[ In an Israeli war that has been retrofitted onto a Holocaust
template, it is obscene that a plea to stop further killing is now
read as moral failure.]
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WHEN ‘NEVER AGAIN’ BECOMES A WAR CRY  
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Natasha Roth-Rowland
October 28, 2023
+972 Magazine [[link removed]]


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_ In an Israeli war that has been retrofitted onto a Holocaust
template, it is obscene that a plea to stop further killing is now
read as moral failure. _

A convoy of Israeli tanks at sunset near the southern Israeli border
with Gaza, October 12, 2023., Image credit: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90 //
+972 Magazine

 

In a 60 Minutes interview
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than a week after Hamas’ attack on southern Israel, which killed
over 1,400 Israelis and saw over 200 more abducted to the Gaza Strip,
U.S. President Joe Biden said that the Palestinian Islamist movement
had “engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the
Holocaust.” The assessment joined a catalog of statements by
Israeli, American, and other politicians and commentators who have
explicitly linked the Oct. 7 massacres to the Nazi genocide, whether
by citing the attacks as the biggest loss of Jewish life since World
War II, or by portraying Hamas as Nazi-like or Nazi successors.

Biden’s antisemitism envoy, Deborah Lipstadt, for example, tweeted
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after the attack that it was “the most lethal assault against Jews
since the Holocaust”; not long after, the U.S. Holocaust Museum put
out a similar tweet
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Israeli politicians have also helped drive this discourse. Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told
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Scholz last week that “Hamas are the new Nazis … And just as the
world united to defeat the Nazis … the world has to stand united
behind Israel to defeat Hamas.” Netanyahu expressed
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sentiments to French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday.

The rhetorical value of casting your enemies
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which the Israeli right and its supporters frequently do when
discussing Palestinians writ large — is the way it suggests,
implicitly or explicitly, that there is only one logical, even moral,
course of action: the complete elimination of the Nazi-designates and
anyone deemed to be affiliated with them.

Thus is the current discourse awash with unabashed calls for genocide
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cleansing, issued from a distressingly broad array
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that, in the words
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a columnist in Israel’s most widely-read newspaper, “Hamas and the
Gazans are one and the same.”

Indeed, the constant invocation of the Holocaust seems to have done
little to sensitize those calling for Gaza’s destruction to its
lessons. In addition to the demands for vengeful mass killings and the
abundant references to Palestinians as “animals,” Nazi-like
imagery has also been making the rounds among hasbarists on social
media; in one drawing
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could have come straight out of Der Stürmer, an IDF boot is pictured
about to step on a cockroach with the head of a Hamas fighter.

Palestinians look for survivors after an Israeli airstrike in Khan
Younis, southern Gaza Strip, October 14, 2023.  (Atia
Mohammed/Flash90  //  +972 Magazine)
The irony is transparent and grotesque: the very kind of obscene
propaganda that helped fuel unimaginable atrocities is being adopted
to, ostensibly, ward off a repetition of that same history — and to
justify ongoing ethnic mass killing and collective punishment.

It is cruel, at a time when there is a worrying depletion
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knowledge about the Holocaust, to witness Holocaust memory being
applied as a double-edged sword. What should be a universalist set of
lessons applied to atrocities everywhere is being warped to validate
violent, ethnonationalist objectives. As the hundreds of Jewish
demonstrators and allies who filled the U.S. Capitol
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week to protest the Gaza war stressed, “never again means never
again for anyone.”

Indeed, if the legacy of the Holocaust is interpreted to present
Israel with carte blanche to cage, bomb, starve, dehydrate, and
otherwise exert necropolitical power over the 2.3 million Palestinians
in Gaza — almost half of them children — then “never again”
does not merely ring hollow. It becomes a call for unchecked violence,
a war cry in an eliminationist campaign of retaliation.

This “Holocaustization” of what is happening in Israel-Palestine
deposits all of us — Jews, Palestinians, those in the region and in
the diaspora — on a dangerous precipice. To operate within that
framework, according to its internal logic, is to condemn us to a
zero-sum war whose terms are clear and devastating: a conflict that
can only ever be resolved by the annihilation of one side or the
other. It is a recipe for perpetual bloodshed — an exhortation, in
the words of Netanyahu
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to “live forever by the sword.”

One does not need to look far to find evidence of this mentality
creeping into wider acceptance. The U.S. State Department
has instructed
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diplomats to avoid using words such as “ceasefire” or
“de-escalation.” A venerated, 122-year-old Jewish group in Boston
has just been effectively forced out
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the city’s umbrella Jewish organization after participating in a
protest calling for a ceasefire. In a war that has been retrofitted
onto a Holocaust template, a plea to stop further killing is now read
as moral failure.

