Holocaust Memory Distortion Has Led to Genocidal Ambivalence Today
‘Never again’ has always been a catchy slogan that billowed proudly in the post-war political winds. But an inability to truly face the civilisational failings that led to the Holocaust renders the slogan & the attached intent obsolete in view of the genocide in Gaza.
‘The Herero are German subjects no longer. They have killed, stolen, cut off the ears and other parts of the body of wounded soldiers, and now are too cowardly to want to fight any longer…. The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the big cannon. Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children.’
The extermination order that began the twentieth century’s first genocide of the Herero, whom the German settlers called ‘baboons.’ Given by the German commander, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, in October, 1904, following a series of attacks by so-called ‘rebels’ on settlers farms in what today we call Namibia.
Omer Bertov, ‘Infinite License,’ NYR, April, 2025.
Empty words & vacant promises…such is the West as we know it
‘On May 14, 1948, on the day in which the British Mandate over a Palestine expired, the Jewish People’s Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum, and approved the following proclamation, declaring the establishment of the State of Israel. The new state was recognized that night by the United States and three days later by the USSR.’
This historic event, which changed forever the face of the Middle East, was given voice and context in the words of David Ben-Gurion, who had, for the most part, written the Declaration of Independence, and was set to become the new states first Prime Minister and steer it through the turbulence of its parturition and the violence of its’ early years.
The full text of the declaration can be read here; it is not overly long, wordy or complex, and below I have quoted a few short sections of Ben-Gurion’s speech that I believe are relevant to the discussion that follows.
Ben-Gurion spoke plainly and to the point. He began though expansively, putting the new state of Israel in its historical context as he saw it; as most Jews saw it at the time. He said:
‘Eretz-Israel (in Hebrew — the Land of Israel, Palestine) was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.’
He then briefly summarised the journey of his people; their exile and subsequent dispersal across Europe and beyond, and the idea of their rebirth, given form and substance by Theodor Herzl, all before the catastrophe of the Shoah (Holocaust), the defeat of the Nazis and the UNGA Resolution 181 (Partition Plan) in November, 1947.
Although it is not part of the question at hand, nor of Ben-Gurion’s speech that day, it is nonetheless important to state that the Resolution proposed the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, including an internationalised area for Jerusalem. This resolution, also known as the Partition Plan, did not explicitly grant Israel a right to any specific territory but rather outlined a plan for the creation of an independent Jewish state within a larger area.
Ben-Gurion said, ‘This right,’ as given by the UN in the Resolution, ‘is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.’
He then moved onto the Declaration proper, beginning:
‘Accordingly we, Members of the People’s Council, representatives of the Jewish community of Eretz-Israel and of the Zionist movement, are here assembled on the day of the termination of the British Mandate over Eretz-Israel and, by virtue of our natural and historic right and on the strength of the Resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.’
Again, it is important to note that at no point in the Mandate or in the Resolution was the land in question called Eretz-Israel. The term used ubiquitously in both documents was ‘Palestine.’ The phrase, Eretz Israel means ‘Land of Israel,’ and is a direct translation of the Hebrew phrase ארץ ישראל (Eretz Yisrael), which occasionally occurs in the Bible, and is first mentioned in the Tanakh in 1 Samuel 13:19 as ‘Eretz Israel’ (English translation) or in the KJB (same chapter and verse), as the ‘land of Israel,’ mentioned as it is following the Exodus, when the Israelite tribes were already in the Land of Canaan.
Ben-Gurion continues:
‘The State of Israel will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.’
But this highly disputed land was already embroiled in a brutal internecine war that had plunged new depths of depravity in the previous months.
Aware of the problems besetting his fledgling state Ben-Gurion continued with an appeal to Arab residents and neighbours alike for peace.
‘We appeal’ he said, ‘in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months — to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.’
‘We extend our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.’
But such appeals were empty gestures and no more; they were intended more for those dignitaries sitting in New York in the UNGA, and were never truly honoured in any way, by either side, it must said. Yet, despite it all, Israel has prospered, in part because of the immense and unwavering support of the U.S., while the Palestinians, Ben-Gurion’s ‘Arab inhabitants,’ have languished and suffered unimaginably beneath the jack boot of the last great Western colonial project.
Blanket Western support for Zionism and the colonial enterprise it heads, has undermined calls for justice for the Palestinians for more than a century in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The immense weight of Western colonial repression and prevailing white supremacist narratives have, thus far, won the day. But the cost has been immense, for both Israelis and Palestinians, and, more latterly, in respect of the decimation and subsequent destruction of international law and all norms associated with what is, and what is not, acceptable in times of war.
That difference seems to increasingly fall along racial and religious lines and has little or nothing to do with what is right, moral or legal. Such feeble concerns as life and limb are subordinated to the colour of one’s skin and the God to whom one bend’s one’s knee.
Hope for something better, something just, something humanely equal for the Palestinians under international law, is now, I would suggest, a forlorn one. As Hamdan Bailal, West Bank resident, and winner of the Best Documentary Oscar for ‘No Other Land’ this year, wrote in a recent NYT Op-Ed following his arrest and beating for being nothing other than he is; a Palestinian, that: ‘There is no law to turn to here and no government that will protect us, no international law and no international bodies that are pushing to stop this violence.’
