On holocausts and genocide
Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s a day that should be dedicated to never again for anyone. It’s a day that shouldn’t be particularizing Jewish people and their past trauma. How deep is the irony that the ICJ ruling came out on the eve of a day that concedes Israel is engaging in genocide?
Ruling that Israel must cease its genocidal acts is historic. Although the judges didn’t explicitly use the language of ceasefire, they essentially called for a de facto ceasefire because of the six provisional measures they laid out to protect Palestinians. Genocide and Holocaust Studies Professor Raz Segal noted these key findings:
“The provisional measures did not include an order for a cease-fire, which South Africa had requested, but they did instruct Israel — by an overwhelming majority vote of the ICJ judges of 15 to 2 — to prevent any acts of genocide in Gaza and ensure that its military does not perpetrate such acts.
As part of the court’s provisional measures, Israel must also prevent and punish incitement to genocide; ensure the provision of urgent aid to Gaza; prevent the destruction of evidence and ensure its preservation; and provide the court with a report on these measures within a month. In effect, these orders do require a cease-fire, for there is no other way to carry them out.”
What remains to be seen is whether or not Israel will comply with these orders and whether the US will use its veto power in the UN Security Council to prevent taking action on this ruling. The case in the California courts, which began soon after ICJ’s announcement, Defense of Children International – Palestine v. Biden, could ideally bolster the ICJ’s ruling if it finds President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin complicit in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The frustrating thing about this – as with all genocides that have occurred since the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was established by the UN in 1946 – is how many more humans have to die while we’re waiting for the legal apparatus to concur and act accordingly.
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I grew up with my maternal grandparents for the first few years of my life. Every night my grandfather would put me to bed. We had a nightly ritual of saying prayers and, although its origin is Christian, we would recite the Golden Rule, something that to this day is embedded in my consciousness. In the mornings he would read the newspaper with me, and in the evenings I would watch Walter Cronkite read the news. Although I didn’t understand it at the time, he was quite horrified about what was reported about the brutality committed by US forces in Vietnam. It was a classic way for him to illustrate the Golden Rule. I don’t know how he would have felt had he lived to see me apply that as universally as I do. I don’t know how deep his Zionism ran. I don’t know how he would have reacted to witnessing the horror of the genocide in Gaza unfolding before us. These rituals punctuated my days just as much as our nightly prayers.
I’m certain it was this foundational experience that led me to beg my parents to join a synagogue. I was the one who requested that I begin Hebrew and Sunday school classes. I was the one who asked to become a bat mitzvah. And while those things did transpire, like many reformed Jewish kids of my generation, I never really learned Hebrew well enough to understand what I was reading. I also never read the Torah or the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible). What I did learn was a lot about Israel and The Holocaust (read: presented as if it only happened to Jewish people) – so much it’s a miracle I didn’t go on one of those pre-Birthright summer programs. The two were inextricably linked in my synagogue education: because of The Holocaust, Israel must exist. In other words, I didn’t become a spiritual person at temple; instead I was trained to be a Zionist.
This phenomenon of young American Jewish children becoming foot soldiers for Israel can be seen quite powerfully in the new documentary Israelism. (There are some great interviews and clips of it on this segment of Democracy Now!) But this phenomenon of indoctrinating young American Jews with Zionism is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that coincides with the same trajectory that Norman Finkelstein laid out in his groundbreaking book, The Holocaust Industry:
“Two central dogmas underpin the Holocaust framework: (1) The Holocaust marks a categorically unique historical event; (2) The Holocaust marks the climax of an irrational, eternal Gentile hatred of Jews. Neither of these dogmas figured at all in public discourse before the June 1967 war; and, although they became the centerpieces of Holocaust literature, neither figures at all in genuine scholarship on the Nazi holocaust. On the other hand, both dogmas draw on important strands in Judaism and Zionism.” (52)
It was after the 1967 that these elements infected the Jewish education system in America. Curricula that previously revolved around the Tanakh (Torah), Hebrew, Yiddish, Jewish history, prayers, synagogue services, customs and ceremonies (something my book goes into depth about). After 1967 most of that was discarded in exchange for Zionism and Israel.
Such an education leaves you feeling as though your trauma is the only one that matters. As the film Israelism makes clear, such an education can leave one feeling alienated from their culture, religion, and even their family if they begin to learn and question the Zionism they were inculcated with as a child.
