The Fundamental Lessons of the Holocaust
“As Israel commits its genocide in Gaza, we should remember that the terrifying truth of the Holocaust is that we all can become moral monsters.”
“As Israel commits its genocide in Gaza, we should remember that the terrifying truth of the Holocaust is that we all can become moral monsters.”
- Chris Hedges
August 16, 2024
From Chris Hedges: The Fundamental Lesson of the Holocaust is That We Can All Become Willing Executioners
There is only one way to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.
The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump. Kamala Harris has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden. There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter.
In short, we are impotent and must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the shipment of hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.
Genocide, the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration. It is a moral issue. It is about the eradication of a people. Any surrender to genocide condemns us as a nation and as a species. It plunges the global society one step closer to barbarity. It eviscerates the rule of law and mocks every fundamental value we claim to honor. It is in a category by itself. And to not, with every fiber of our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in what Hannah Arendt defines as “radical evil,” the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.
The plethora of Holocaust studies should have made this indelible point. But Holocaust studies were hijacked by Zionists. They insist that the Holocaust is unique, that it is somehow set apart from human nature and human history. Jews are deified as eternal victims of anti-Semitism. Nazis are endowed with a special kind of inhumanity. Israel, as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington concludes, is the solution. The Holocaust was one of several genocides carried out in the 19th and 20th centuries. But historical context is ignored and with it our understanding of the dynamics of mass extermination.
The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo Levi stress, is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes very little. We can all become complicit, if only through indifference and apathy, in evil.
“Monsters exist,” Levi, who survived Auschwitz, writes, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
To confront evil — even if there is no chance of success — keeps alive our humanity and dignity. It allows us, as Vaclav Havel writes in “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to suppress. It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It tells the victims they are not alone. It is “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position” and an “attempt to regain control over one’s sense of responsibility.”
What does it say about us if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds hundreds of innocents a day?
What does it say about us if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens of thousands will get sick and many will die?
What does it say about us if we permit for 10 months the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to wipe out families and force survivors to camp out in the open or find shelter in crude tents?
What does it say about us when we accept the murder of 16,456 children, although this is surely an undercount?
What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools — including the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr, or dawn prayers — and other emergency shelters?
What does it say about us when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of Israeli troops, at times dressed in Israeli military uniforms?
What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of prisoners?
Are these the kinds of allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we want to embrace? What message does this send to the rest of the world?
If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible. Protestors outside the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago demand an end to the genocide and U.S. aid to Israel, but inside we are fed a sickening conformity. Hope lies in the streets.
A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.
“But what of the price of peace?” the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who was sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood:”
I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious. We are called to defy — through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance — the laws of the state, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers.
December 29, 2023
From Chris Hedges: We All Can Be Induced to Become Part of the Apparatus of Death, This Is the Terrifying Truth of the Holocaust
Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary. The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland.
There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation - for those who want to live - will be the only option.
Danny Danon, Israel's former Ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.” “We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I'm talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.”
The problem for now “is countries that are willing to absorb them, and we're working on this,” Netanyahu told Likud Knesset members.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who “voluntarily” registered for deportation. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several hours to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”
The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. Israeli leaders are also cynically advertising the proposed ethnic cleansing as voluntary and a humanitarian gesture to solve the catastrophe they created.
This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it.
The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity, with little prodding, to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters.
The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, the over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, the thousands of Tutsi families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion.
We were warned. Raul Hilberg. Primo Levi. Bruno Bettelheim. Hannah Arendt. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They understood the dark recesses of the human spirit. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred. Some of those who bore witness to this awful truth, including Levi, Bettelheim, Jean Améry, the author of “At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” and Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” committed suicide. The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children.
“Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.”
Primo Levi railed against the false, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the state of Israel — a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wonders if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.”
Levi saw us reflected in Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi collaborator and tyrannical leader of the Łódź Ghetto. Rumkowski sold out his fellow Jews for privilege and power, although he was sent to Auschwitz on the final transport where Jewish Sonderkommando — prisoners forced to help herd victims into the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies — in an act of vengeance reportedly beat him to death outside a crematorium.
“We are all mirrored in Rumkowski,” Levi reminds us. “His ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization, that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.” We, like Rumkowski, “are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Willingly 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.”
Levi insists that the camps “could not be reduced to the two blocks of victims and persecutors.” He argues, “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims; on the contrary; it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.” He chronicles what he called the “gray zone” between corruption and collaboration. The world, he writes, is not black and white, “but a vast zone of gray consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.” We all inhabit this gray zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust.
