The Shoah after Gaza
Pankaj Mishra
In 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of the systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments as things of the past. He insisted that those who are tortured remain tortured, and that their trauma is irrevocable. Like many survivors of Nazi death camps, Améry came to feel an ‘existential connection’ to Israel in the 1960s. He obsessively attacked left-wing critics of the Jewish state as ‘thoughtless and unscrupulous’, and may have been one of the first to make the claim, habitually amplified now by Israel’s leaders and supporters, that virulent antisemites disguise themselves as virtuous anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists. Yet the ‘admittedly sketchy’ reports of torture in Israeli prisons prompted Améry to consider the limits of his solidarity with the Jewish state. In one of the last essays he published, he wrote: ‘I urgently call on all Jews who want to be human beings to join me in the radical condemnation of systematic torture. Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end.’
Améry was particularly disturbed by the apotheosis in 1977 of Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister. Begin, who had organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building settlements in the Occupied Territories. In its early years the state of Israel had an ambivalent relationship with the Shoah and its victims. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, initially saw Shoah survivors as ‘human debris’, claiming that they had survived only because they had been ‘bad, harsh, egotistic’. It was Ben-Gurion’s rival Begin, a demagogue from Poland, who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation, and a new basis for Israel’s identity. The Israeli establishment began to produce and disseminate a very particular version of the Shoah that could be used to legitimise a militant and expansionist Zionism.
Améry noted the new rhetoric and was categorical about its destructive consequences for Jews living outside Israel. That Begin, ‘with the Torah in his arm and taking recourse to biblical promises’, speaks openly of stealing Palestinian land ‘alone would be reason enough’, he wrote, ‘for the Jews in the diaspora to review their relationship to Israel’. Améry pleaded with Israel’s leaders to ‘acknowledge that your freedom can be achieved only with your Palestinian cousin, not against him’.
Five years later, insisting that Arabs were the new Nazis and Yasser Arafat the new Hitler, Begin assaulted Lebanon. By the time Ronald Reagan accused him of perpetrating a ‘holocaust’ and ordered him to end it, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese and obliterated large parts of Beirut. In his novel Kapo (1993), the Serbian-Jewish author Aleksandar Tišma captures the revulsion many survivors of the Shoah felt at the images coming out of Lebanon: ‘Jews, his kinsmen, the sons and grandsons of his contemporaries, former inmates of the camps, stood in tank turrets and drove, flags waving, through undefended settlements, through human flesh, ripping it apart with machine-gun bullets, rounding up the survivors in camps fenced off with barbed wire.’
Primo Levi, who had known the horrors of Auschwitz at the same time as Améry and also felt an emotional affinity to the new Jewish state, quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation
Misgivings of the kind expressed by Améry and Levi are condemned as grossly antisemitic today. It’s worth remembering that many such re-examinations of Zionism and anxieties about the perception of Jews in the world were incited among survivors and witnesses of the Shoah by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its manipulative new mythology. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a theologian who won the Israel Prize in 1993, was already warning in 1969 against the ‘Nazification’ of Israel. In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion: the tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from ‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself’. Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating ‘non-Jews as subhuman’ and replicating ‘racist Nazi attitudes’.
Evron urged caution, too, against Israel’s (then new and ardent) supporters in the Jewish American population. For them, he argued, championing Israel had become ‘necessary because of the loss of any other focal point to their Jewish identity’ – indeed, so great was their existential lack, according to Evron, that they did not wish Israel to become free of its mounting dependence on Jewish American support.
They need to feel needed. They also need the ‘Israeli hero’ as a social and emotional compensation in a society in which the Jew is not usually perceived as embodying the characteristics of the tough manly fighter. Thus, the Israeli provides the American Jew with a double, contradictory image – the virile superman, and the potential Holocaust victim – both of whose components are far from reality.
Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish-born Jewish philosopher and refugee from Nazism who spent three years in Israel in the 1970s before fleeing its mood of bellicose righteousness, despaired of what he saw as the ‘privatisation’ of the Shoah by Israel and its supporters. It has come to be remembered, he wrote in 1988, ‘as a private experience of the Jews, as a matter between the Jews and their haters’, even as the conditions that made it possible were appearing again around the world. Such survivors of the Shoah, who had been plunged from a serene belief in secular humanism into collective insanity, intuited that the violence they had survived – unprecedented in its magnitude – wasn’t an aberration in an essentially sound modern civilisation. Nor could it be blamed entirely on a hoary prejudice against Jews. Technology and the rational division of labour had enabled ordinary people to contribute to acts of mass extermination with a clear conscience, even with frissons of virtue, and preventive efforts against such impersonal and available modes of killing required more than vigilance against antisemitism.
When I recently turned to my books to prepare this piece, I found I’d already underlined many of passages I quote here. In my diary there are lines copied from George Steiner (‘the nation-state bristling with arms is a bitter relic, an absurdity in the century of crowded men’) and Abba Eban (‘It is about time that we stand on our own feet and not on those of the six million dead’). Most of these annotations date back to my first visit to Israel and its Occupied Territories, when I was seeking to answer, in my innocence, two perplexing questions: how did Israel come to exercise such a terrible power of life and death over a population of refugees; and how can the Western political and journalistic mainstream ignore, even justify, its clearly systematic cruelties and injustices?
I had grown up imbibing some of the reverential Zionism of my family of upper-caste Hindu nationalists in India. Both Zionism and Hindu nationalism emerged in the late 19th century out of an experience of humiliation; many of their ideologists longed to overcome what they perceived as a shameful lack of manhood among Jews and Hindus. And for Hindu nationalists in the 1970s, impotent detractors of the then ruling pro-Palestinian Congress party, uncompromising Zionists such as Begin, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir seemed to have won the race to muscular nationhood. (The envy is now out of the closet: Hindu trolls constitute Benjamin Netanyahu’s largest fan club in the world.) I remember I had a picture on my wall of Moshe Dayan, the IDF chief of staff and defence minister during the Six-Day War; and even long after my childish infatuation with crude strength faded, I did not cease to see Israel the way its leaders had from the 1960s begun to present the country, as redemption for the victims of the Shoah, and an unbreakable guarantee against its recurrence.
I knew how little the plight of Jews scapegoated during Germany’s social and economic breakdown in the 1920s and 1930s had registered in the conscience of Western European and American leaders, that even Shoah survivors were met with a cold shoulder, and, in Eastern Europe, with fresh pogroms. Though convinced of the justice of the Palestinian cause, I found it hard to resist the Zionist logic: that Jews cannot survive in non-Jewish lands and must have a state of their own. I even thought it was unjust that Israel alone among all the countries in the world needed to justify its right to exist.
I wasn’t naive enough to think that suffering ennobles or empowers the victims of a great atrocity to act in a morally superior way. That yesterday’s victims are very likely to become today’s victimisers is the lesson of organised violence in the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and too many other places. I was still shocked by the dark meaning the Israeli state had drawn from the Shoah, and then institutionalised in a machinery of repression. The targeted killings of Palestinians, checkpoints, home demolitions, land thefts, arbitrary and indefinite detentions, and widespread torture in prisons seemed to proclaim a pitiless national ethos: that humankind is divided into those who are strong and those who are weak, and so those who have been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies.
Though I had read Edward Said, I was still shocked to discover for myself how insidiously Israel’s high-placed supporters in the West conceal the nihilistic survival-of-the-strongest ideology reproduced by all Israeli regimes since Begin’s. It is in their own interests to be concerned with the crimes of the occupiers, if not with the suffering of the dispossessed and dehumanised; but both have passed without much scrutiny in the respectable press of the Western world. Anyone calling attention to the spectacle of Washington’s blind commitment to Israel is accused of antisemitism and ignoring the lessons of the Shoah. And a distorted consciousness of the Shoah ensures that whenever the victims of Israel, unable to endure their misery any longer, rise up against their oppressors with predictable ferocity, they are denounced as Nazis, hellbent on perpetrating another Shoah.