The words of triumph on the night of November 29, 1947, given by Golda Myerson (later Meir) to the jubilant crowds in Jerusalem upon hearing that the UN General Assembly had given partition the go ahead, were full of hope for the future for the (then) putative state of Israel; a future that has, in spite of the ubiquitous guilt-laden support of the historically antisemitic West, been consistently blighted by near continuous conflict and bloodshed with one enemy or another.
‘For two thousand years we have waited for our deliverance. Now that it is here it is so great and wonderful that it surpasses human words. Jews, mazel tov, good luck!’ she said (1); but good luck alone has not been enough to ensure Israel’s security.
And yet even in triumph that night, some revellers, like Yosef Nahmani, a Tiberias city councillor, were torn and conflicted, and in a dark harbinger of the intense racial strife to come, he knew that what had been given would never be enough for most Jews.
Despite joining in the celebrations, he later wrote in his diary that, ‘in my heart there was a joy mixed with sadness: joy that the nations had at last acknowledged that we are a nation with a state, and sadness that we lost half the country, Judea and Samaria, and, in addition, we (would) have (in our state) 400,000 Arabs (1).’
Indeed, David Ben-Gurion was far more pragmatic, and with a conscious awareness of the difficult road that lay ahead said, ‘I could not dance, I could not sing that night. I looked at them, so happy dancing, and I could only think they were all going to war.’
And today, eight decades later, young Israelis are still going to war; still dying, and for what?
To satisfy the racist, maximalist dreams of one man who wages war on pretence of it being on behalf of his people, but is in reality to distract from the immensity of his own crimes, misdemeanours and failures? Well, certainly that’s a large part of it, and the entirety of the question of Netanyahu’s culpability is beyond the scope of this post alone, but is one that I shall return to I’ve no doubt.
It is arguable now, and little more beyond that, to wonder what the outcome might have been had Ben-Gurion actually written and implemented the constitution he had always promised was forthcoming. I discussed in great detail some of the reasons why he turned his back on that option in a previous post, ‘What is a Constitution?’ and the other posts in that series that followed it, but perhaps only he himself knows exactly why he went down the road to what has become Israeli ‘perdition’ and not the idyllic, haven state he had envisioned.
His fears, so real and tangible that night so long ago, have been realised in ways perhaps unimaginable back then.
The fact remains however that, in the absence of a written constitution, the legality and force of the declaration as a legal document is questionable, and perhaps gave Ben-Gurion, the Jewish militias, and later the IDF, the legal leeway and latitude to turn ‘the land’s Palestinian majority into a minority through intimidation and violent expulsion,’ and the uprooting of so many that became the Nakba, that ensues to this very minute and beyond.
However, in the U.S. today we are seeing the fragility that even the most lauded of constitution’s provides if a rogue ruler/President decides to trample it, and the values of the nation it was written on behalf of, into the ground.
I repeat again Hamdan Bailal’s words from above.
‘There is no law to turn to here and no government that will protect us, no international law and no international bodies that are pushing to stop this violence.’
Just like the Holocaust; the Jewish Shoah, the extent of the the tragedy was never just a Jewish issue, or a Jewish problem; it never occurred in Jewish history in isolation. Despite all attempts to portray this as a singular event that affected the Jews of Europe alone, at the hands of temporally demented German people in thrall to a mad, yet hypnotic dictator, its alleged causal and physical isolation is anything but isolated. The fast flowing rivers of the Holocaust may have run deepest in Germany, but the flood plains engulfed an entire civilisation, and much of the damage still remains today, buried beneath the thick silt of time, and behind layered dense banks of convenient psychological misrepresentation, cultural misdirection and overwhelming guilt, over which we fear to peek for what we might see.
Because, after all, the narrative is that ‘the Holocaust was born and executed in modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture (2).’
And like the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, the wide ranging extent of the culpability for the current Middle Eastern Holocaust stretches far beyond the borders of Israel. This is not solely a Palestinian issue, or an Israeli problem; the continuing lack of international political will and resistance to the ongoing slaughter is a huge problem for all of us. It is nothing less than a massive undeclared failing of today’s Western society, civilisation and culture at large.
And it is this immense failing I shall examine in today’s post.
‘The townspeople of the East Texas village of Leesburg hammered a buggy axle into the ground to serve as a stake. Then they chained nineteen-year-old Wylie McNeely to it. They collected the kindling they would use for the fire at the base of his feet, despite his protestations of innocence in connection to the white girl they said he had assaulted. Five hundred people gathered that fall in 1921 to see Wylie McNeely burn to death in front of them. But first, the leaders of the lynching had to settle a matter of importance. The leaders drew lots to see who would get which piece of McNeely’s body after they had burned him alive, figure out the body parts “which they regarded as the choicest souvenir.” This they did in front of the young man facing his final seconds on this earth, there chained up and left to hear of the disposition of his fingers and ears to the men who had kidnapped him outside of the law. The leaders debated this in front of the five hundred people who had come to watch him die and who were impatient for the festivities to begin. After the men had decided and after all was settled, they lit the match.’