It is hard not to be cynical about the plethora of university courses about the Holocaust given the censorship and banning of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, imposed by university administrations. What is the point of studying the Holocaust if not to understand its fundamental lesson — when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable? It is hard not to be cynical about the “humanitarian interventionists” — Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power — who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the “Responsibility to Protect” but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the “humanitarian interventions” they championed, from Bosnia to Libya, come close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay. There is nothing moral about denouncing slavery, the Holocaust or dictatorial regimes that oppose the United States. All it means is you champion the dominant narrative.
The moral universe has been turned upside down. Those who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to “defend” themselves. Vetoing ceasefires and providing 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that throw out metal fragments for thousands of feet is the road to peace. Refusing to negotiate with Hamas will free the hostages. Bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances and refugee camps, along with killing three former Israeli hostages, stripped to the waist, waving an improvised white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew, are routine acts of war. Killing over 21,300 people, including more than 7,700 children, injuring over 55,000 and rendering nearly all of the 2.3 million people in Gaza homeless, is a way to “deradicalize” Palestinians. None of this makes sense, as protesters around the world realize.
A new world is being born. It is a world where the old rules, more often honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It is a world where vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced systems carry out in public view vast killing projects. The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.
One day, we will all be Palestinians.
“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms,” Christopher R. Browning writes in Ordinary Men, about a German reserve police battalion in World War Two that was ultimately responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jews. “In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce ‘ordinary men’ to become their ‘willing executioners.’”
Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and new expressions. Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, as well as over six million Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche. At the same time, Germany and the U.S. rehabilitated thousands of former Nazis, especially from the intelligence services and the scientific community, and did little to prosecute those who directed Nazi war crimes. Germany today is Israel’s second largest arms supplier following the U.S.
The supposed campaign against anti-Semitism, interpreted as any statement that is critical of the State of Israel or denounces the genocide, is in fact the championing of White Power. It is why the German state, which has effectively criminalized support for the Palestinians, and the most retrograde white supremists in the United States, justify the carnage. Germany’s long relationship with Israel, including paying over $90 billion since 1945 in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, is not about atonement, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, but blackmail.
“The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the U.N. solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine,” Pappé writes. “What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-à -vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and, more importantly, it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves, but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.”
The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded. It was bastardized to serve the apartheid state. If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. We seek our moral worth in the past, rather than the present. We condemn others, including the Palestinians, to an endless cycle of slaughter. We become the evil we abhor. We consecrate the horror.
January 13, 2009
From Chris Hedges: The Lesson of the Holocaust Is That When You Have the Capacity to Halt Genocide, And You Do Not, You Are Culpable
The incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel. It is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to reign death and destruction on Gaza, to use lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase in the decades long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. The assault on Gaza is about creating squalid, lawless, and impoverished ghettos in the West Bank and Gaza, where life for Palestinians will be barely sustainable. It is about building a series of ringed Palestinian enclaves where the Israeli military will have the ability to instantly shut off movement, food, medicine, and goods to perpetuate the misery. Privilege and power, especially military power, is a dangerous narcotic. Violence destroys those who bear the brunt of its force, but also those who try to use it to become gods. Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, said Israel is engaged in a war to the bitter end against Hamas in Gaza.
Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums, to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command and control, no army, and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is murder. The images of dead Palestinian children lined up as if asleep on the floor of the main hospital in Gaza are a metaphor for the future. Israel will from now on speak to the Palestinians in the language of death, and the language of death is all the Palestinians will be permitted to speak back. The use of terror and hunger to break a hostile population is one of the oldest forms of warfare. I watched the Bosnian Serbs employ the same tactic when I was in Sarajevo, and I also watched the Bosnian Serbs, like the Israelis, attempt to justify their systematic destruction of the city with thousands of dead and wounded on a few poultry, Muslim mortars and light arms fire.
Those who orchestrate such sieges do not grasp the terrible rage born of long humiliation, indiscriminate violence, and abuse. A father or a mother whose child dies because of a lack of vaccines or proper medical care does not forget. A boy whose ill grandmother dies while being detained at an Israeli checkpoint does not forget. Families who carry the broken bodies of their children to hospitals do not forget. All who endure humiliation, abuse, and the murder of those they love do not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those who eventually stumble out into the daylight. Is it any wonder that 71 percent of children interviewed at a school in Gaza recently said they wanted to be a martyr?