In reading and annotating the writings of Améry, Levi and others I was trying somehow to mitigate the oppressive sense of wrongness I felt after being exposed to Israel’s bleak construal of the Shoah, and the certificates of high moral merit bestowed on the country by its Western allies. I was looking for reassurance from people who had known, in their own frail bodies, the monstrous terror visited on millions by a supposedly civilised European nation-state, and who had resolved to be on perpetual guard against the deformation of the Shoah’s meaning and the abuse of its memory.
Despite its increasing reservations about Israel, a political and media class in the West has ceaselessly euphemised the stark facts of military occupation and unchecked annexation by ethnonational demagogues: Israel, the chorus goes, has the right, as the Middle East’s only democracy, to defend itself, especially from genocidal brutes. As a result, the victims of Israeli barbarity in Gaza today cannot even secure straightforward recognition of their ordeal from Western elites, let alone relief. In recent months, billions of people around the world have witnessed an extraordinary onslaught whose victims, as Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, an Irish lawyer who is South Africa’s representative at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, put it, ‘are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something’.
But the world, or more specifically the West, doesn’t do anything. Worse, the liquidation of Gaza, though outlined and broadcast by its perpetrators, is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military and cultural hegemony: from the US president claiming that Palestinians are liars and European politicians intoning that Israel has a right to defend itself to the prestigious news outlets deploying the passive voice while relating the massacres carried out in Gaza. We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time. Yet the prevailing callousness, timidity and censorship disallows, even mocks, our shock and grief. Many of us who have seen some of the images and videos coming out of Gaza – those visions from hell of corpses twisted together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows – have been quietly going mad over the last few months. Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves are being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children.
Those driven to scan Joe Biden’s face for some sign of mercy, some sign of an end to bloodletting, find an eerily smooth hardness, broken only by a nervous little smirk when he blurts out Israeli lies about beheaded babies. Biden’s stubborn malice and cruelty to the Palestinians is just one of many gruesome riddles presented to us by Western politicians and journalists. The Shoah traumatised at least two Jewish generations, and the massacres and hostage-taking in Israel on 7 October by Hamas and other Palestinian groups rekindled a fear of collective extermination among many Jews. But it was clear from the start that the most fanatical Israeli leadership in history would not shrink from exploiting a widespread sense of violation, bereavement and horror. It would have been easy for Western leaders to choke off their impulse of unconditional solidarity with an extremist regime while also acknowledging the necessity of pursuing and bringing to justice those guilty of war crimes on 7 October. Why then did Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, assert that Israel has the right to ‘withhold power and water’ from Palestinians? Why did Germany feverishly start selling more arms to Israel (and with its mendacious media and ruthless official crackdown, especially on Jewish artists and thinkers, provide a fresh lesson to the world in murderous ethnonationalism’s quick ascent there)? What explains headlines on the BBC and in the New York Times like ‘Hind Rajab, six, found dead in Gaza days after phone calls for help’, ‘Tears of Gaza father who lost 103 relatives’ and ‘Man Dies after Setting Himself on Fire Outside Israeli Embassy in Washington, Police Say’? Why have Western politicians and journalists kept presenting tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians as collateral damage, in a war of self-defence forced on the world’s most moral army, as the IDF claims to be?
The answers for many people around the world cannot but be tainted by a long-simmering racial bitterness. Palestine, as George Orwell pointed out in 1945, is a ‘colour issue’, and this is the way it was inevitably seen by Gandhi, who pleaded with Zionist leaders not to resort to terrorism against Arabs using Western arms, and the postcolonial nations, which almost all refused to recognise the state of Israel. What W.E.B. Du Bois called the central problem of international politics – the ‘colour line’ – motivated Nelson Mandela when he said that South Africa’s freedom from apartheid is ‘incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’. James Baldwin sought to profane what he termed a ‘pious silence’ around Israel’s behaviour when he claimed that the Jewish state, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as an instance of gross racial injustice. So, today, do the leaders of the United States’s oldest and most prominent Black Christian denominations, who have accused Israel of genocide and asked Biden to end all financial as well as military aid to the country.