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste, (3), and the fallibility of having a Constitution.
Genocidal legitimacy: ‘In the name of the people…’
Michael Mann wrote in 1999, before 9/11, and long before October 7, that despite the twentieth century’s death toll through genocide being in excess of 60 million, academic attention on the subject area was sadly lacking. ‘If they think about genocide at all,’ he observed drily, ‘they view it as an unfortunate interruption of the real structural tendencies of the twentieth century — economic, social and political progress.’
The generalised view was that ‘…murderous ethnic and political cleansing (was) seen as a regression to the primitive — essentially anti-modern — and is committed by backward or marginal groups manipulated by clever and dangerous politicians.’ Limited to people who didn’t know any better; who were essentially ‘uncivilised;’ ‘the terrible Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis).’ Genocide had little to do with ‘us’ he wrote.
Still the genocidal crimes committed by colonising nations all across the globe were not seen as part of this equation. A point perhaps underlined by the post-war German attitude of vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with or overcoming the past) that was limited to the memory of the Holocaust, and not long-forgotten colonial crimes against human Herero ‘baboons.’
Indeed, Mann suggests the notion of the ‘other’ originally arose out of the idea of democracy, and is a disturbing by-product of early democratic projects that were usually limited to the male, propertied classes, with other classes (and genders) denied enfranchisement.
Of course, the notion of the (inferior) ‘other’ within the bounds of a democratic territory or nation has stayed with us, as a persistent weeping sore on the otherwise blemish free idea of democratic liberalism, and forms today the basis of the right-wing racist, anti-immigrant tropes that are so widespread across nations that would call themselves democratic, free, and (largely) liberal.
White-washing a nations torrid, violent past and forgetting the crimes of latter day heroes in the service of the nation is a rare and magical skill, that whilst not unique to our civilised, enlightened Western nations, is most certainly a ubiquitous one.
And so it is with the Holocaust, which is usually passed off as an aberration; a one off occurrence, that came about either as the culmination of centuries of European antisemitism — which, Bauman suggests (2) is, of itself a unique phenomenon that stands alone for ‘its unprecedented systematicity, for its ideological intensity, for its supra-national and supra-territorial spread, for its unique mix of local and ecumenical sources and tributaries’ — or, it is seen as a ‘one item set;’ a singular societal aberration that says more about the pathology of the society in which it occurred, yet provides no tangible link to furthering our understanding of our own society’s normalised condition, thereby negating the need for any significant revision in respect of the modernisation of our (Western) civilisation, or of our ‘civilising’ sociological processes, effectively nullifying questions about our own society.
At worst the Holocaust is perhaps seen as some type of neo-cortical failure to control primitive urges welling up from a violent, pre-civilisational era. Such a view has had the effect of removing it from the realm of sociological inquiry in relation to today’s modern society.
The point being that, however one views or reads about the Holocaust, it is, as Bauman suggests, always ‘shunted into the familiar stream of history.’
‘When viewed in this fashion, and accompanied with the proper citation of historical horrors (the religious crusades, the slaughter of Albigensian heretics, the Turkish decimation of the Armenians, and even the British invention of concentration camps during the Boar War), it becomes all too convenient to see the Holocaust as ‘unique’ — but normal, after all (see references in Bauman, 2).’
However one decides to see the Holocaust then, it requires little or no revision of society’s theoretical framework of modernisation. Everything can continue on as normal; progress can march on full steam ahead, because the aberration that was the Holocaust has been put firmly in its place and our civilisation is content that the lessons have been learned. The mantra that is ‘never again’ will be forever adhered to because we are nothing if we are not able to learn from our mistakes; the civilising process has worked we are told; we have progressed far beyond the historical dirty work of the inherently evil Hitler and his National Socialist regime.
There was however, an alternative view Mann tells us, that is ‘derived from a religious perspective,’ one that ‘sees the capacity for evil as a universal attribute of human beings, whether ‘civilized’ or not. This is true, yet capacity for evil only becomes actualized in certain circumstances, and, in the case of genocide, these seem less primitive than distinctly modern.’
Yes indeed. Yes indeed.
Leo Kuper, who had ‘essentially founded genocide studies by noting that the modern state’s monopoly of sovereignty over a territory that was, in reality, culturally plural and economically stratified, (effectively) created both the desire and the power to commit genocide (4).’
Furthermore, since the societal conditions that led to the Holocaust are still present today, and are even being magnified by the various right-wing political parties and movements that are gaining prominence everywhere, current sovereign territorial claims, as an integral part of a nations sovereignty, mean ‘the right to commit genocide, or engage in genocidal massacres, against people under (their) rule (4),’ is considered to be the concerned nations business alone (e.g. the Uyghurs in China).
Bauman was pragmatic, yet assertive in his summary of this dire situation (2) when he wrote that, ‘the Holocaust, now thoroughly researched by historians, should be looked upon as, so to speak, a sociological laboratory. The Holocaust has exposed and examined such attributes of our society as are not revealed, and hence are not empirically accessible, in non-laboratory conditions. In other words, I propose,’ he says, ‘to treat the Holocaust as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities of modern society.’