A Palestinian boy carries a young child as they flee an Israeli
airstrike on Gaza City, October 11, 2023.  (Mohammed
Zaanoun/Activestills.org  //  +972 Magazine)
What, then, is the endgame here? How much ruination in Gaza, which
is spreading to the West Bank
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is deemed necessary? And even once the mass slaughter ends, what then?
As long as there is no political solution — an option that the
Holocaust framing renders impossible — catastrophic violence will
persist. And it will, as recent history has shown, get much worse.

It is true, as Adam Shatz noted
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the London Review of Books, that there is more than mere cynicism at
play in the Holocaust comparisons proliferating around us, not least
by Israelis and diaspora Jews themselves; as he rightly points out,
the Hamas attacks lit up “the rawest part of [Jews’] psyche: the
fear of annihilation.” The activation of this fear is now being
exacerbated by ominous reports of antisemitic attacks across multiple
countries, from interpersonal violence
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synagogues being attacked
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destroyed
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This acknowledgement, however, does not lessen the dangers of
portraying the Israeli military as being locked in a fight to the
death with an ultimate evil. Moreover, given the overwhelming
asymmetry between Israeli and Palestinian military capabilities, and
the fact that Israel is backed by a global superpower, there is only
one side in this equation that is being threatened with potential
genocide, and that is the Palestinians.

This in no way contradicts the fact that, as Hamas ruthlessly
demonstrated on Oct. 7, Israeli Jews are increasingly paying a price
for Israel’s ongoing abuses. As my colleagues Meron Rapoport
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Iraqi
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+972 Magazine, the attacks definitively dispelled the illusion that
Israel can forever subjugate, segregate, displace, and summarily
execute Palestinians with minimal blowback. But as frightening and
shocking as the Oct. 7 attacks were, they are not an indicator that
Jews — in Israel or anywhere else — face mass, state-sanctioned
violence in the way that Palestinians do and have done for decades.

Palestinians, above all those in Gaza, are under very real threat of
a second Nakba, to the extent that the Nakba ever ended. The echoes of
1948 are all around: over 7,000 Palestinians dead in three weeks of
Israeli airstrikes and 1.4 million displaced; flattened neighborhoods
and “tent cities”; talk of mass expulsions to the Sinai and
the political jockeying
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potential refugees. Here, history is indeed repeating itself. What’s
more, just like Jewish communities around the world, Muslim
communities, too, are facing an uptick in violent hate crimes
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There are thus two immediate issues at play: to end the bombardment of
Gaza, and to secure the release of Israeli and other hostages held
captive there. Invoking the Holocaust in the present dire
circumstances does not bring those goals closer — it only pushes
them further away. It may give the illusion of lending moral authority
and clarity to the proceedings, but in a war that has killed more than
8,000 people and counting, such claims are misleading at best, and
cynical at worst. Surely, with all the current discussion of the
Holocaust, we might honor its legacy better than that.

_[NATASHA ROTH-ROWLAND is a writer and researcher at Diaspora
Alliance, and a former editor at +972 Magazine. She has a PhD in
History from the University of Virginia, and wrote her dissertation on
the history of the Jewish far right in Israel-Palestine and the United
States. Natasha previously spent several years as a writer, editor,
and translator in Israel-Palestine, and is now based in New York.]_

_This article was produced in partnership with Diaspora Alliance
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_OUR TEAM HAS BEEN DEVASTATED BY THE HORRIFIC EVENTS OF THIS LATEST
WAR – THE ATROCITIES COMMITTED BY HAMAS IN ISRAEL AND THE MASSIVE
RETALIATORY ISRAELI ATTACKS ON GAZA. OUR HEARTS ARE WITH ALL THE
PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES FACING VIOLENCE._

_We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The
bloodshed unleashed by these events has reached extreme levels of
brutality and threatens to engulf the entire region. Hamas’
murderous assault in southern Israel has devastated and shocked the
country to its core. Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Gaza is
wreaking destruction on the already besieged strip and killing a
ballooning number of civilians. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank,
backed by the army, are seizing the opportunity to escalate their
attacks on Palestinians._

_This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the
past 13 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and
militarism, the entrenched occupation, and an increasingly normalized
siege on Gaza._

_We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need
your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity
of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians
and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the
fight of their lives._

_CAN WE COUNT ON YOUR SUPPORT
[[link removed]]? +972 MAGAZINE IS THE
LEADING MEDIA VOICE OF THIS MOVEMENT, A DESPERATELY NEEDED PLATFORM
WHERE PALESTINIAN AND ISRAELI JOURNALISTS AND ACTIVISTS CAN REPORT ON
AND ANALYZE WHAT IS HAPPENING, GUIDED BY HUMANISM, EQUALITY, AND
JUSTICE. JOIN US._

* Israel-Gaza War
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Gaza City
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* Palestinians
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* Hamas
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* Hostages
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* Holocaust
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* The Holocaust
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* Nazis
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* World War II
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* Jews
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* Genocide
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* apartheid
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* ethnic cleansing
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* Nabka
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* Biden Administration
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* Ceasefire
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* Cease Fire
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* West Bank
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* nazism
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