Pearls and Irritations

I write as a child of Holocaust survivors because I am disturbed by the demagoguery engaged by the leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, labelling hapless Palestinian refugees as potential terrorists.

I quote from The Guardian article: “Peter Dutton has compared Hamas to the Nazis in an opinion piece that calls the registered terrorist organisation “evil’s darkest shade” and suggests it may be worse than the Nazis in at least one respect.

In the column for the News Corp tabloids on Sunday, Dutton said Hamas “felt no guilt” about the 7 October attacks whereas the Nazis “tried to conceal their crime of murdering six million Jews”.

Dutton is simply wrong on these contentions:

1) The version of the 7 October events is the official Israeli government version.

This version has been questioned in Israel and by organisations such as the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

These organisations have insisted on being involved in an independent investigation of the 7 October events which the Netanyahu consistently has refused to initiate.

2) Dutton reverses and distorts completely the facts of what is occurring in Gaza.

The Palestinians are suffering an assault by the Israeli military comparable to the Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. The Lancet, the most respected medical journal, quoted a few weeks ago a figure of two hundred thousand dead in Gaza. Apart from the thousands of Palestinians being killed, the whole of the Gazan population is starving and many are dying from lack of food and medical care.

3) The Israeli military has been committing gigantic war crimes. The latest news reports cite the Israeli military engaging in kidnapping and forcing young Palestinian men into Israeli army uniforms and using them as human shields. Such conduct is reminiscent of the tactics used by the German military and the SS during the Second World War.

4) Today, we are witnessing a phenomenon of the genocide of the Palestinian people pursued by the Netanyahu government comparable to the war of annihilation waged by the Nazis against the Jewish people during the Second World War. One of the key concepts in understanding this unfolding tragedy and horror of the genocide of the Palestinians is ‘identification with the aggressor’, a psychoanalytical concept developed by two outstanding psychoanalysts, Sandor Ferenczi and Anna Freud.

This concept of ‘identification with the aggressor’ explains cogently the ferocity, barbarism and dehumanisation of the Palestinian Other by a significant section of Israelis, particularly many conscripts in the IDF.

In short, what we are currently witnessing is not only a great tragedy of the Palestinian people in terms of war of annihilation and collective punishment being waged against them, but also a great tragedy of the Jewish people and the destruction of the Jewish Haskalah Enlightenment traditions.

I close on a note of appeal: it behoves all Jewish people to resist and work against this phenomenon of again living in dark times, and heed Hannah Arendt’s example in resisting this darkness which is threatening to overwhelm not only the Jewish people but all of humanity.

Dutton engaging in this demagoguery and showing a complete lack of compassion towards hapless refugees fleeing the genocide encourages the continuation of this war of annihilation against the Palestinian people.

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