And whilst there is a distinct lack of Auschwitz style death camps, the cold-blooded, modern military machine that ensures conscience free video-game application of mass slaughter, the open-ended detention without any due process, the ‘systemic, institutional policy focused on the continual abuse and torture’ of Palestinian detainees by Israeli authorities does not in any way exclude the wider situation in Palestine from being, under Bauman’s definition, a twenty first century laboratory under which the dark attributes and violent, genocidal extremes of modern democratic societies can be viewed in all their gruesome vitality.
‘On Thursday, the State of Israel will mark 77 years since its establishment, but this year, too, a dark shadow will hang over the independence celebrations. This is the second consecutive Independence Day that will be marked during a war, and at a time when 59 hostages are still imprisoned in Gaza, when, according to estimates, 21 of them are probably alive.…/…Abandoning the hostages not only overshadows the Independence Day celebrations, but it also badly undermines confidence in the state and the very fact that it is a home and a refuge for Jews. The fact that we’ve lost our way is also reflected in the continuation of the war, which, since being renewed, has in effect been directed against the entire population of the Gaza Strip. Israel has become a country that no longer knows how to distinguish between fighters and civilians and between a war and a war crime. When a country loses this compass, the danger that awaits it from within is no less serious than that which awaits it from outside.’
A post-modern military & a modern application of violence still leads to genocide
‘…genocide has usually been a deliberate instrument of modern state policy.’ wrote Mann. ‘Some emphasize the technology available to the perpetrators: modern weapons, transport and administration have escalated the efficiency of mass, bureaucratic, depersonalized killing (see references in Mann for more clarity and detail).’
Indeed, Helen Fein suggested that the victims of premeditated genocides, such as the Holocaust, were slaughtered in order to fulfil the state’s desire for a new socio-political order. Stressing the ‘genocidal potential of modern ‘myths’ or ‘political formulae’ — ideologies of nation, race and class,’ she effectively erased the line between the primitive human animal and modern civilised man in respect of the ability, or desire to commit genocide.
However, Mann suggests that despite the wide disparity of views (in respect of the origin of genocidal tendencies), one aspect all twentieth centuries genocides shared was the justification of their actions as being ‘in the name of the people.’ By claiming legitimacy in the name of ‘the people’, Mann asserts that ‘genocidal régimes claim kinship to movements which are usually recognized as the bearers of true modernity, like liberalism or social democracy,’ and that genocide today could be regarded as deriving from the ‘dark side of democracy.’
There is no doubt the words of the U.S. Constitution and the meaning therein give legitimacy not only to the United States, but also to ‘the (American) people.’ Indeed, the preamble below, to the beginning of the Constitution proper starts with the words, ‘We the People…’
‘We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.’
The strength and power of the Constitution inspired and gave legitimacy to many nations who followed suit, legitimating not only the territory of their nation with like-constitutions, but also the people therein, the national collective, if you will. But with the investment of territorial sovereignty and the moral legitimacy it engenders, two problems can then arise.
‘First,’ explains Mann, ‘the citizen body is conceived of as sharing distinctive virtuous characteristics, ethnic and/or political, which may distinguish it from non-citizen inhabitants or neighbours who are not entitled to citizenship. ‘We, the people’ may generate the sense of the alien ‘other’. Second, if sovereignty is also conceived of as territorial — which is a normal feature of modern states — then the ‘other’ may be physically excluded from the territory of the people.’
The truth of this is self-evident if one looks coldly at the facts. In America the lofty ideals in the Declaration of Independence, like those in Israel’s declaration, have never been close to being attained, and have always held, right from the first, as an ethnic calculation that distinguished one American from another on the basis of skin colour, class, and/or religion.
‘…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.’
‘All men’ was never the inclusive, all encompassing, morally virtuous statement it was claimed to be. Isabel Wilkerson tells us that, ‘…more than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the contested soil of what would become the United States, a concept of birthright, the temptation of entitled expansion that would set in motion the world’s first democracy and, with it, a ranking of human value and usage…/…they took pre-existing notions of their own centrality, reinforced by their self-interested interpretation of the Bible, and created a hierarchy of who could do what, who could own what, who was on top and who was on the bottom, and who was in between (3).’
The colour and deadly nature of this hierarchy and the racial domination it spawned was given a voice and a calling that still shouts out today from the halls of American power.
In John O’Sullivan’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ the nature of the racially motivated expansionist ideal that made America was clear and shrill. ‘Texas is now ours…’ he proclaimed gloriously. ‘California will, probably, next fall away from the loose adhesion…’ (conferred by Mexico), before he confirmed ominously: ‘The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders.’
This racialised pretext then became the basis for American expansion, continental domination and the genocide of the land’s indigenous peoples — European settlers were in fact paid by the government for every native killed — that consistently defied the high-minded ideals and moral proclivities contained in the declaration and the constitution. Subsequent constitutional amendments, designed to level the racial playing field, were little more than empty gestures and have to this day, never fulfilled the promises contained therein.
In fact as Julianne Barr writes in the opening passages of the amazing anthology on native American life she co-edited with Susan Sleeper-Smith, ‘Why you can’t teach United States history without American Indians (5),’ the lie that this (America) was an untamed wilderness ripe for settlement has been perpetuated ever since in the media, movies, popular American culture and much of American academic and educational history.
