Israeli outrage has been provoked by Mahmoud Abdulbas’s use of a Holocaust analogy at a press conference he held with Olaf Scholtz (German Chancellor). In response to a question on whether he would apologise for the 1972 Palestinian attack on Israeli athletes in Munich, he said: “From 1947 until today, Israel has committed 50 massacres in 50 Palestinian villages”, and then added, “50 slaughters; 50 Holocausts”.
It was a foolish improvisation made at the wrong moment and in the wrong place. Even though Abbas tried to retract his utterance later on, the damage was done. Scholtz expressed his disgust at the outrageous claim, and Israeli premier, Yair Lapid, slammed the “monstrous lie”. Other Israeli leaders pounced on the opportunity to discredit Israel’s so-called peace partner.
This wasn’t the first time a Palestinian or Arab leader has drawn parallels with the Holocaust to express outrage at the Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing, and countless crimes in Palestine. More than one person has accused Israel in Nazi-like ways.
The mistaken reference to Palestinian suffering being a Holocaust is meant to highlight the helplessness of Palestinian leaders and maybe to get back at Israel for its aggression. This could be taken as serious, but it should not.
The truth is that the Holocaust has had such an impact on the Palestinians, even indirectly, that they don’t fully understand its meaning or its evil. Although Arabs are not immune to colonial and imperial violence, it is nothing like the scale of Nazi Germany’s industrial-scale crimes.
Angrily and furious, the Palestinians believed for a long time that they were responsible for the horrors inflicted on European Jews. They were the ones who were robbed their homeland by the 1948-established Jewish state.
The Holocaust has been used against the Palestinians by their tormentors. Indeed, it is the Zionist leaders’ abuse of the Nazi and Holocaust analogies that have long rendered the Palestinians careless, even indifferent, to the horrors that befell Jews in previous decades.
Liberal Zionists have described the Palestinians as accidental victims of victims. This narrative claims that the Jews who survived by leaping from a burning building had landed on a lucky victim, the Palestinians.
Is that a crime? But why not make it a crime to crush the innocent? Why all the racism and constant abuse? What about all the leaps that were made before and after?
The Zionists of the past chose to establish a homeland in Palestine for Jews nearly 50 years before the Holocaust. They knew that it was home to another people. They wanted it rid of all non-Jewish people. Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion believed Zionism was not driven by victimhood but rather by the necessary emancipation of the Jewish people as a new nation in Palestine.
That’s settler colonialism by any other name. While the Gaza Strip may not be Buchenwald, but this open-air prison for two million Palestinians has been subject to Israeli aggression under the pretense of security for decades.
These analogies are utterly inappropriate for Palestinians, and their abuse by Zionists is truly evil. Israeli leaders have called any Palestinian or Arab leader they disliked a “new Hitler”, to justify aggression and war against Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and others. Before their trilateral attack on Egypt in 1956, Israel and its two co-conspirators, France and Britain, portrayed its pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, as “Hitler on the Nile”.
Worse, any journalist who criticizes Israeli policies is routinely called a neo Nazi, Holocaust denier, or neoSemite.
Meanwhile, “Never Again”, the noble phrase that appears on many Holocaust memorials, has become an excuse for dominating Palestine and much of the Middle East. Well after Israel became the Middle East’s superpower and its only nuclear power, the “threat to the survival of the Jewish state” has been used as a pretext to bomb, kill and maim Palestinians and Arabs.
Such Zionist and Israeli abuse of the Holocaust’s memory and even its survivors was exposed by Israeli historian Tom Segev in his revelatory book The Seventh Million, The Israelis and The Holocaust, as well as by American Jewish scholar, Norman Finkelstein, in his daring book, The Holocaust Industry, Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.
The latter is critical of the cynical calculus behind the persistent Invoking of the Holocaust by American Zionist Organisations, in order to portray Israel, despite its 1967 war and occupation, as a victim.
To be sure, it isn’t only Zionists who have abused the Holocaust analogy for cynical political goals. European and American leaders have used it to demonise the likes of Iran and Iraq and to justify fighting wars in the Balkans and the Middle East.
All of which is to say, Abbas was not the first and won’t be the last to incorrectly reference the Holocaust while talking about other crimes against humanity. The Israeli uproar over Abbas’ faux pas is at best disingenuous and opportunistic.
Israeli leaders, who lack all morals and morality and are accused of war crimes, have pounced on the “despicable” analogy to project moral indignation, or worse, surplus morality. And yet, Israel’s minister of war, Benny Gantz, has vowed not to give up on Abbas, because he’s been instrumental in protecting Israel’s security.
Welcome to Israel-Palestine. Here hypocrisy thrives, irony goes out the window.
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