The genocide in Gaza has exposed the weaponization of the Holocaust as a vehicle not to prevent genocide, but to perpetuate it, not to examine the past, but to manipulate the present.

Nearly all Holocaust scholars, who see in any criticism of Israel a betrayal of the Holocaust, have refused to condemn the genocide in Gaza. Not one of the institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust have drawn the obvious historical parallels or decried the mass slaughter of Palestinians.

Holocaust scholars, with a handful of exceptions, have exposed their true purpose, which is not to examine the dark side of human nature, the frightening propensity we all have to commit evil, but to sanctify Jews as eternal victims and absolve the ethnonationalist state of Israel of the crimes of settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide.

The hijacking of the Holocaust, the failure to defend Palestinian victims because they are Palestinian, has imploded the moral authority of Holocaust studies and Holocaust memorials. They have been exposed as a vehicles not to prevent genocide but to perpetrate it, not to explore the past, but manipulate the present.

Any tepid recognition that the Holocaust may not be the exclusive property of Israel and its Zionist supporters is swiftly shut down. The Holocaust Museum LA deleted an Instagram post that read: “NEVER AGAIN” CAN’T ONLY MEAN NEVER AGAIN FOR JEWS” after a backlash. In the hands of Zionists, “never again” means precisely that, never again only for Jews.

Aimé Césaire, in “Discourse on Colonialism,” writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the nègres d’Afrique.”

It was this distortion of the Holocaust as unique that troubled Primo Levi, who was imprisoned in Auschwitz from 1944 to 1945 and wrote “Survival in Auschwitz.” He was a fierce critic of the apartheid state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. He saw the Shoah as “an inexhaustible source of evil” that “is perpetuated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation”.

He deplored “Manichaeanism,” those who “shun nuance and complexity” and who “reduce the river of human events to conflicts, and conflicts to duals, us and them.” He warned that the “network of human relationships inside the concentration camps was not simple: It could not be reduced to two blocs, victims and persecutors.” The enemy, he knew, “was outside but also inside”.

Levi writes about Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a Jewish collaborator who ruled the Lodz ghetto. Rumkowski, known as “King Chaim,” turned the ghetto into a slave labor camp which enriched the Nazis and himself. He deported opponents to death camps. He raped and molested girls and women. He demanded unquestioned obedience and embodied the evil of his oppressors. For Levi, he was an example of what many of us, under similar circumstances, are capable of becoming.

“We are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit,” Levi wrote in “The Drowned and the Saved. “[H]is fever is ours, the fever of our Western civilization that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige”.

“Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility”, Levi adds. “[W]illingly or not, we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death and that close by the train is waiting”.

These bitter lessons of the Holocaust, which warn that the line between the victim and victimizer is razor thin, that we can all become willing executioners, that there is nothing intrinsically moral about being Jewish or a survivor of the Holocaust, are what Zionists seek to deny. Levi, for this reason, was persona non grata in Israel.

Holocaust studies, which exploded in the 1970s and were epitomized by the deification of the Holocaust survivor and fervent Zionist Elie Wiesel — literary critic Alfred Kazin called him a “Jesus of the Holocaust” — have now surrendered any claim to championing universal truths. These Holocaust scholars use a benchmark evil, as Norman Finkelstein points out, “not as a moral compass but rather as an ideological club”. The mantra “Do not compare”, Finkelstein writes, “is the mantra of moral blackmailers”.

Zionists find in the Holocaust and the Jewish state a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as a cloying moral superiority. After the 1967 war, when Israel seized Gaza and the West Bank, Israel, as Nathan Glazer approvingly observed, became “the religion of the American Jews”.

Holocaust studies are based on the fallacy that unique suffering confers unique entitlement. This was always the purpose of what Finkelstein calls “The Holocaust Industry”.

“Jewish suffering is depicted as ineffable, uncommunicable, and yet always to be proclaimed,” writes the European historian Charles Maier in The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity.