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The original UN Resolution (60/7) from 2005 that commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day, uses language that is universal rather than particular in its understanding of World War II’s genocide:
“Recalling the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted in order to avoid repetition of genocides such as those committed by the Nazi regime,
Recalling also the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.”
It requests that states create education programs about the Nazi Holocaust in order to “inculcate future generations with the lessons of the Holocaust in order to help to prevent future acts of genocide.”
In other words, the resolution understands that the point of historical lessons is to preclude them from repeating. In other words, marking this occasion means understanding that genocide, regardless of who is doing the mass murder or who is being killed, should be prevented by this act. In other words, never again for anyone.
And yet the Zionist Jewish people around the world continue to promote the fallacy that this is a uniquely Jewish event.
If you’re Israeli, you memorialize the Holocaust (Shoah in Hebrew) several times a year: in the spring with Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), in the fall to remember Kristallnacht, Tish B’Av in the summer (which is actually marking the first and second temples’ destruction in Jerusalem rather than events in Europe), Tenth of Tevet in the winter (also related to the first temple’s felling), and of course the one the UN commemorates every year on 27 January. Just imagine what it must be like to grow up imaging yourself to be so persecuted that every season of the year you have a holiday to remember that.
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The dangerous and false equivalence between Judaism and Zionism left me feeling alienated from my religion, my culture, and much of my family for much of my adult life. It’s only in the past couple of years that I’ve become more involved with Jewish Voice for Peace that I’ve been able to feel reconnected. It is from that community that I was able to find people like Jessica Rosenberg and Brant Rosen who are anti-Zionists rabbis. Through these new connections I’ve been studying Torah for the first time in my life with Tzedek Chicago’s class that is comprised of a global community of anti-Zionist Jews.
Reading this seminal text at this midpoint in my life has awakened me to an understanding of Judaism, but perhaps more importantly I’m also beginning to see how the Hebrew Bible undergirds so much of Israeli violence. For example, early in Israel’s most recent genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, Netanyahu alluded to Amalek, which the Republic of South Africa quoted as one of the innumerable examples of genocidal intent:
“On 28 October 2023, as Israeli forces prepared their land invasion of Gaza, the Prime Minister invoked the Biblical story of the total destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, stating: ‘you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.’”
This week the Torah portion covered the introduction of Amalek who doesn’t seem to represent any particular set of people. But Amalek apparently picks a fight with the Israelites who have just left Mitzrayim (the land we know today as Egypt), although we’re not told why. What we are told is what God tells Moses regarding this altercation:
“Then יהוה said to Moses, ‘Inscribe this in a document as a reminder, and read it aloud to Joshua: I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven!’” (Exodus 17:14)
Amalek reappears and the line is repeated:
“Therefore, when your God יהוה grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that your God יהוה is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!” (Deuteronomy 25:17)
This is what Netanyahu is alluding to when he suggests Palestinians are Amalekites. He’s equating the Israelites with the settler colonialists in Israel and the Amalekites with the Palestinians. In so doing, Netanyahu is very clearly stating that he doesn’t only want to erase Palestinians from Gaza – he also wants to wipe out any evidence of their existence, hence the fixation with destroying mosques, schools, universities, cultural centers. And as Tzedek Chicago’s cantor Adam Gottlieb astutely pointed out, Zionism’s failure is that it has prevented us from learning the lessons of the Nazi holocaust. We’ve remembered to forget the actual Nazi holocaust.
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Zionism has made us forget what antisemitism is. It has made us forget that genocide is universal rather than particular. It makes us blind to the ways in which European Jews who colonized Palestine learned a great deal from their Nazi oppressors – from the Big Lie and hasbara (propaganda) and the art of genocide.
Scholars of genocide like Raz Segal and activists with Jewish Voice for Peace knew early on that Israel’s campaign against Palestinians in Gaza was genocidal. And now we have confirmation from the highest court in world.
“On this day of remembrance in 2021, you noted that, “The Holocaust was no accident of history.” As you stated, “It occurred because too many governments cold-bloodedly adopted and implemented hate-fueled laws, policies, and practices to vilify and dehumanize entire groups of people, and too many individuals stood by silently. Silence is complicity.”
President Biden, what is happening right now in Gaza is no accident of history — and your complicity has been anything but silent. We call upon you to be true to your word and end U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.
If the words “Never Again” have any meaning at all, they must mean “Never Again for Anyone.” We fervently ask of you: please honor the word and spirit of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day by using your office to bring a ceasefire to this tragic violence — and to stop blocking efforts toward building a truly just peace for all who live between the river and the sea.”
