Jonathan Ofir is an Israeli musician, conductor and blogger / writer based in Denmark.
The Jewish state learned that it can commit its own Holocaust in Gaza and deny that it exists. By Jonathan Ofir April 6, 2024 9
I remember how our Israeli Prime Minster, Benjamin Netanyahu, told Holocaust survivors at an elderly home, “The Holocaust happened because there was no State of Israel. If there had been a Jewish state before, there would have been no Holocaust.”
Later, he would tell the whole world while speaking from the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum that “the Jewish state has learned the lessons of the Holocaust. Has the world learned the lessons of the Holocaust?”
What lesson has the Jewish state learned?
That we, ourselves, can commit a Holocaust in Gaza in 2024, and then deny that it exists. Indeed, we have even decried sober UN appraisals of our genocide as an “obscene inversion of reality.”
We haven’t even seen the worst of it. As Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa reports from her visit to Gaza, “the reality on the ground is infinitely worse than the worst videos and photos that we’re seeing in the West.” Israelis generally avoid seeing any of it — what do we care?
“People first resorted to eating horse and donkey feed, but that’s gone. Now they’re eating the donkeys and horses,” Abulhawa writes. “Some are eating stray cats and dogs, which are themselves starving and sometimes feeding on human remains that litter streets where Israeli snipers picked off people who dared to venture within the sight of their scopes. The old and weak have already died of hunger and thirst.”
“What I see is a holocaust.” she summarizes. “The incomprehensible culmination of 75 years of Israeli impunity for persistent war crimes.”
I second that.
But most Israelis are holocaust deniers. Oh, how we hate the Holocaust deniers, so oblivious to the total destruction of European Jewry. How could they be so utterly callous in questioning the numbers, saying that it was “just a war?”
That’s what we do. We downplay it, call it a war of self-defense, and erase history — it all started on October 7. Over 13,000 dead children, some starved to death, do not seem to alter our perception. It’s just collateral damage.
This is possible because the Palestinians are Nazis now. If you ask about “civilians,” Israelis will, in the words of former Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, say: “What is wrong with you?!” Or, like Israeli President Isaac Herzog, they would assert that there are no “uninvolved” in Gaza.
They’re all Nazis.
But you know what? We are the Judeo-Nazis now. It’s never been so clear. Oh, yes, there are right-wing Judeo-Nazis, who have spoken of “wiping out” Huwwara before October 7, but now there are the many kibbutzniks who openly speak of wiping out Gaza. Two-thirds of us, including nearly 40% of the “left wing,” literally want to deprive Gazans of the most basic humanitarian aid (it’s 80% on the right wing, by the way, and they constitute about two-thirds of Israeli voters).
In other words, most of us literally want to starve Palestinians.
Others opt for a more “proportionate” genocide, simply bombing them by the hundreds, ostensibly for the purpose of killing one Hamas leader.
We have learned nothing. Our morality is dust.
Should I be more nuanced? Yes, perhaps there were some more sensible Nazis. I hear Hitler was generally quite polite in his familiar circles. But not to the human animals. They could be exterminated, and the world would be a better place without such vermin.
Now the Palestinians are the “human animals,” in the words of our Defense Minister, Yoav Galant. I haven’t heard many Israelis rebuff his words. After all, he’s been critical of Netanyahu from inside the government — he’s nuanced!
The depths to which we have sunk leave me wondering how there still are countries on our side. What the hell is wrong with them? Don’t they see that, by supporting Israel economically and militarily, they are abetting a genocide?
Clearly, Israelis aren’t the only ones who haven’t learned the lessons of the Holocaust.
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