“It is intensely private, not to be diluted, but simultaneously public so that gentile society will confirm the crimes. A very peculiar suffering must be enshrined in public sites: Holocaust museums, memory gardens, deportation sites, dedicated not as Jewish but civic memorials. But what is the role of a museum in a country, such as the United States, far from the site of the Holocaust? … Under what circumstances can a private sorrow serve simultaneously as public grief? And if genocide is certified as a public sorrow, then must we not accept the credentials of other particular sorrows too? Do Armenians and Cambodians also have a right to publicly funded holocaust museums? And do we need memorials to Seventh Day Adventists and homosexuals for their persecution at the hands of the Third Reich?”

Any crime Israel carries out in the name of its survival — its “right to exist” — is justified in the name of this uniqueness. There are no limits. The world is black and white, a never-ending battle against Nazism, which is protean depending on who Israel targets. To challenge this bloodlust is to be an anti-Semite facilitating another genocide of Jews.

This simplistic formula not only serves the interests of Israel, but also the interests of colonial powers that carried out their own genocides, ones they seek to obscure. What was the annihilation of Native Americans by European settlers, the Armenians by Turks, the Indians in the Bengal famine by the British or the Soviet-orchestrated famine in the Ukraine? What was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Is Manifest Destiny any different from the Nazis’ embrace of the concept of Lebensraum? These too were holocausts, fueled by the same dehumanization and bloodlusts.

The sacralization of the Nazi Holocaust offers a bizarre quid pro quo. Arming and funding the state of Israel, preventing U.N. resolutions and sanctions from being adopted to condemn its crimes, and demonizing Palestinians and their supporters, is proof of atonement and support for Jews. Israel, in return, absolves the West of its indifference to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust, and Germany for perpetrating it.

Germany uses this unholy alliance to separate Nazism from the rest of German history, including the genocide German colonists carried out against the Nama and Herero in German South-West Africa, now Namibia.

“[S]uch magic”, Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal writes:

“legitimizes racism against Palestinians at the very moment that Israel perpetrates genocide against them. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness thus reproduces rather than challenges the exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism that led to the Holocaust.”

Segal, the director of the program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, wrote an article on Gaza on Oct. 13, 2023 — six days after the incursion by Hamas and other Palestinian fighters into Israel — titled: “A Textbook Case of Genocide.” This denunciation from an Israeli Holocaust scholar, whose family members perished in the Holocaust, was a very lonely stance.

Segal saw in the Israeli government’s immediate demand that Palestinians evacuate the north of Gaza, and the blood-curdling demonization of the Palestinians by Israeli officials — the defense minister said Israel was “fighting human animals” — the stench of genocide.

“The whole idea about prevention and ‘never again’ is that — as we teach our students — there are red flags that once we notice them, we’re supposed to work in order to stop the process that could escalate to genocide” Segal said when I interviewed him, “even if it’s not genocidal yet”.

“Holocaust studies as a field might be dead, which is not necessarily a bad thing” he continued.

“If indeed Holocaust studies is intertwined from the beginning with the ideology of global Holocaust memory, maybe it’s good that we won’t have Holocaust studies anymore. And maybe it will open the door for even more interesting and important research on the Holocaust as history, as real history”.

You can watch my interview with Segal here.

Segal paid for his courage and his honesty. The offer to lead the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies — which has issued no condemnation of the genocide — was revoked.

Nearly two years into the genocide, the International Association of Genocide Scholars finally issued a statement saying that Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition set out in the U.N. Convention on Genocide.

But the vast majority of Holocaust scholars remain mute, endlessly condemning the atrocities committed by Hamas while ignoring those committed by Israel. They were mute when South Africa argued before the International Court of Justice that Israel was committing genocide. They were mute when Amnesty International published a report in December 2024 accusing Israel of genocide.

“How many Palestinian students apply to graduate programmes in Holocaust and Genocide Studies around the world? Usually none. How many Palestinian scholars identify themselves as scholars in this field? They, too, can be counted on one hand”, Segal writes in a co-authored article in the Journal of Genocide Research.

Genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers”.

