‘Never Again’ means no Holocaust against the Palestinian people right now!

Feb 3, 2025
Auschwitz Birkenau, Poland, 9 January 2022: The railway conducing into Auschwitz II Birkenau nazist extermination camp.

Mark Dreyfus wrote an article in, The Guardian (29 January 2025) entitled, ‘ For my great-grandparents, for all Jews, for all humanity, I say never again ‘. Here is my response.

I write to make people, who are not Jewish, aware that the Jewish community is not only not monolithic, but that many dissent from what is interminably framed by the Zionist Establishment here in Australia as the ‘only legitimate view’ of the many voices within the Australian Jewish community. Dreyfus, I note, is the pre-eminent voice of the Zionist Establishment.

I come from a similar background to Dreyfus, actually, one with possibly a greater number of my extended family perishing during the Holocaust: only one other survivor on my mother’s side of her extended family, and two on my father’s side survived.

I have two objections to what Dreyfus writes below.

My first objection is that Dreyfus writes as if the Holocaust is the only unique genocide in history. There have been many genocides in modern history including the genocide of Aboriginal people here in Australia. European empires and the colonisation of Africa, the Americas and Asia resulted in multiple Holocausts. To ignore these Holocausts by continually repeating that the Jewish Holocaust is the only genocide the world has witnessed in the modern era is to approve and consent to the imperial narrative playbook which Dreyfus regurgitates ad nauseum whenever he speaks or writes for various publications.

My second objection is that Dreyfus, particularly since the beginning of the war of annihilation against the Palestinians in October 2023, has engaged in a mendacious narrative attempting to link protests against this war of annihilation to ‘antisemitism’. Together, with Dutton and Albanese this has been the official narrative propagated by Australia’s political Establishment and perhaps the majority of the intellectual elites and most of the mass media.

There is, in contrast, virtually a complete silence about the Palestinian Holocaust in public conversations in the mass and official media. The narratives are invariably framed in an ideologically skewed way as the so-called ‘War against Hamas’ or the ‘Gaza-Israel War’. Not a word from Dreyfus, not a word from Albanese or Dutton and, more or less, total erasure of the horror in Gaza and the West Bank in print and electronic media. The public, instead, is continually hammered with the narrative of the ‘terrorist Hamas’ with the political establishment promoting and emphasising the moral virtue of Israel’s genocidal military.

If Dreyfus and members of the Australian political and media elites want to appear credible in their memory to the victims of the Jewish Holocaust they must intransigently oppose the Palestinian Holocaust and take to task the Netanyahu’s government which is unquestionably responsible for this genocide.

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