The Holocaust Should Be A Lesson Not A Template

“Jewish people exterminating men, women and children in a concentration camp is _______.”

How do you finish a sentence like that? The words should fall like acid into your ear drums. It should be an impossible sentence. And yet, not so. We are witnessing it today in Gaza – the world’s largest open-air prison, home and hell to 2.3 million brutally repressed human beings – carried out by the Jewish State of Israel. Genocide.

If the word genocide seems excessive or if you can’t believe your own lying eyes, then at least listen to leading Israeli politicians in their own words. Israeli government minister Amichai Eliyahu endorses using a nuclear bomb against Gaza - and told the Times of Israel: “They can go to Ireland or the desert,” adding that anyone waving a Palestinian or Hamas flag “shouldn’t continue living on the face of the earth.” Israel, he said, should retake and resettle the entire Gaza Strip.

A senior member of Likud and recent minister Galit Distal Atbaryan said Israel must invest all its energy "in one thing: erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth."

Many thousands of Jewish people all over the world are putting their bodies on the line, and are raising their voices to say Not In Our Name.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the coded word Amalek in a recent speech. He said: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”

Netanyahu was sending a message of genocidal intent from the Prophet Samuel:

“I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”

The bible is a treasure trove of genocidal invocations and Netanyahu chose his words well.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called the people of Gaza (over 1 million of whom are children) "human animals". It was he who ordered a "complete siege" of Gaza, cutting off water, food, fuel, and electricity.

Moshe Feiglin, a former deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset, called for a “non-nuclear” Hiroshima and recalls with admiration the bombing of Dresden. Several prominent Israeli and American political figures have called for the complete destruction of Gaza. The President of Israel says anyone left in the north of Gaza is either a terrorist or a terrorist sympathiser. Israel has so far slaughtered over 4000 terrorist babies and children. Unbelievably, despicably, the victims of the Shoah are being politicised and weaponised to legitmise this genocide.

Unlike the Six Million, these victims are in our midst, are right here, right now. In our time. On our watch. Hundreds of jurists and genocide scholars worldwide have signed letters declaring Gaza a genocidal siege. Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal calls it a textbook case of genocide.

Many thousands of Jewish people all over the world are putting their bodies on the line, and are raising their voices to say Not In Our Name. They are being arrested in their thousands throughout the world (400 Jewish Americans in the US Capitol, hundreds more in Grand Central Station New York, hundreds in Wall Street, hundreds of Jewish Voices for Peace protesters in Canada); they are shaking their peaceful fists at the Zionist state of Israel. Heroic Israeli Jews are doing the same at great personal risk within the borders of the Jewish State.

It now appears clear that the Highest Stage of Zionism is Genocide for the Palestinians. The Oslo Accords, signed exactly 30 years ago, was a hollow promise of a two-state solution. America made sure of that. PLO/Fatah renounced war with Israel in 1993 and what have they got in return? Blockades, dispossession and repression. Little wonder the ranks of Hamas were swollen with thousands of disillusioned Palestinians who saw their holy sites desecrated, their people massacred with impunity, and settler settlements and cities built on more and more stolen land. Hamas today is the bitter fruit of US-Israeli betrayal of the Palestinians. As one Israeli commentator said post-October 7: the Israelis believed themselves unassailable, the Palestinians had been pacified, so why give concessions?

Netanyahu and his army are seeking to create a Greater Israel. The Palestinians are in the way. When he spoke at the UN in September this year, Netanayahu showed a map of a “New Middle East”. Absent from the map was Palestine – Gaza, the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights were all incorporated into Greater Israel. Why not, if you have the USA, Britain and the EU to help you get away with it? International law and a rules-based system are for chumps.

Settlers are stealing more land and shooting Palestinians in the West Bank, hospitals are being bombed in Gaza, refugee camps are being flattened under heavy bombardment.

Mekomit, an Israeli news site, released a leaked Israeli Ministry of Intelligence “concept paper” a couple of weeks ago. It outlines what is effectively part of a Final Solution of the Palestinian Question. You can read it in English on Wikileaks. Key points: drive the Gazans to the southern end of the Strip. Clear an opening at Rafah. Establish tent cities in the Egyptian Sinai. In other words: kill or ethnically cleanse 2.3 million Palestinians (out of a total 7.3 million Palestinians spread over Gaza, Israel and the West Bank), ending their long life in Gaza. Netanyahu’s office says it only represents “initial thoughts”.

Calling for the killing or permanent expulsion of Palestinians who survive the Israeli assault is a clear expression of genocidal intent. In the words of a Likud MP: “Let them die ... Gaza needs to be wiped out."

Where will it end? What depths of depravity will the Western World, including our own New Zealand MPs, including influential parts of the Jewish community, tolerate? That is the Question.

Silence is complicity.

Worse, the Western World is sending bombs, bullets, shells and missiles to enable the dark night of the Palestinian people to get darker. We are witnessing the unmasking of America, the scraping out of the last flesh of decency from the dark heart of Europe and the settler colonies like New Zealand, Canada, Australia. We’re turning a blind eye to what Al Jazeera is showing us daily. We are turning a deaf ear to the screams of dying children.

I was taught a long time ago that if we deny evil, we deceive ourselves; and there ends up being no truth, no decency in us. We become empty nobodies. We become our own punishment. Look at what Israel itself has become.

If Gaza becomes a charnel house for the Palestinians, it won’t just desecrate all memorials to the Six Million, it will be a collective and eternal stain on our entire generation.

On the front page of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is displayed the oft-quoted words of Pastor Martin Niemoller urging us to not ignore the persecution of others because, as he himself found out when the Gestapo sent him to Sachsenhausen, then Dachau concentration camps, your turn may soon follow. I would update his poem with just one stanza:

Then They Came for the Palestinians

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Palestinian.

Eugene Doyle received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service to coastal communities, environmental action, water quality, emergency resilience and other causes. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War.

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