Militant movements feed off of martyrs, and Israel is delivering the maimed and the dead by the truckload. Hamas fighters armed with little more than light weapons, a few rockets, small mortars, are battling one of the most sophisticated military machines on the planet. And the determined resistance by these doomed fighters exposes throughout the Arab world the gutlessness of dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who refuses to open Egypt’s common border with Gaza despite the slaughter. Israel when it bombed Lebanon two years ago sought to destroy Hezbollah. By the time it withdrew, humiliated, it had swelled Hezbollah’s power base and handed it heroic status throughout the Arab world. And Israel is doing the same for groups like Hamas.
The refusal by our political leaders, from Barack Obama to all but five members of Congress to the major media, to speak out in defense of the rule of law and fundamental human rights exposes our cowardice and our hypocrisy. Those who openly condemn the Israeli crimes, including Israelis such as Tom Segev, Ilan Pappé, Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, as well as American stalwarts Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich, Norman Finkelstein, and Richard Falk, are ignored or spurned like lepers. They are denied a platform in the press. They are rendered nearly voiceless. Falk, the UN special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories and former professor of international law at Princeton, was refused entry into Israel in December, detained for twenty hours, and deported. Never mind that nearly all of these voices are Jewish.
Our self-righteous celebration of ourselves and our supposed virtue is exposed to be as false as that of Israel. We have become monsters, militarized bullies, heartless and savage. We are a party to human slaughter, a flagrant war crime, and do nothing. We forget that the innocents who suffer and die in Gaza are a reflection of ourselves, of how we might have been should fate and time and geography have made the circumstances of our birth different. We forget that we are all absurd and vulnerable creatures. We all have the capacity to fear and hate and love. “Expose thyself to what wretches feel,” King Lear said, entering the mud and straw hovel of poor Tom, “and show the heavens more just.” Falk labeled the assault before Israel made its incursion into Gaza against the Palestinians as a “crime against humanity.” He reminded us that under international law, collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza is a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law, as laid down in Article 33 of the 4th Geneva Convention.
The public debate about the Gaza attack engages in the absurd pretense that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, whose security and dignity is being threatened. This blind defense of Israeli brutality towards the Palestinians is a betrayal of the memory of all those killed in other genocides in other times. From the Holocaust to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia, the lesson of the Holocaust is not that Jews are special; it is not that Jews are unique; it is not that Jews are eternal victims. The lesson of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to halt genocide, and you do not, no matter who carries out that genocide or who it is directed against, you are culpable.
The shelling of the UN school in Jabalia took place, Israel said, because Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from near the school entrance. And they offered proof, an aerial photo which showed the school and the mortar. But the photo, it was uncovered, was more than a year old. It was a lie, and lies permeate the absurd reports like the one on the front page of this Sunday’s New York Times, titled “A Gaza War Full of Traps and Trickery.” In this story, unnamed Israeli intelligence officials gave us a spin on the war worthy of the White House fabrications made on the eve of the Iraq War. We learned about the “perfidious and dirty tricks” of Palestinian resistance fighters. Foreign reporters, barred from Gaza and unable to check the veracity of the Israeli version of the war, are asked to abandon their trade as reporters to become stenographers. The cynicism of conveying Israeli propaganda and lies as truth as long as it is sourced to unidentified Israeli officials is the poison of American journalism. If this is all journalism has become—if moral outrage, the courage to defy the powerful, the commitment to tell the truth and to give a voice to those who without us would have no voice, no longer matters—then our journalism schools should devote their energies to teaching shorthand. It seems to be the skill most ardently coveted by the majority of our senior editors and news producers.
There have always been powerful Israeli leaders, since the inception of the State of Israel in 1948, who have called for the physical removal, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Indeed, 800,000 Palestinians were driven out by Jewish militias in 1948. But there were also a few Israeli leaders, including the assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who argued that Israel could not pick itself up and move to another geographical spot on the globe. Israel, Rabin believed, would have to make peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors to survive. Rabin’s vision of two states, however, died with him. The embrace of wholesale ethnic cleansing by the Israeli leadership and military is now unquestioned. This cleansing, for this is the intent of the campaign in Gaza, means Palestinians’ right to exist, was effectively cancelled 61 years ago with the establishment of the Israeli state. It means an acceleration of the expulsion and extinction of the indigenous people whose land was stolen from them, and whose land is now disappearing again under the weight of expanded settlements in the West Bank and newly seized territory by the Israeli military. It means that the infamous Plan D of 1947 and 1948, which resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah and the massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in razed villages like Deir Yassin, finds its logical conclusion in the events in Gaza.