In 1967, Baldwin was tactless enough to say that the suffering of Jewish people ‘is recognised as part of the moral history of the world’ and ‘this is not true for the blacks.’ In 2024, many more people can see that, when compared with the Jewish victims of Nazism, the countless millions consumed by slavery, the numerous late Victorian holocausts in Asia and Africa, and the nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are barely remembered. Billions of non-Westerners have been furiously politicised in recent years by the West’s calamitous war on terror, ‘vaccine apartheid’ during the pandemic, and the barefaced hypocrisy over the plight of Ukrainians and Palestinians; they can hardly fail to notice a belligerent version of ‘Holocaust denial’ among the elites of former imperialist countries, who refuse to address their countries’ past of genocidal brutality and plunder and try hard to delegitimise any discussion of this as unhinged ‘wokeness’. Popular West-is-best accounts of totalitarianism continue to ignore the acute descriptions of Nazism (by Jawaharlal Nehru and Aimé Césaire, among other imperial subjects) as the radical ‘twin’ of Western imperialism; they shy away from exploring the obvious connection between the imperial slaughter of natives in the colonies and the genocidal terrors perpetrated against Jews inside Europe.
One of the great dangers today is the hardening of the colour line into a new Maginot Line. For most people outside the West, whose primordial experience of European civilisation was to be brutally colonised by its representatives, the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity. Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in their own countries, most non-Western people were in no position to appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe. So when Israel’s leaders compare Hamas to Nazis, and Israeli diplomats wear yellow stars at the UN, their audience is almost exclusively Western. Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.
In 2006, Tony Judt was already warning that ‘the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalised to excuse Israel’s behaviour’ because a growing number of people ‘simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behaviour in another time and place’. Israel’s ‘long-cultivated persecution mania – “everyone’s out to get us” – no longer elicits sympathy’, he warned, and prophecies of universal antisemitism risk ‘becoming a self-fulfilling assertion’: ‘Israel’s reckless behaviour and insistent identification of all criticism with antisemitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia.’ Israel’s most devout friends today are inflaming this situation. As the Israeli journalist and documentary maker Yuval Abraham put it, the ‘appalling misuse’ of the accusation of antisemitism by Germans empties it of meaning and ‘thus endangers Jews all over the world’. Biden keeps making the treacherous argument that the safety of the Jewish population worldwide depends on Israel. As the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein put it recently, ‘I’m a Jewish person. Do I feel safer? Do I feel like there’s less antisemitism in the world right now because of what is happening there, or does it seem to me that there’s a huge upsurge of antisemitism, and that even Jews in places that are not Israel are vulnerable to what happens in Israel?’
This ruinous scenario was very clearly anticipated by the Shoah survivors I quoted earlier, who warned of the damage inflicted on the memory of the Shoah by its instrumentalisation. Bauman warned repeatedly after the 1980s that such tactics by unscrupulous politicians like Begin and Netanyahu were securing ‘a post-mortem triumph for Hitler, who dreamed of creating conflict between Jews and the whole world’ and ‘preventing Jews from ever having peaceful coexistence with others’. Améry, made desperate in his last years by ‘burgeoning antisemitism’, pleaded with Israelis to treat even Palestinian terrorists humanely, so that the solidarity between diaspora Zionists like himself and Israel did not ‘become the basis for a communion of two doomed parties in the face of catastrophe’.
There isn’t much to be hoped for in this regard from Israel’s present leaders. The discovery of their extreme vulnerability to Hizbullah as well as Hamas should make them more willing to risk a compromise peace settlement. Yet, with all the 2000 lb bombs lavished on them by Biden, they crazily seek to further militarise their occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Such self-harm is the long-term effect Boaz Evron feared when he warned against ‘the continuous mentioning of the Holocaust, antisemitism and the hatred of Jews in all generations’. ‘A leadership cannot be separated from its own propaganda,’ he wrote, and Israel’s ruling class act like the chieftains of a ‘sect’ operating ‘in the world of myths and monsters created by its own hands’, ‘no longer able to understand what is happening in the real world’ or the ‘historical processes in which the state is caught’.