Writing in the New York Review a few years ago, Peter Nabokov quotes from Jeffrey Ostler’s ‘magisterial’ account of the immensity of land losses, massive population declines and personal miseries of Native North Americans. Ostler explained that…
‘At the time of European invasion, there was no part of North America that was not claimed and ruled by sovereign Indian regimes. The Europeans whose descendants would create the United States did not come to an unsettled wilderness; they grafted their colonies and settlements onto long-existent Indian homelands that constituted the entire continent.’
Estimates of the Indian population range between 12–15 million in 1492 when the first white man stepped ashore. By 1900 the total population had been reduced to 237,000. The devastation was not, as is commonly thought, due to the introduction of European diseases, but was rather engineered by settlers who became largely responsible for the loss of the natives primary food sources; which was for many (Indian) nations, the buffalo.
This was a genocidal endpoint given literary credence recently in the TV series ‘Yellowstone,’ when the character John Dutton tells how his forebears had chased the last surviving herds of buffalo through the Montana valleys and into the region of the Yellowstone park to keep them from being slaughtered by the army.
When his young sidekick, Carter, asks why the army would want to kill the buffalo (S4 E9), Dutton explains it was to starve out and further impoverish the remaining natives. When Carter exclaims that that was not fair, Dutton looks at him and says, ain’t ‘no such thing as fair.’
Indeed, the colonial need to dominate, to acquire at any cost was there from the very start of the American project, just as it was for the French, the British, the Germans, and now the Israelis, and often with the deliberate aim of the wholesale destruction of the native population.
But in America, a second genocide was taking place concurrently alongside the wholesale destruction of the Native population; one that was, for the most part, legal and entirely sanctioned by the state, but was in character and in act, every bit as genocidal.
Non-native blacks — originally the imported human commodity — were also been systematically oppressed in such a way that the charge of institutional genocide against successive, if not, against every American government, was, and is, more than valid. And yet, this is never spoken about, never addressed, and, as genocide researcher, Zoe Samudzi explains, likely never will be…
‘One of the most glaring examples to explicitly conjoin the act or event of genocide with the processes of global imperialism is the US response to the We Charge Genocide petition. Delivered to the United Nations by the Civil Rights Congress in December 1951, nearly a year after the Genocide Convention went into legal effect, the petition held that “the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, and unified policies of every branch of government.” Not only was this allegation placed within the longué durée of anti-Black statecraft from slavery to Reconstruction-era brutality to the Jim Crow present, but the petitioners internationalized genocide. They noted that just as the Nazi campaign and its attendant racial ideologies demonstrated how “genocide at home can become wider massacre abroad, […] domestic genocide develops into the larger genocide that is predatory war.” They deliberately globalized W.E.B. Du Bois’s analytic of the Black/white color line to connect “the racial terror of the lynch mob directly to more organized campaigns of colonial warfare,” according to global politics scholar Benjamin Meiches.’’’
And like the genocide of African-Americans, the persecution and cleansing of Palestinians began as wholly domestic affair, but has arguably, since 9/11 and the global rise in anti-Muslim Islamophobia, and the terror campaign led against Israelis by Hamas militants on October 7, become a global concern.
As existing localised Israeli persecution and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians evolved into a full blown genocide, those who express support for Palestinians outside of the region were finding themselves as the latest victims of a globalised anti-Palestinian movement, as support for the Israeli colonising mission gained unconditional governmental support all across the West.
As Mann’s universal capacity for evil (see quote above) became actualised in the uncivilised and continuously oppressed figure of the dehumanised, animalistic Islamic Palestinian citizen, feared and seen by modern, civilised (white) government officials everywhere as the latter day incarnation of bin Laden’s Islamic evil, re-birthed in Hamas’ actions on October 7, Palestinians, irrespective of gender, age, status, history, military capability or intent, lost all semblance of innocence as the Judeo-Christian mission and crusade was rendered clear-eyed and good. The Islamic evil had to perish.
‘Imperialism as a civilizing mission was a humanitarian iteration of permanent security,’ Samudzi explains. ‘Good subjects were governable, and ungovernable subjects were cast as terrorists or dissidents or otherwise tainting elements that compromised the integrity of the white (or white-approved) sovereign. The willingness to enact racialized violence that blurs the boundary between the civilian and armed resister is an example of an always already genocidal impulse of states whose maintenance necessitates the racecrafting — an othering — foundational to permanent security.’
And Palestinians, simply by resisting efforts to oppress them, became irredeemably ungovernable, rendering the application of a ‘permanent security (following Dirk Moses: The Problems of Genocide)’ doctrine a must. The atrocities committed that day by Hamas, and the subsequent religious invocation of Palestinians as Amalekites provided the Israelis with their neoliberal paradigm to total war, eradicating any calls for civilian innocence, enabling the exploitation and racialisation of the oppressed Palestinian millions who have never been afforded the luxury of innocence in the eyes of the world.