The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations as it carries out genocide has imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilization.

“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century — just as the First World War was for a generation in the West”, Pankaj Mishra writes in The World After Gaza.

The ability to peddle the fiction that the Nazi Holocaust is unique, or that Jews are uniquely entitled, has ended. The genocide presages a new world order, one where Europe and the United States, along with their proxy Israel, are pariahs. Gaza has illuminated a dark truth — barbarism and Western civilization are inseparable.

First published on The Chris Hedges Report.

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Juan Cole, a renowned history professor at the University of Michigan and expert on the Middle East and South Asia, joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to tackle inconvenient truths ignored by the media in the history of Israel and Palestine. This includes the conflation that criticizing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is somehow a form of Holocaust denial. This view of history distorts and whitewashes the deep antisemitic history of Western European culture, Scheer and Cole argue.

Cole describes the history of what came to be the current state of affairs in Israel and Palestine as a sort of Rube Goldberg machine where the European-spawned-Holocaust fueled the migration of European Jews to Palestine and the ouster of the inhabitants there who had nothing to do with the German-led barbarism against the Jewish people.

Never fully confronted, the gravest barbarism in modern history that Europe had created came to be ignored in the postwar period. In one of the most bizarre moral distortions in human history, the West shifted responsibility for the horror of the annihilation of European Jews to the Palestinian olive farmers in what is now greater Israel. That is the deeply immoral, rhetorical scam that continues to define the West’s responsibility for this continuing tragedy.

“You have this exchange of populations, this ethnic cleansing: Jews sent to Israel and Palestinian sent out of Israel. But the Palestinians that were sent out of Israel didn’t have a stable framework for their lives, they became stateless people, for a while,” Cole said.

In terms of the Palestinians as victims of colonialism, Cole said, “The Palestinians are among the great unresolved problems created by the modern era of this industrial ethnic nationalism and settler colonialism that came together in Palestine in this very unfortunate way.”

First aired on Scheer Intelligence.

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BY Melvin Goodman
October 27, 2023

The mainstream media have fully documented terrorism by Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and other groups against Israeli civilians that reached its most horrific and sadistic level in the massacre of October 7th.  The media typically define terrorism as any act of violence against civilians in support of an ideology, which certainly describes Hamas’ terrorism.  But there is another definition of terrorism that refers to acts of violence against civilians in order to intimidate and/or defeat their political leaders.  On the basis of that definition, Israel has been terrorizing Palestinian communities over the past 75 years.  This, of course, does not explain—let alone excuse—the horrors that Hamas inflicted on Israelis several weeks ago, but attention must be given to the impact of terrorist acts by both sides on the politics and policies of Israelis, Palestinians, and Arab countries.

Just as the horrors of the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s have contributed to Israeli brutality toward the Palestinians, the terrorism of the Nakba in 1948 has contributed to Arab hostility toward Israel.  This is the “chain of hate” that the legendary historian Arnold Toynbee wrote about in the 1950s.  The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, is not well known to some and denied by too many others, but the forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians from their homes during the 1948 Arab-Israel war is certainly well known to Arabs.

Israelis have called for the resignation of the UN Secretary Secretary General for merely stating that the Hamas attacks of October 7 “did not happen is a vacuum.”  Israelis have even objected to the remarks of one of the two released hostages for stating that she was well treated by Palestinian guards and doctors who made sure that she received her medicines.  Typically, the Israelis dismiss any criticism of their actions as examples of anti-semitism or any failure to demonize their enemy.

The atrocious Israeli bombing campaign that has led to thousands of airstrikes on Gaza is a clear violation of international law and the rules of warfare because of the lack of any proportionality, which finds huge amounts of ordnance dropped on civilian communities that cannot defend themselves.  Israel’s failure to provide an exit strategy for Gazans is a violation of international law.  Israel’s failure to provide food, water, and fuel is another violation of international law.  The sum total of these horrific actions points to terrorism and even genocide.

