Pearls and Irritations

At the Imperial War Museum in London, there’s a moving display about Nazis and the Holocaust, the ‘ultimate human evil’. Seeing it in May this year, I wondered if eventually there will be an exhibition of the Palestinian genocide.

I am still wondering why Jewish people who say ‘never again’ about that dreadful experience can support Israel repeating it against the Palestinians, the first genocide to be visualised in real time. Some in Australia aren’t supporters, including the members of the Jewish Council of Australia and Jews Against the Occupation 48. For their courage, they are vehemently attacked as ‘self-hating Jews’.

Two non-Jewish Australians, Mary Kostakidis and Antoinette Lattouf, have been accused of anti-Semitism merely for sharing social media posts to which Australian Jewish groups objected. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra cancelled a performance by British-Australian pianist Jayson Gillham, who made a truthful statement about Palestinian journalists being targeted and killed in Gaza. The Sydney Theatre Company survived outrage from subscribers and donors after actors appeared on stage wearing kaffiyehs.

When students who protested against Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza were attacked, neither university authorities nor much of the legacy media defended them. Yet Eva Shteinman, a post-graduate researcher in medicine, deplored the lawsuits against the University of Sydney and its Vice-Chancellor over the alleged ‘sustained and toxic nature of the attacks on Jews’. She said, on the contrary, that she’d ‘witnessed shocking’ anti-Palestinian racism on the campus (SMH, 4 October 2024: 27).

According to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, anti-Semitic incidents and threats are reported to have ‘surged’ by 300 per cent in a year. Being Jewish at an Australian university is a ‘toxic experience’, said a Jewish peak body spokeswoman (SMH 8 October 2024: 4,5). A Jewish Australian writer to the SMH (7 October 2024: 26) who had arrived when we were ‘all Australians’, despaired that Jewish Australians are now different: ‘we are Jews to be despised’. None of them reflects on why Australian public opinion has suddenly changed. Could it be the new holocaust?

Holocaust, meaning ‘burnt offering’, describes the Nazi genocide of six million European Jews, and several minorities, in 1941-45. The Hebrew word Shoah applies ‘catastrophic destruction’ solely to Jewish victims. From 1933 in pursuit of Lebensraum, Hitler’s government harassed Jews, forced them out of Germany, passed anti-Semitic laws, and segregated Jews in ghettoes, before sending millions to extermination camps. The Nazi perpetrators described their State terrorism against two thirds of the Jews in Austria, Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union as the ‘Final Solution’.

Just as the Nazis deployed State terror against the Jews, Israel from the start did the same against the Palestinian ‘terrorists’. Israel drove 750 000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948, just as Jews were deported from Germany. In fact, what Israel has progressively done to Palestinians since the Nakba ‘disaster’ of 1948, and has done intensively since the Hamas outbreak from Gaza on 7 October 2023, is State terrorism. It projects the experiences of the Holocaust onto Palestinians.

The term ‘Holocaust’ is supposed to apply exclusively to the fate of the Jews in Europe, and is jealously so defined. Yet Prime Minister Netanyahu, his Ministers, and IDF spokespeople freely use Nazi expressions like ‘final solution’, living space, and variations of Untermenschen to justify their genocidal actions against Palestinians in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and now attacks on their supporters in Lebanon.

Israel has seized 78 percent of historical Palestine, terrorising its people. Palestinians who for generations have been forced from their homes and are now being pushed back and forth, south and north, at the whim of Israel’s ministers, and humiliated, starved, and bombed by the IDF, know what Jews felt like in 1941-45. They know what terror is: being witnesses to their own genocide. Yet Israel says it’s the Palestinians who are terrorists.

Always for Israel, and many Western countries too, Hamas, Hebollah, the Houthi in Yemen, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps are unquestioningly identified as ‘terrorist’ organisations. Australia and its Five Eyes allies, and other nations with historical experience of seizing territory and colonising it, write their own lists of terrorist organisations, mostly the same ones. Australian ADF people are now deployed in the Red Sea and Israel, in an extension of the ‘forever war’ against terrorism that George W Bush declared in 2001.

US presidents’ demands for allied support against those declared to be terrorists are never refused. By 2017 the US had military forces engaged in fighting terrorism in 79 countries – 39 per cent of the world’s nations. The US and Israel themselves inflict terror on the populations they target, and with results that disproportionately outweigh those of their terrorist enemies. To support US hegemony, the arms industry, and Israel, Americans and their allies are constantly reminded that they have to fight terrorists.

The statistics rival the Nazi record in asymmetry. Israel opted for genocide after Hamas killed at least 1,200 Israelis and wounded more than 3,300 on 7 October 2023. In Gaza, the latest Hamas-controlled health ministry report states that at least 43,204 Palestinians were killed and 101,641 wounded since the start of the war. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad hold as hostages more than 120 soldiers and civilians, dead and alive, including foreign nationals. Some 9000 Palestinian men, women, and children are in prisons in Israel. So who are the victims? Who are the terrorists?

Australians have still to grasp the issue. Displaying iconography linked to ‘terror groups’ with the intention of inciting violence or hatred is unlawful, and yet the flag of Israel was projected on the Sydney Opera House. At a recent Hyde Park rally, protestors were warned that the Hezbollah flag, symbols and portraits of Hezbollah’s assassinated leader Hassan Nasrallah ‘should not be displayed’, or it might be a criminal offence. The forever war on terror won’t end until we face up to who the State terrorists are.

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