Back in 1968, not a year into Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote,: ‘The state ruling over a hostile population of 1.4 to 2 million foreigners (now much larger, c.5m) will necessarily become a Shin Bet state, with all that this implies for the spirit of education, freedom of speech and thought, and democratic governance. The corruption that is characteristic of all colonial regimes will also infect the State of Israel…’, a point perhaps forcibly addressed in a recent Haaretz editorial (quoted above) when, with evident sadness, the editors talk of the ‘dark shadow’ that has engulfed their nation, which ‘has become a country that no longer knows how to distinguish between fighters and civilians and between a war and a war crime.’
The dehumanisation of the enemy allows the dominant population and its armed forces to forget the humanity of the ‘enemy,’ rendering atrocities acceptable, necessitating the need for murder, rape and unadulterated violence under any and all circumstances. It makes the enforced starvation of millions a viable tactic; the purposeful bombing of so-called ‘safe zones;’ hospitals, schools, tent cities of displaced persons, a military necessity, and the indiscriminate assassination of unarmed civilians a legitimate security issue.
Peter Beinart, who has never been afraid to speak his mind, suggests (6) that in the dreadful wake of the Holocaust a sense of ‘false innocence’ came to suffuse ‘contemporary Jewish life,’ that camouflaged racial ‘domination as self-defense.’
The fact that Germany, the U.S., and other other European nations have never fully confronted the uncomfortable societal facts about the Holocaust, has had lasting consequences that are today acceptably manifest in the destructively militaristic corralling, persistent persecution, and political sidelining of the Palestinians as a way to shut out, to ignore the ugly truth that ‘the Holocaust can only be understood as a failure of civilization (i.e. of human purposive, reason-guided activity) to contain the morbid predilections of whatever has been left of nature in man (2).’
‘For remembering must have consequences,’ says Omer Bertov, ‘especially when it comes with an absolute commitment to ‘never again’ allow a Holocaust to happen. And when ‘never again’ becomes not just a slogan but part of a state ideology, when it becomes the prism transforming every threat, every security issue, every challenge to the state’s legitimacy or righteousness into an existential peril,’ as has been done relentlessly in respect of October 7, ‘then no holds must be barred to defend those who have already faced annihilation.’
‘This,’ Beinart writes, is a world view that ‘offers infinite license to fallible human beings (6).’
And, when humanity falls and fails, as it inevitably will, ‘fallibility’ will be engraved on the tombstone of mankind, alongside ‘ignorance’ and ‘greed’ as humanity’s lost legacy.
Bauman suggests that the Holocaust tells us unerringly that the Hobbesian world has not yet been fully ensnared ; the problem of civilisation endures he says. ‘We do not have, as yet, enough civilisation.’
As we watch the daily death toll rise in Gaza, the unlearned lesson from the Holocaust then becomes that the civilising process, the very essence of the Western project, is not advancing, is not progressing as we like to kid ourselves it is. If anything, the gross, immoral and wholly illegal failure of the West to draw a red line under Israel’s Middle Eastern Holocaust, shows that with collective negative action we have actually regressed as a civilisation to point far closer to the ‘animal within’ than perhaps we were in 1939.
However, is that really the point of the ‘civilising process?’ Are we supposed to outrun the animal within, or should we just be accepting of the fact that some violent actions are baked into the (de-?)humanising process?
In 1979, Richard L. Rubenstein gave a highly controversial, yet highly imaginative and novel view when speaking at a symposium on ‘Western Society after the Holocaust.’ He attempted to re-read Max Weber’s diagnosis on the tendencies of modern societies in light of the Holocaust — an event that obviously Weber himself had no knowledge of — and whether it was possible to ascertain whether Weber had considered, postulated or even thought about the possibility that his theories on ‘modern bureaucracy, rational spirit, principle of efficiency, scientific mentality, relegation of values to the realm of (pure) subjectivity, etc,’ had ever recorded any mechanism by which society was capable of excluding the eventual occurrence of events such as the Nazi excesses (see Bauman, 2, for references).
And Rubenstein concluded in the negative, much to the displeasure of his many colleagues who vociferously disputed his findings, perhaps, as Bauman suggests, because they saw such work severely damaging Weber’s much prized sociological legacy. Yet, Rubenstein remained adamant.
Rubenstein asserted that, ‘no horror perpetrated by the German medical profession or German technocrats was inconsistent with the view that values are inherently subjective and that science is intrinsically instrumental and value-free.’
The simple fact was that Rubenstein was able to see ‘the other side,’ the Janus-faced tradition of the ‘perceptive visions bequeathed by the sociological tradition,’ of which Weber was a theoretical pioneer.
And whilst I agree entirely with Mann’s view that democracy has a dark side, I cannot agree that it on its own gave rise to the genocidal tendency in our midst. This, for me, much like the views of Rubenstein’s dissenting colleagues, is shunting the blame for one of the worst events in human history aside and, in this instance, back into the political stream of history as an issue that can be solved through a simple refinement of the democratic process, rather than taking it for what it truly was; a logical and purely rational outcome of the civilising process that humanity had not predicted or expected, much like ‘the appearance of a new malign strain of an allegedly tamed virus (2).’ Covid-19 perhaps?