“It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as disparate events unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system. Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology in its most consensual and simplistic variety, has allowed all Israeli governments in the past and present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities,” but there is, in his words, “a clear pattern of genocide.” Gaza tonight has descended into chaos. Hamas, despite Israeli propaganda, has never mustered the sustained resistance Hezbollah carried out during the Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon, has been crippled, if not broken. Gaza will be ruled in the future by antagonistic bands of warlords, clans, and mafias, resembling, I suspect, Somalia. And out of that power vacuum will rise a new generation of angry Jihadists, many of whom may spurn Hamas for more radical organizations.
Israel operates under the illusion that it can crush Hamas and install a quisling Palestinian government in Gaza and the West Bank. This puppet government will be led, Israel believes, by the discredited Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, now cowering in the West Bank after being driven out of Gaza. Abbas, like most of the corrupt Fatah leadership, is a detested figure. He is as loathed as he is powerless. Israel’s destruction of Hamas and reoccupation of Gaza will not bring peace or security to Israel. It will merely obliterate the only internal organization with enough stature and authority in Gaza, an organization elected to power in free and fair elections, to maintain order. The Israeli attack empowers the Islamic movements across the region who one day may well ring Israel link a vise. The attack reduces all communication between the Palestinians and the Israelis to the language of force. The violence unleashed on Palestinian children will one day be the violence unleashed on Israeli children. This is the tragedy of Gaza, and this is the tragedy of Israel.
America is Bankrolling the Holocaust of Our Time
The Gaza Health Ministry has released a 1,516–page document listing the names of over 50,000 Palestinians confirmed killed in Gaza since Oct 7, 2023. There are a total of 474 pages listing 15,600+ children’s names. For the first 27 pages, the age is listed as 0 — children under 1 year old.
The genocide in Palestine is 100% made in the USA. Israel’s barbarity is our own. We may not understand this, but the rest of the globe does.
"Like watching Auschwitz on TikTok"
Gabor Maté is a Hungarian-Canadian physician, author, speaker, expert on trauma and addiction, and a Jewish survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. Maté recently participated in a conversation with French activist, author, and film producer Frank Barat, during which the two discussed the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Palestine and its countless implications. Below a…
“Well, first of all, it’s like we’re watching Auschwitz on TikTok. Had there been YouTube and Instagram and TikTok around Auschwitz, this is what we would have seen: People burning alive. And it is beyond horrendous, beyond comprehension… When people like this are empowered and encouraged and allowed and supported in perpetrating their horrors, they get more crazy, more cruel, more remorseless, more relentless, more ruthless. That’s what happened to the Nazis. The Nazis did not start off with gas chambers. But, then they started killing their mentally ill people in gas vans, then they started shooting Jews in Eastern Europe, and then they ended up with the gas chambers of Auschwitz. So, it’s a progression of madness and cruelty that’s almost inevitable on the part of the perpetrator—and especially when it is encouraged by all the imperial powers…
We live in a post-colonial world where very few powers and economic entities control most of the world, and the inequality is just getting worse and worse so that the top few wealthiest people in the world control more wealth than the bottom half of humanity. That system has to be maintained. And one of the reasons I think the West supports Israel so vociferously is because it’s a lesson to the rest of the world: You better not challenge us. If you want to know what’s going to happen to you, this is what’s going to happen to you. So, it already has become the new normal. There was an article in The New York Times this morning about the Israelis using Palestinians as human shields. There was an article in Le Monde this morning about how the Bedouin have been ethnically cleansed from the Negev Desert and from the West Bank. These things are reported, but nobody does anything about them. So, this is the new normal until a sufficient percentage of humanity stands up and says, ‘No, we will not accept this new normal.’ So, that’s why we will keep talking as long as there is breath in our lungs. Perhaps we are contributing to something in the long term, and at least, perhaps in the present, we are saying to Palestinians, ‘There’s not much we can do to help you, practically, but at least we see you, and you are not alone.’ And I think that is important.”
“As a Holocaust survivor, Israel’s genocide in Gaza is not done in my name.
I see echoes of the Holocaust in Gaza today:
Dehumanization, humiliation, large-scale killings, destruction of families and the determination in which they are destroying the whole of Gaza is very similar to the cruelty of the fascist regimes and it should not be controversial to say so.
What happened to the Jewish people, the industrial scale of extermination and invisible emotional pain, is so horrendous that it should never be repeated anywhere in the world.
That is why we say not in our name and Never Again.
Fascism thrives on indifference and the general public being intimidated or looking the other way due to self-preservation.
Don’t look the other way.
Be brave and on the right side of history.”
