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The spirit of Auschwitz
Holocaust Day, 9 April, is also the day on which Palestinians mark the memory of the Deir Yassin massacre. Omar Barghouti* contemplates a grotesque coincidence that will not be consigned to the past"Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal of being an independent people with the Arabs in this small country. The only solution is a Palestine, at least Western Palestine [west of the Jordan River] without Arabs ... And there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe, should be left. Only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb the millions of our own brethren. There is no other way out."
This is not one of the many infamous statements made by the now deceased Rehavam Ze'evi or by Meir Kahane. It is a 1940 declaration by Yosef Weitz, one of the Zionist officers responsible for Jewish colonisation and member of the Jewish Agency's first "Transfer Committee."
Fifty-four years later, an Israeli soldier, participating in the army's brutalities in Jenin refugee camp, told The Guardian: "The problem is that there is not enough room in this small country for two peoples. It is a trial of strength that we are winning. They would like to throw us into the sea. We may have to do the same to them." The irony is that virtually all the refugees in the Jenin camp were first "transferred" from the coastal region of Haifa in 1948, to make room for the influx of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. And now, they are facing death, destruction and possibly another forced displacement. The victims of the Holocaust are victimising the byproduct victims of the Holocaust yet another time.
On 9 April, Palestinians everywhere commemorated the 54th anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre, when Zionist terror groups murdered 254 innocent Palestinian Arabs in cold blood -- as documented by several historians, including some of the "new historians" in Israel. In an authoritative account of the massacre, the British interrogating officer at the time, Assistant Inspector-General Richard Catling, confirmed that: "Many young school girls were raped and later slaughtered. Many infants were also butchered and killed."
Deir Yassin was meant to set an example, a particularly shocking precedent, to terrorise the Palestinians off their lands and into exile. It was no accident, no aberration, no extreme vengeance. It was simply a calculated act of terror in a well-thought-out plan to depopulate Palestine, and create in the resulting space a Jewish homeland for the victims of the Nazi genocide. Those victims also commemorated their history on 9 April, which was "Holocaust Day."
This coincidence stirs up a bitter irony. The victims of one of history's worst crimes against humanity are increasingly resorting to some of the same tools of racist hatred and collective punishment to complete the job that the founders of Zionism had envisioned: a "pure" Jewish state.
Last month, during a visit by a delegation from the International Parliament of Writers, the famous Portuguese Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago said he dreaded the "spirit of Auschwitz" in Ramallah and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories. Many Israeli intellectuals hypocritically condemned the remark, some implicitly accusing Saramago of anti-Semitism. Ironically, just this past January, Israel's Ha'aretz reported that "one of the Israeli officers in the [occupied] territories" found it justified to "internalise the lessons of earlier battles -- even, however shocking it may sound, how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto."
Indeed, several Israeli policies evoke a strong analogy with the Nazis, despite the unquestionable disparity in the magnitude of criminality between the two cases. Some of the wicked practices of the Nazis in concentration camps were even imported, wholesale and unabashedly, by Israeli army officers. During the last army incursion into Palestinian towns and refugee camps towards the end of February of this year, the Washington Post reported: "The [Israeli] army's mass round-ups of Palestinian refugees has been a public relations disaster for Israel, as images have been broadcast and printed around the world of blindfolded captives, including teenage boys and graying middle-aged-men, held at gun point. Some Israelis were also incensed that [Israeli] troops were writing [identification] numbers on some of the prisoners' arms and foreheads."
One of those who expressed "outrage" over this practice was the right-wing Israeli lawmaker Tommy Lapid, who declared in the Knesset: "As a refugee from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable."
In the current Israeli offensive against the Palestinians under occupation, the Israeli army has, in an effort to implement Sharon's promise of "battering them into submission," systematically committed several serious violations of international humanitarian law and of the Fourth Geneva Convention. These violations amount to war crimes, as described by UN agencies, Israeli human rights organisations and by Israel's best friend in the region, Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit.
Some of the better-documented examples have included the "shaving" of dwellings on top of their occupants in the Jenin refugee camp -- in other words, the indiscriminate shelling of that crowded camp's humble homes from tanks and helicopters, non-stop, for seven days, "using the elderly as human shields" in front of the tanks. The Israeli army persistently prevented ambulances from reaching the injured, and even shot at several ambulances which dared to try -- as has been documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Hundreds of innocent civilians, including scores of children, have been confirmed killed or injured as a result of the army's arbitrary clearing of the homes and the tiny alleys to allow its tanks to advance into the Jenin camp. The Times of London carried an eyewitness account from a survivor of the carnage there. He confirmed that "Children screamed for water and some were forced to drink sewage." He also said that "the most terrible thing was seeing Israeli soldiers take eight men and line them up and kill them." Those eight names were later revealed by a Palestinian source on Al-Jazeera television on 10 April 2002.
The commander of the Israeli forces in Jenin justified the tragic civilian losses and suffering by saying: "But people who raise children willing to commit suicide, who choose this path, they are expected to pay the price."
To top it all off, the latest newcomer to the already extremist Israeli government will be no other than Brigadier General (res.) Effi Eitam, currently the head of the National Religious Party, who thinks of the Arab citizens of Israel in the following terms: "The Israeli Arabs are in large measure the ticking bomb beneath the whole democratic Israeli order inside the [pre-June 1967] Green Line. Even today, in the Galilee and the Negev, a de facto autonomy of theirs is being created, which could in practice turn Israel into the bubble of Metropolitan Tel Aviv. Therefore, I say that the State of Israel today faces an existential threat that is characterised by being an elusive threat, and elusive threats by their nature resemble cancer. Cancer is a type of illness in which most of the people who die from it die because they were diagnosed too late. By the time you grasp the size of the threat, it is already too late to deal with it."
Commenting on this, the veteran Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar wrote in Ha'aretz that "the fact that the Nazis were especially fond of this [cancer] metaphor is probably not lost on the General."
This clear trend towards the extreme right in Israel hardly provokes any popular challenge, thanks mainly to the unprecedented complicity of the Israeli media. Although most of the media in Israel have never boasted a very bright record in being critical of government policies towards the Palestinians, they have sunk to new lows of collusion in covering, or rather covering up, the current Israeli "campaign of terror," as The Guardian has termed it.
"A journey through the [Israeli] TV and radio channels and the pages of the newspapers," writes Aviv Lavie in Ha'aretz, "exposes a huge and embarrassing gap between what is reported to [Israelis] and what is seen, heard, and read in the world, not only in the commentaries and analytical pieces, but also in the reporting of the dry facts."
"Israel looks like an isolated media island, with most of the reporters drafted into the cause of convincing themselves and the reader that the government and army are perfectly justified in whatever they do," he adds.
This fact, coupled with the enthusiastic approval, or dubious silence, of the absolute majority of Israeli Jews, makes the fear of creeping fascism in Israeli society, as expressed by several Israeli Knesset members, seem a bit optimistic. In fact, fascism is already there.
Several Israeli commentators and politicians have recently warned that unless the Palestinians accept the fact that they cannot gain anything through the use of force, they might witness an encore of the Nakba [the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe]. Given the prevailing attitudes and convictions among Israelis, and the alarming level of impunity, which Israel takes for granted, one cannot take this threat lightly.
* The writer is a doctoral student of philosophy at Tel Aviv University, currently residing in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank.
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