Henry Feingold though, Bauman tells us was, like Rubenstein, a man apart, and was staring the truth in the face when he wrote:
‘The final solution marked the juncture where the European industrial system went awry; instead of enhancing life, which was the original hope of the Enlightenment, it began to consume itself. It was by dint of that industrial system and the ethos attached to it that Europe was able to dominate the world (see references in Bauman,2,).’
And those very same skills were employed in securing the effectiveness of the final solution.
‘(Auschwitz) was also a mundane extension of the modern factory system. Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings and the end-product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager’s production charts. The chimneys, the very symbol of the modern factory system, poured forth acrid smoke produced by burning human flesh. The brilliantly organised railroad grid of modern Europe carried a new kind of raw material to the factories. It did so in the same manner as with other cargo. In the gas chambers the victims inhaled noxious gas generated by prussic acid pellets, which were produced by the advanced chemical industry of Germany. Engineers designed the crematoria; managers designed the system of bureaucracy that worked with a zest and efficiency more backward nations would envy. Even the overall plan itself was a reflection of the modern spirit gone awry. What we witnessed was nothing less than a massive scheme of social engineering…’
In this purely rational respect, everything was as it should be. Bauman calls it ‘normal;’ not normal in the sense of being totally familiar, ‘but in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilization.’
‘There is more than a wholly fortuitous connection between the applied technology of the mass production line, with its vision of universal material abundance, and the applied technology of the concentration camp, with its vision of a profusion of death. We may wish to deny the connection, but Buchenwald was of our West as much as Detroit’s River Rouge — we cannot deny Buchenweld as a casual aberration of a Western world essentially sane (see references in Bauman, 2,).’
Rubenstein stresses that the ‘success’ of the Holocaust ‘bears witness to the advance of civilization.’ The cold hard reality, as despicable and gut wrenching as it might be to hear, is that in the final solution, ‘the industrial potential and technological know-how boasted by our civilization ha(d) scaled new heights in coping successfully with a task of unprecedented magnitude,’ and in so doing revealed society’s hidden capacity for the gruesome on a monumental scale (2).
‘Civilization,’ then encompasses both faces of modernity. It means ‘slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps. (But) it also means medical hygiene, elevated religious ideas, beautiful art, and exquisite music. It is an error to imagine that civilization and savage cruelty are antithesis…(2)’
On December 4, 1948, the New York Times published a letter by a group of Jewish luminaries, that included among their number, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, Abraham Brick, Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo, Isidore Abrahmowitz and many more. The thrust of the letter was to protest the visit of Menachem Begin to the U.S. and to further denounce his Herut (freedom) Party (that later morphed into Likud, the party of today’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu).
Herut, they protested was ‘a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.’
It continued, noting that Herut’s political rhetoric and actions stood in stark contrast, making it ‘inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents…’
They accused Begin and the armed militia, Haganah (the forerunner of the IDF), of escalating the levels of violence in advance of Israel’s independence, and even of celebrating the massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, and slaughtering the 240 residents despite the resident’s insistence they remain outside the ongoing Arab-Jewish war.
There were many such massacres during the early days of the war, but Deir Yassin has always stood out as being one of the first such instances of Israeli ethnic cleansing of what were, essentially, pastoral Palestinians, and not armed assailants.
‘On 1 April 1948, the Zionist forces that had been given the instruction to cleanse dozens of Palestinian villages from the western side of Jerusalem received a large bundle of orders.’
‘Among them was a directive from the intelligence service of the Haganah depicting every village as an enemy base and anyone above the age of ten as an able fighting male. The villages and the men and children in it were thus considered legitimate military targets to be destroyed and killed.’
These actions, the denouncers wrote, bore the ‘unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a ‘Leader State’ is the goal.’ They ended the letter requesting that America turn its back on Begin and not support ‘this latest manifestation of fascism.’
Today, as Israel continues to enforce its illegal but totally inhumane blockade of all water, food, medicine and fuel whilst still carrying on with its lethal bombing campaigns throughout every night, the death toll soars as the risk of mass starvation grows.
All condemnation is washed aside by Israel as inconsequential, as words of international political condemnation become just that; words that mean nothing at all, as cowardly Western nations continue to crumble beneath the coercive weight of U.S. threats to do otherwise.
The Western imperialist neo-colonial pact then, remains in force as Israel now makes no bones about targeting the innocent. ‘The use of the word ‘war’ for what is going on in Gaza is misleading and distorted. What’s happening in Gaza is not war. It’s an unbridled Israeli assault on people who are mostly uninvolved in any activity against it.’
Even though Israel’s ‘target bank’ has long run dry, the bombs continue to fall with relentless regularity. Long known as the biggest prison in the world, Gaza has now become the biggest death camp in the world, as Israel’s military industrial complex hides behind the use of ultra-modern technology to justify its continued slaughter.
Just as the Nazis had utilised the best science, engineering and bureaucratic methods to destroy their enemy within, so Israel employs the very height of today’s technology to pummel and destroy their enemy within.
Yes, the conditions are different. Yes, the reasoning may be different. Yes, the execution may be different. But the genocidal outcome is without doubt, the same.