The mainstream media have largely ignored the fact that Israel had turned Gaza into an “outdoor prison,” a term first used by former British Prime Minister David Cameron, soon after Hamas won an election in 2006.  The election initially had the support of the Bush administration and particularly its secretary of state, Condi Rice.  The term “outdoor prison” predictably drew criticism from Israelis, but the fact that 2 million Palestinians have suffered from 50 years of occupation and 15 years of blockade cannot be denied.  When I was in Israel in the late 1970s on an official visit and referred to Israel as an apartheid state, I was similarly criticized by my Israeli host.

Half of the population of Gaza are children, and Israeli tactics have ensured that Palestinian children grow up in a society characterized by fear, lack of security, and hopelessness.  Medical services have been destroyed, and the unemployment rate in Gaza is the world’s worst.  Palestinian students have won academic scholarships in the West, including the United States, but have not been allowed to leave the territory.  The kinds of images that we are seeing today as a result of Israeli bombing should have been more widely circulated in previous bombing campaigns in 2009 and 2014.  US administrations have for the most part ignored this terrorism.

Seven out of ten Palestinians in Gaza are registered as refugees, and many of these come from families who were forced to leave their villages in 1948. Many more have been forced to leave their homes due to other wars or violence.  Four years after the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2014, tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza were still unable to return to their homes.  The oldest children in Gaza have lived through three wars that have killed more than 3,800 Palestinians prior to the current campaign. More than 700 of these were children. Many children have seen family members, relatives, friends or others be killed or seriously wounded.

A 2012 UN report predicted the Palestinian enclave would be “unlivable” by 2020 if nothing was done to ease the blockade, and in June 2017 a UN report on living conditions in Gaza stated that all the indicators are going in the wrong direction and that deadline was actually approaching even faster than earlier predicted.  The current war’s first week witnessed 6,000 bombs destroying or damaging 11,000 structures.

The United States and the Biden administration are complicit in these campaigns because we send sophisticated military weaponry to Israel as soon as possible.  Currently, the United States is rushing 155mm artillery, smart bombs, and surface-to-surface missiles to support an air and ground campaign against a defenseless community. In an unusual display of courage, a senior State Department official, Josh Paul, resigned to protest the rush of military deliveries to an Israeli military that doesn’t need them.

The combination of an untrustworthy Netanyahu and a politically vulnerable Biden does not point to an opportunity for a cease-fire, let alone any political solution.  Biden has indeed warned Netanyahu not to be “consumed by rage,” but this is an example of too little and too late.  Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is particularly clueless regarding the context of the war, arriving in Israel to say that he was there “as a Jew.”  Israel’s sadistic bombing campaign contributed to Arab leaders’ unwillingness to meet with President Biden.  Every recent US administration seems to believe that US-funded arms transfers will contribute to Israeli security and encourage Israeli concessions that will allow a Palestinian state.  This is a false and dangerous calculation.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

First Published on CounterPoint.

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Putin’s claim to rid Ukraine of Nazis is especially absurd given its history

Jeffrey Veidlinger, University of Michigan

Russian President Vladimir Putin justifies his war on Ukraine as a peacekeeping mission, a “denazification” of the country.

In his address to the Russian people on Feb. 24, 2022, Putin said the purpose was to “protect people” who had been “subjected to bullying and genocide … for the last eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine.”

The victims of the genocide claimed by Putin are Russian speakers; the Nazis he referenced are the elected representatives of the Ukrainian people. While Ukraine’s new language laws have upset some minorities, independent news media have uncovered no evidence of genocide against Russian speakers. In fact, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, Russian speakers have more freedom in Ukraine than they have in Russia, where Putin’s authoritarian government routinely suppresses political dissent. And while far right groups have been growing in Ukraine, their electoral power is limited.

As the author of a recently published book on anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine and a historian of the Holocaust, I know why the accusations of Nazism and genocide have resonance in Ukraine. But I also understand that despite episodic violence, Ukrainian history offers a model of tolerance and democratic government.

