How a victimised people becomes an abusing people, “having learned nothing and having forgotten nothing”
By Dimitris Konstantakopoulos
The director of a conservative, pro-government newspaper (in Greece) complained the other day “that the memory of the Holocaust is rapidly receding. There are many who don’t remember, have never read anything about it, don’t think it’s any of their business,” and it is because of this retreat of memory that, he believes, “violent anti-Semitism” is manifesting itself on American campuses. I would agree, but only halfway, with the writer. Indeed, humanity seems to have forgotten about Fascism and the Holocaust. That is why it allows the Jewish State to repeat, today, against the Palestinians, the methods of Fascism and the Holocaust, of which the Jews themselves were victims eighty or ninety years ago.
A French-Jewish friend, half of whose ancestors perished in Auschwitz, obviously devastated because the world she has created in her mind is being torn apart by the actions of her own kindred, keeps sending to a friend of mine many messages with information and complaints about what is happening in occupied Palestine. The last one he received was the following: “Forgive me for bombarding you with e-mails, but I feel as if I’m living a nightmare since October 7. What is the difference between a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps and this Palestinian who was arrested, tortured and is now a shadow of his former self? It’s like the madness of a recurring hallucination (‘Pardonnez moi de vous accabler de mails, mais là, je crois faire le pire des cauchemars depuis le 7 Octobre. Quelle différence entre un rescapé des camps de concentration nazis et ce palestinien arrêté, torturé, plus qu’amaigri? Comme une folie de reproduction – répétition hallucinatoire!’) .
Those who today assist and collaborate in the greatest crime against humanity, the greatest and most heinous atrocity that humanity has experienced for decades, either passively, pretending not to see, not to hear and not to understand, ignoring or downplaying and concealing the news about the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide, or, much more, actively supporting and justifying it, with the infamous “Israel’s right to self-defence”, bear responsibility for the crime themselves, just as Pontius Pilate did. They are the same people who in the Occupation would have turned the Jews over to the Germans. And they are often the descendants, political and ideological at least, if not physical, of those who actually did turn Jews over to the Germans during the Occupation.
After all, the historical roots of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s ruling Israeli Likud party are none other than the fascist-inspired current of “revisionist Zionism” (https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2023/12/ACHCAR/66374) , which was born in the interwar period and has always fought for the inclusion of at least all of Palestine in Israel. In 1948, dozens of prominent Jews, first and foremost Albert Einstein, pointed out the similarity of this current to Nazism and recalled its criminal terrorist practices against Arabs, Britons and even Jews themselves who disagreed with it, in a letter https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinLetterToTheNewYorkTimes.December41948/page/n1/mode/2up to the New York Times. This current and Netanyahu personally have also been accused https://www.timesofisrael.com/labor-chief-michaeli-rabin-was-assassinated-with-netanyahus-cooperation/ of being responsible for the assassination of then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the peace accords with Yasser Arafat. When this assassination took place, an Israeli journalist described it as a victory of the spirit of Zionist totalitarianism over the democratic spirit of the Greeks.
Today, the warnings of these very important Jews are solemnly borne out. Israel is ruled by an alliance of Netanyahu’s (as unapologetic as ever) secular far right with the religious fundamentalist far right, and some commentators go as far as describing the Israeli prime minister himself as the “godfather of modern Israeli fascism” https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/21/netanyahu-is-the-godfather-of-modern-israeli-fascism . This governing alliance is now carrying out its own “final solution” in Palestine and it is the same alliance that seeks to generalise war throughout the Middle East, following the ideas of Haushofer, the founder of the German geopolitics based on inequality that inspired Hitler.
A member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost scholar of Fascism, Zeev Sternhell wrote an essay in 2018, before he died, under the characteristic title: “In Israel, Growing Fascism and a Racism Analogous to That of Early Nazism.” According to Sternhell, the difference between them and the original Nazis is that they do not want the physical extermination of the Palestinians, but seek “only” to deny them “basic human rights”.
This was possibly the case in 2018. Now Israel’s rulers are gradually moving from the phase of oppression to the phase of extermination of the Palestinians, i.e. from “early” to “mature” Nazism. And they didn’t wait for the Hamas attack on October 7 to do it. They started much earlier in the West Bank, when Israel’s National Security Minister Ben-Gvir, described by his political opponents in Israel as a sadist, repeatedly called for the extermination of thousands of Palestinians. It is certainly tragic how a victimised people becomes an abuser people, “having learned nothing and having forgotten nothing”, without realising that they are laying the very foundations of their own downfall. As for us, we have indeed forgotten history, we have forgotten where totalitarianism led humanity a century ago and where its reappearance can is lead us today.
January 9th, 2024, published in Αντισημιτισμός, Ολοκαύτωμα και Νεοναζισμός translated from Greek by Christos Marsellos.
PS: If the methods employed by Israel will lead to the deportation or extermination of Palestinians, the consequences will be felt not only in the wider Middle East but to the whole planet. Because such a victory will contribute to the demolition of the democratic and humanistic ideology adopted – at least in words – by humanity after the victory over Nazism in 1945. A victory of such methods in Palestine will constitute an enormous contribution to the rise of various fascist and semi-fascists methods and to the escalation of wars in all the West as a minimum, the same way the victory of Franco in Spain 1939 opened the way for WWII.
There is an organic unity between NATO’ s aggressive policies in Ukraine, Israeli government’s policy in Gaza and the commercial – up to now – war against China. They all represent the general effort of the “collective West” to preserve its global domination. And it is not a simple coincidence that, in the final level, that is the level of politics application, the hardliners regarding Ukraine are exactly the same with the hardliners regarding Gaza: Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, whose force cannot but originate from choices of important forces inside the real center of power in the West, “the empire of Finance” (the same which is dictating its policies to the ex- Rothschild banker who happens to be the President of France). And whatever will happen to these three fronts will have huge repercussions to the other ones https://www.defenddemocracy.press/ukraine-palestine-taiwan-the-course-to-world-war-and-how-to-stop-it/.
March 14th, 2024
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