The Israeli leadership is currently engaged in an undoubted genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza. A complementary mopping up operation continues (if in slow motion) in the West Bank.
During World War II, a certain genocide took place. More than one if one counts the attempted genocide by the Nazis, consciously on racist grounds, of millions of slavs and Poles.
After a slow start, post-1945, there is now a vast enterprise of research into the Jewish holocaust, including within designated academic journals. There is also a substantial publicity infrastructure, distinct from the scholarship, involving educational networks, museums, etc. The latter has become an industry in itself.
One dimension of the research involves the questions of how mass murder on this scale could possibly have occurred and could the murder on such a scale have been averted. Various failures of Western institutions are evoked – anti-Semitism in the US State Department (and in the US population in general) that restricted the visa quotient for potential Jewish refugees; realpolitik amongst British officials cultivating links with Middle Eastern Arab countries and restricting Jewish refugee access to Palestine; the silence of the Germanophile Pope Pius XII; etc. Prominent in this literature is David Wyman’s 1984 The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941- 1945.
A contrary view is posited in Michael Desch’s ‘The Myth of Abandonment: The Use and Abuse of the Holocaust Analogy’ (Security Studies, 2006). Desch claims that, however plausible the attribution of mentalities and motives to such key players, the posited causal links with the potential to save significant numbers of Jewry from Europe is implausible on all counts.
Desch concludes that: “The sad truth is that there was little the Allies could have done to stop the Holocaust short of winning the war. … This fact was also widely recognised by Jewish leaders at the time.” This view is supported by William Rubinstein in his 1997 The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews From the Nazis. Rubinstein (cited in Desch) begins his book with: “… no Jew who perished during the Nazi Holocaust could have been saved by any action which the Allies could have taken at the time, given what was actually known about the Holocaust, what was actually proposed at the time and what was realistically possible.”
Regardless of this belated reckoning, at some stage the presumed ‘crime of indifference’ was weaponised. In particular, American support for and financial coddling of the state of Israel was payback for the presumed guilt. The ‘compensation’ is ongoing, now simply a racket, with an estimated US$318 billion (adjusted for inflation) handed over to Israel between 1951 and 2022.
Another response of US authorities has been to claim that the lesson of the Holocaust is that the potential for mass murder must be prevented by assertive action. ‘Humanitarian intervention’ (or ‘the responsibility to protect’) is seen as appropriate and the US has the resources and the global standing to perform such. (Paul Wolfowitz, Zionist and Neocon, key figure behind the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, used such reasoning in an interview in December 2003.) Here was the ‘Never Again’ motif in full force.
The problem was and is that the US and its allies have always been partial in their application of the seeming moral imperative. Israel remains the most immune of the immune. No sin has been punished – its brutal ethnic cleansing in its creation and its ongoing state-building, its involvement with Britain and France in the 1956 invasion of Egypt following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal; its secretive acquisition of a nuclear deterrence capacity, its attempted sinking of the USS Liberty in June 1967, its relentless expansion of settlements in the Occupied West Bank since 1967, its strangulation of Gaza since 2005.
The current utter destruction of Gaza – orchestrated by Old Testament-style psychopaths, supported by the majority of Jewish Israelis, with the repression of dissent – is merely the culmination of Israel’s modus operandi since 1948. The ‘transfer problem’ has never gone away. Yet the funding and arming by the US (and others) of Israel continues apace.
Never Again? I don’t think so.
By happy coincidence perhaps, the ABC showed the documentary Prosecuting Evil (2018) on 11 December 2023. It is a masterly exposition of the career of dogged lawyer Benjamin Ferencz (also here) and his role leading to and participation in the Nuremberg War Trials and in the subsequent establishment of the International Criminal Court. Surprisingly, or not, there is no mention of Israel in the documentary. Even more surprising, Israel-firster Alan Dershowitz appears in the documentary, praising Ferencz’ contribution to the heavens. With friends like these …
South Africa submitted its 84 page application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 December 2023, claiming the act of genocide by Israel against the Gazan people, of incitement to genocide by Israeli leaders, and requesting provisional measures to stop the slaughter. The court held hearings on 11 and 12 January Craig Murray, British ex-diplomat and activist, reported on the hearings here and here. The court delivered its ruling on 26 January. The court that genocide was the appropriate label for Israel’s actions, and that it should henceforth cease the slaughter.
Now here’s the thing. The World War II mass murder of European Jewry took place mostly behind closed doors, as it were. Most of the living witnesses were the perpetrators. Not so the Gaza genocide. Like the American war in Vietnam, the destruction and the mass murder are reported in the media daily, even in the mainstream media that is right up Israel’s arse. The media exposure proved fatal to the US cause in Vietnam. What chance a comparable development regarding Gaza? By contrast with the conditions of the Jewish holocaust, there is the knowledge and capacity to constrain Israel’s bloodlust.
However, the prospects appear slim. The ICJ has no battalions.
Israel has always acted with impunity and will continue to do so. To my knowledge, not a single body amongst the countless ‘official’ Jewish organisations (with associated media) formally representing the so-called diaspora has broken ranks. Their potential power to bring Israel to heel is enormous, but their guns remain directed at Israel’s detractors. The assertively dissident organisation Jewish Voice for Peace, although cross-country, remains marginalised within global Jewry itself and in the corridors of power.
The West – the US, Britain, Europe, satraps Canada, Australia and New Zealand – is rusted on to Israel and its criminality. Immediately following the ICJ ruling, Israel diverted attention by claiming that a handful of United Nations Relief and Works Agency employees were involved in the Hamas 7 October invasion. Israel destroys Gaza while the UNRWA keeps it (barely) functional. As Jonathon Cook notes, Israel has long been committed to the dismantling of the UNRWA’s crucial role in Gaza. The Western cabal (as above) in unison have immediately jumped on board in cutting their respective contributions to UNRWA funding. Thus do they grotesquely join in Israel’s genocidal agenda.
The locales of carnage have evolved since 1945. The Palestinians are the new Jews. How long can the holocaust and antisemitism industries live with the anomaly?
Evan Jones, now retired, lectured in political economy at Sydney University for 34 years. His current preoccupations are malpractice in the Australian banking sector, French politics, and mainstream media disinformation.
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