006, 35,000 of who were Palestinians. While the
numbers to date should be considerably higher and probably more
uneven, with a disproportionately higher number of Palestinian
fatalities, it is safe to say that it will still be far below
100,000.
2) Motivation
In the aftermath of the
Holocaust, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), which
legally defined the term genocide and affirmed it as a crime under
international law. Article 2 of said Convention defines genocide as
"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:a) Killing members of the group;b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the groupc) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Since the CPPCG came into
effect there have been a number of disagreements concerning its
interpretation. Legal scholars, as well as genocide scholars have
been debating whether the "intent to destroy" a group
should be understood exclusively as the physical-biological
destruction of the group, or whether a more broader view of
intentional destruction of societies or groups through violence and
coercion of various kinds should be considered. Those advocating the
latter view would also consider intentional mass displacements of
populations, i.e. ethnic cleansing, such as experienced by 700,000
Palestinians in 1948, as genocide.
Whether or not the
Palestinian experience can be defined as an attempted genocide seems
thus to be a matter of interpretation of the term. Yet even those
scholars who do support the equation of ethnic cleansing with
genocide are not contending that Israel ever had the plan to destroy
the Palestinian society as a whole. Both in 1948, as well as today,
the main motivation behind Israeli policies must be seen as extending
Israeli control over as much territory as possible, and as some like
Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerlin argue, to make the creation of a
viable Palestinian state all but impossible to achieve, a notion that
he has labelled “politicide”. While racism is definitely on the
rise, including within the Israeli government, Israeli policies
yielding at the confiscation of Palestinian land and the concomitant
displacement of the Palestinian population can by no means be equated
with Hitler's "final solution of the Jewish question",
which aimed at the annihilation of the Jewish people as a whole.
3) Methods:
There can be no question
that, although Israel is continuously violating the basic rights of
Palestinians, including killing and illegitimately incarcerating
them, their methods can by no means be compared to those of the Nazis
and their concentration camps, which were built in order to confine
Jews into the smallest possible space, eventually in preparation for
their ultimate extinction. Millions of people were systematically
killed by gassing and extreme work under starvation
conditions.
We can thus conclude that
comparisons between Israel and Germany's Third Reich are historically
unfounded and mainly serve to simplify the complexity of both
situations.
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Placard seen in a demonstration in solidaity with Gaza, Chicago, November 2012 |
Whether or not the playing of the Nazi card against
Israel and Zionism in itself amounts to anti-Semitism is also very
much disputed. Those Jews who view Israel and Zionism as central to
the Jewish identity will unquestionably regard such a move as
anti-Semitic, those who define their identity in different ways may
feel differently. At the same time it also very much depends on the
nature of the comparison. The above illustrated equation of a
swastika with a Star of David, a symbol that, although it is also used
in the Israeli flag, represents Jewry as a whole, clearly constitutes
an anti-Semitic act, even if it was intended to criticise the Jewish
state only. It is thus, as Iganski and Sweiry write, "neither
useful nor necessary to try to get inside the heads of those who use
such discourse [...] to determine whether antisemtic bias is at work,
it is the consequences of the words [or imagery] they use that
matter."
The fact that the Nazi
card is disproportionately more often played against Israel than at
any other state points to other implications of the historically
inadequate comparison, namely at a double standard that criticises Israel's actions much harsher than that of other states, as well as an intentional reversion of roles in
which the Jews as victims of Nazism are being transformed into Nazis
themselves. Notice that here again the emphasis lies on Jews as a
global community and not on Israel and its policies towards
Palestinians.
While there is no question that the Holocaust has and
continues to be shamelessly instrumentalised by the Israeli state and
its supporters themselves, the real pain and trauma that it has
caused to millions of people could not be alleviated. Thus using and
relativising the Holocaust also affects and slanders the memories of
those who have been victimised by it, and whose lives may not be
connected to the state of Israel and its policies towards the
Palestinians at all.
In line with this is also
the often heard argument that as a people who underwent an attempted
genocide themselves, Jews are expected to conduct themselves better
than other nations. This naïve and morally dubious expectation
completely ignores the fact that mass expulsions and killings were
unfortunately still commonplace after the end of WWII and begs the
question of why the atrocities committed by Jews after the Holocaust
are considered to be more sickening than those committed by people
who did not undergo mass murder.
The fact that the
suffering endured by Palestinians is not comparable in scope to the
Holocaust, or other genocides, such as in Rwanda or Bosnia, does not
diminish it. There is plenty to criticise about the policies,
practices and leaders of the Israeli state and protest can be
expressed in numerous forceful and much more adequate and productive
ways.
Marc Levine emphasises that also for the Palestinian cause it is crucial to provide an accurate historical context to the current conflict. “[T]he use of highly charged historical comparisons that do not hold up to scrutiny unnecessarily weaken the Palestinian case against the occupation”. Furthermore, “handing Israel's supporters the gift of inaccurate or exaggerated comparisons does not help this struggle, particularly not in Israel and the US, the two most important battlegrounds in this conflict.“
For a more thorough analysis on the significance of the Holocaust in Israeli society and as a response to this article, read on here
Marc Levine emphasises that also for the Palestinian cause it is crucial to provide an accurate historical context to the current conflict. “[T]he use of highly charged historical comparisons that do not hold up to scrutiny unnecessarily weaken the Palestinian case against the occupation”. Furthermore, “handing Israel's supporters the gift of inaccurate or exaggerated comparisons does not help this struggle, particularly not in Israel and the US, the two most important battlegrounds in this conflict.“
For a more thorough analysis on the significance of the Holocaust in Israeli society and as a response to this article, read on here
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