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A MARGINALLY deeper sense of history might have dissuaded Donald Trump from proposing the ‘cleaning out’ of Gaza’s Palestinian population as his preferred plan for the devastated enclave. He’s right, it does resemble a demolition site — courtesy of a genocidal Israeli military campaign that would not have been possible without American military and diplomatic support.
He might even be aware that the now dominant Zionist far right has long dreamed of expelling Palestine’s indigenous inhabitants as the ideal means of realising its dream of an exclusively Jewish Eretz Israel. He probably doesn’t know, though, that the deportation of German Jews was initially the Nazis’ preferred option. The plan began to change after the 1938 Evian conference in France, where representatives from Western nations including the US and UK expressed sympathy for the Jews but baulked at the idea of accepting refugees.
The outcome reinforced Nazi hostility against the Jews, while Hitler and his henchmen mocked their foreign critics for refusing to back up their words with action. Their new goals were spelt out at the Wannsee conference in early 1942, where the Nazi hierarchy unanimously acclaimed Hitler’s vision of a ‘final solution’ whereby 11 million European Jews were effectively sentenced to death.
The horrendous eventual death toll of 6m cast a permanent shadow across Europe, and raised questions about the capacity of human beings for empathy. Jews weren’t the Nazis’ only targets, mind you. First they came for the communists, then for the social democrats and trade unionists. They also sought to eliminate the Roma people, homosexuals, and the intellectually impaired. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, where an estimated 1m Jews were butchered, the mass murder mechanism of gas chambers was initially tested on Soviet prisoners of war.
‘Never again’ remains an aspiration 80 years after Auschwitz.
There’s an element of irony in the fact that Auschwitz was formally liberated by the Red Army 80 years ago on Monday. Most of the inmates had been evaporated by then, and many of the remainder had been sent on a death march. About 7,000 of the frail and sick remained. Among the survivors was the Italian scientist Primo Levi, who published some of the first insider accounts about the death camps. “They did not greet us, nor did they smile,” he writes of the Soviet soldiers who chanced upon the camp on their way to Berlin, “they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by … the feeling of guilt that such a crime could exist.”
Confronted with what could be described as living corpses, alongside thousands of bodies that no one could be bothered to bury, this was a humane reaction. Red Army field hospitals in the complex managed to save some lives, but many of the long-suffering patients succumbed to dysentery, diphtheria, scarlet fever or other diseases.
Levi’s memoir of his 10 months in the death camp, If This is a Man, was initially ignored, but recognised as a unique testament when republished a decade later. In an afterword for a subsequent edition published 40 years ago, he answers frequently asked questions, including one about the average German reaction to what their government was perpetrating. “[M]ost Germans didn’t know because they didn’t want to know,” he writes. “Because, indeed, they wanted not to know.”
Couldn’t much the same be claimed about Israeli citizens today? Numerous reports point out that mainstream Israeli media tends to ignore the genocide. It may be so, but it’s hardly conceivable that one of the most tech-savvy populations in the world turns a blind eye to global media. Not unless it consciously wishes to ignore the parallels, imperfect as they may be, between the Israeli and Nazi genocides.
The lessons from the Holocaust recited at the Auschwitz site in Poland on Monday are all very well. Fascism has lately been resurfacing across Europe and has lately raised its hand in the US. The risk of antisemitism keeps growing. But it can only be combated with the clear recognition that visceral opposition to Zionism and the Netanyahu government’s fascist predilections is decidedly not antisemitic, and challenges precisely the kind of attitudes that Jews faced in 1930s Europe.
A more recent memoir reflects on the experiences of Noam Chayut, an enthusiastic Holocaust expert who diligently underwent the brainwashing that taught him he was a Zionist first, secondly an Israeli, and lastly a Jew. As a representative of ‘the most moral army in the world’, he encountered a Palestinian girl in a West Bank village who hesitated while her playmates ran away. She did not return his smile. “As soon as I realised the fact that in her eyes I myself was absolute evil, the absolute evil that had governed me until then began to disintegrate,” he confessed. His book, first published a dozen years ago, is titled The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust.
Published in Dawn, January 29th, 2025