Whilst the Germans were meticulous with their record keeping — the reason why we know so much about the extent of human endurance, for example, is due to the administrative diligence of German doctors — the Israelis, without any definable military strategy to win the ‘war’’ — arguably a consequence of the bureaucratic takeover of the post-modern military complex — and with full knowledge of the global outrage this genocide has provoked, will no doubt, prove to be lax, inefficient, and highly covert in their record keeping.
But thanks to the diligent efforts of some citizens, the trail of death and destruction wrought by the modern Israeli war machine is being documented. Lee Mordechai’s remarkable record for example, that he calls ‘Bearing witness to the Israeli-Gaza war,’ means that the truth is out there if one cares to hunt it down.
The genocide of Jews by the Nazis, and that being committed by the Jews of Israel in Gaza and the West Bank today, are incomparable in so many ways. But in one crucial aspect they are one and the same. They were/are both being brought about using the very height of modern technology available; the very best our Western civilisation had/has to offer.
‘Had Nazi power prevailed, authority to determine what ought to be would have found that no natural laws had been broken and no crimes against God and humanity had been committed in the Holocaust. It would have been a question, though, whether the slave labour operations should continue, expand, or go out of business. these decisions would have been made on rational grounds (2)’.
A German victory then would have seen no UN, no human rights pacts, no genocide convention, and no Israeli state. In much the same way, an Israeli victory now — whatever that looks like — they will hope would see all surviving Palestinians condemned as terrorists, as warmongering antisemites, and their wholesale removal from the face of the earth, justified as a valid, humane contribution to the unstinting advance of our Western civilisation.
Perhaps this is why Israel is at pains to deliberately target those who can paint a different picture; the journalists, the writers, the poets; those who, with their words, can flesh out the suffering of a people condemned as unworthy of existence by a society who sees their demise as a price worth paying to sanctify their own complicity in past crimes. Guilt is far easier to apportion if there is no-one is left to dispute how that guilt is apportioned. In targeting the voices of the Palestinian people Israel is pulling the sting out of the future memory of the Middle Eastern Holocaust.
If our Western society is once again seen to be justified in its actions in Gaza then we can blunder on once more without looking the truth the face. The civilising mission would remain on track. We would continue on our rational road ignoring the irrationality, the Janus face within. The Palestinians, discredited and shamed before those white faces who matter, will be forgotten, lost to the sands of time, mere words in an ancient book of God that will hold no resonance or meaning beyond the association of their having been guilty by virtue of birth.
Bauman says, ‘the message the Holocaust contains about the way we live today — about the quality of the institutions on which we reply for our safety, about the validity of the criteria with which we measure the propriety of our conduct and of the patterns of interaction we accept and consider normal — is silenced, not listened to, and remains undelivered. If unravelled by the specialists and discussed inside the conference circuit, it is hardly ever heard elsewhere, and remains a mystery for all the outsiders. It has entered as yet contemporary consciousness. Worst still, it has not as yet affected contemporary practice.’
And so it is; we can move on with our lives oblivious to the animal within because we believe we are civilised. And yet, as Trump ‘disappears’ immigrants and his own citizens in ever growing numbers, and Israel kills infants, children, women and old men at ever increasing rates, and Western nations everywhere revile those who look different, worship differently, and who turn up at our doorstep hungry, thirsty and in need of a helping hand, I wonder, how long can we ignore the existence of the animal within all of us, of the animal within our society?
George Orwell, famously wrote in ‘Nineteen eighty four:'
‘He who controls the past controls the future; he who controls the present controls the past.’
Zygmunt Bauman ends his remarkable book with a warning:
‘If Orwell is right that control of the past allows control of the future, it is imperative, for the sake of our future, that those who control the present are not allowed to manipulate the past in a fashion that is likely to render the future inhospitable to humanity and uninhabitable.’
I believe Orwell was right, and sadly that the message contained Bauman’s stark warning, has already been lost.
‘As I fall asleep I see the dead walk, I see the living die. I see a boy searching for his mother in the corridors of Al Shifa (hospital — now destroyed). I hear his words — ‘Mama Mama’ — flying the through the air along with all the other debris. I see trees uprooted and their fruit squashed into dirt under tank tracks. I see the walls disassembling in mid-air, in ultra-slow motion, slowing, spinning, moving closer and closer to the occupants of the house, lying perfectly still in their beds, trapped in their slumber, as if for centuries like sleeping beauty.’
‘I see a girl crying for her lost doll, shouting for it to come back, angry with it. I see a city being erased from the world’s memory, building by building. I see death sneaking through parks and gardens. I see it all and still, even after 84 days of it, I don’t believe any of it is happening. It must be a nightmare, I think to myself, in the dream. It must all be a nightmare.’
Just a few of the words of Atef Abu Saif, who managed to escape Gaza after 84 days of hell, and who published his thoughts recently in a book; ‘Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide.’ I recommend it to those with a strong stomach and an open mind.
Thanks for reading.
- Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001; Benny Morris, 2001.
- Modernity and The Holocaust; Zygmunt Bauman, 1991.
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent; Isabel Wilkerson, 2020.
- Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century; Leo Kuper, 1981.
- Why You Can’t Teach American History Without American Indians? Susan Sleeper-Smith & Julianne Barr, 2015, Kindle Version.
- Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza; Peter Beinart, 2025.