Ukraine’s Jewish leadership

First, it is worth pointing out that Ukraine today is a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won a five-year term in the 2019 presidential election with a landslide majority, defeating 39 candidates. His Servant of the People party then swept the parliamentary elections in July 2019, winning 254 seats in the 450-seat chamber, becoming the first majority government in the history of the modern Ukrainian state. Zelensky was well-known as a comedian and star of the popular sitcom “Servant of the People,” from which his party’s name was derived.

The fact that Zelensky is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor and was raised in what he told The Times of Israel was “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family” was barely noted during the election. “Nobody cares. Nobody asks about it,” he remarked in the same interview. Nor did Ukrainians seem to mind that the prime minister at the time of Zelensky’s election, Volodymyr Groysman, also had a Jewish background.

For a brief period of time, Ukraine was the only state outside of Israel to have both a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. “How could I be a Nazi?” Zelensky asked in a public address after the Russian invasion began. “Explain it to my grandfather.”

The pogroms against Jews

Sporadic episodes of violence against Jews, or pogroms, began well before the Holocaust. In 1881, for instance, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, ordinary churchgoers, laborers, railway workers and soldiers attacked Jewish-owned shops, mills and canteens, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Jews in what was then considered the south of Russia, but is now Ukraine. During another wave of violence following the Revolution of 1905, workers, peasants and soldiers, egged on by Russian right-wing paramilitary groups, murdered 5,000 Jews in the region.

During the unrest that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, about 100,000 Jews died as a result of attacks perpetrated against them by soldiers fighting to restore a united Russia, as well as by the armies of the newly established Ukrainian and Polish states.

Finally, during the Second World War, German soldiers murdered 1.5 million Jews in the areas that are now Ukraine, often with the collaboration of Ukrainian militias established in the diaspora and with the help of local auxiliary police. The role of ethnic Ukrainians in the Holocaust remains contentious in Ukraine today, where nationalist heroes who collaborated with the Nazis continue to be honored.

Yet at the same time, millions of non-Jewish Ukrainians lost their lives under the Nazis or were exploited as slave laborers. The occupiers treated Ukrainian lands as little more than Lebensraum, living space for ethnic Germans.

A pluralistic state

Forgotten in this history is the period between 1917 and 1919 when an independent Ukrainian state offered a different model of multiculturalism and pluralism. The Ukrainian state that declared its independence from Russia in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolutions, envisioned a Ukraine for all ethnicities and religious groups living within its territory.

One of its first acts was passing the Law on National Autonomy in January 1918, which allowed each of the major ethnic minority groups – Russians, Jews, and Poles – broad autonomous rights, including the right to use their own language.

The cabinet included a Secretariat of National Affairs, with vice-secretariats for Russians, Jews and Poles, and, briefly in 1919, even a Ministry of Jewish Affairs. The legislative body, as well, included proportional representation from each of the national minorities. The state issued declarations and currency printed in four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Yiddish.

However, this state, hailed by Jews around the world as a model for the new nation states then emerging in eastern and central Europe, never managed to hold the capital for more than a few months at a time. By April of 1919, the government was being run from a moving train and could barely claim more land than the tracks beneath it.

From its inauguration in January 1918, Ukraine found itself enmeshed in a bloody war on multiple fronts. The Soviet Red Army attacked it from the east, while Moscow sought to ignite Bolshevik revolutions throughout Ukraine. A Russian White Army led by officers from the old tsarist army attacked from the south, hoping to reestablish a version of the Russian Empire. From the west, the army of the newly established Polish Republic attacked with the goal of restoring historic Poland’s borders.

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At the same time, a range of insurgent fighters and anarchists formed militias to seize land for themselves. In the midst of this chaos, the dream of a pluralistic state devolved into inter-ethnic violence.

In March 1921, the war ended with the Treaty of Riga, incorporating much of the territory claimed by the independent Ukrainian state into the Soviet Union.

Putin’s selective telling of the past exaggerates the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine while ignoring the state’s historic struggle for pluralism and democracy. There is a good reason for this: he fears democracy more than he fears Nazism.

Jeffrey Veidlinger, Professor of History and Judaic Studies, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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