Forty-four years after Evron wrote this, it is clearer, too, that Israel’s Western patrons have turned out to be the country’s worst enemies, ushering their ward deeper into hallucination. As Evron said, Western powers act against their ‘own interests and apply to Israel a special preferential relationship, without Israel seeing itself obligated to reciprocate’. Consequently, ‘the special treatment given to Israel, expressed in unconditional economic and political support’ has ‘created an economic and political hothouse around Israel cutting it off from global economic and political realities’.
Netanyahu and his cohort threaten the basis of the global order that was rebuilt after the revelation of Nazi crimes. Even before Gaza, the Shoah was losing its central place in our imagination of the past and future. It is true that no historical atrocity has been so widely and comprehensively commemorated. But the culture of remembrance around the Shoah has now accumulated its own long history. That history shows that the memory of the Shoah did not merely spring organically from what transpired between 1939 and 1945; it was constructed, often very deliberately, and with specific political ends. In fact, a necessary consensus about the Shoah’s universal salience has been endangered by the increasingly visible ideological pressures brought to bear on its memory.
That Germany’s Nazi regime and its European collaborators had murdered six million Jews was widely known after 1945. But for many years this stupefying fact had little political and intellectual resonance. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Shoah was not seen as an atrocity separate from other atrocities of the war: the attempted extermination of Slav populations, Gypsies, disabled people and homosexuals. Of course, most European peoples had reasons of their own not to dwell on the killing of Jews. Germans were obsessed with their own trauma of bombing and occupation by Allied powers and their mass expulsion from Eastern Europe. France, Poland, Austria and the Netherlands, which had eagerly co-operated with the Nazis, wanted to present themselves as part of a valiant ‘resistance’ to Hitlerism. Too many indecent reminders of complicity existed long after the war ended in 1945. Germany had former Nazis as its chancellor and president. The French president François Mitterrand had been an apparatchik in the Vichy regime. As late as 1992, Kurt Waldheim was president of Austria despite there being evidence of his involvement in Nazi atrocities.
Even in the United States, there was ‘public silence and some sort of statist denial regarding the Holocaust’, as Idith Zertal writes in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (2005). It wasn’t until long after 1945 that the Holocaust began to be publicly remembered. In Israel itself, awareness of the Shoah was limited for years to its survivors, who, astonishing to remember today, were drenched with contempt by the leaders of the Zionist movement. Ben-Gurion had initially seen Hitler’s rise to power as ‘a huge political and economic boost for the Zionist enterprise’, but he did not consider human debris from Hitler’s death camps as fit material for the construction of a strong new Jewish state. ‘Everything they had endured,’ Ben-Gurion said, ‘purged their souls of all good.’ Saul Friedlander, the foremost historian of the Shoah, who left Israel partly because he couldn’t bear to see the Shoah being used ‘as a pretext for harsh anti-Palestinian measures’, recalls in his memoir, Where Memory Leads (2016), that academic scholars initially spurned the subject, leaving it to the memorial and documentation centre Yad Vashem.
Attitudes began to change only with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. In The Seventh Million (1993), the Israeli historian Tom Segev recounts that Ben-Gurion, who was accused by Begin and other political rivals of insensitivity to Shoah survivors, decided to stage a ‘national catharsis’ by holding the trial of a Nazi war criminal. He hoped to educate Jews from Arab countries about the Shoah and European antisemitism (neither of which they were familiar with) and start binding them with Jews of European ancestry in what seemed all too clearly an imperfectly imagined community. Segev goes on to describe how Begin advanced this process of forging a Shoah consciousness among darker-skinned Jews who had long been the target of racist humiliations by the country’s white establishment. Begin healed their injuries of class and race by promising them stolen Palestinian land and a socioeconomic status above dispossessed and destitute Arabs.
Further reading: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza
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