The 23rd and 24th of April this year mark Yom HaShoah, literally “Day of the Holocaust,” more commonly known as Holocaust Remembrance Day. The occasion was initially observed informally but later became an official national day of remembrance when Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, enacted a law establishing it as such in the 1950s.

The Shoah (or Holocaust) was the systematic extermination of approximately 6 million Jews across Europe, with around 1.5 million of these being children. It remains a profound historical tragedy, and we shouldn’t be insensitive to it as it offers lessons for all of us from many different perspectives, including the moral and the political.

A Product of Modernity

Numerous thinkers, mostly of ethnic Jewish heritage, have argued that the Holocaust was not an aberration but rather a direct by-product of modernity. They indicate to certain elements such as the fetishization of biological concepts of “race,” an overreliance on ultra-rationalist “scientific planning,” the rise of the modern nation-state as the ultimate regulator of life, and the reduction of human beings to disposable data points in a mathematically organized system.

Among these voices, perhaps the most eloquent was Zygmunt Bauman, who articulated his perspective in a major work titled Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). Drawing on the insights of fellow Jewish thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, Bauman lamented that many historians had failed to fully absorb what he perceived as the deeper “lessons of the Holocaust.” In contrast, he approached it through the lens of the sociology of modernity. He writes (p.10):

By and large, the lessons of the Holocaust have left little trace on sociological common sense, which includes among many others such articles of faith as the benefits of reason’s rule over the emotions, the superiority of rationality over (what else?) irrational action, or the endemic clash between the demands of efficiency and the moral leanings with which “personal relations” are so hopelessly infused.

A little further on, he explicitly places the blame squarely on Enlightenment rationalism (p.68):

The Jews offered an essentially similar case. They were not a race like the others; they were an anti-race, a race to undermine and poison all other races, to sap not just the identity of any race in particular, but the racial order itself. (Remember the Jews as the “non-national nation”, the incurable enemy of the nation-based order as such.) […] the matter could not possibly end with the cleansing of Germany of the Jews. Even residing far from the German borders, the Jews would continue to erode and disintegrate the natural logic of the universe. Having had ordered his troops to fight for the supremacy of the German race, Hitler believed that the war he kindled was waged in the name of all races, a service rendered to racially organized humankind.

 

In this conception of social engineering as a scientifically founded work aimed at the institution of a new, and better, order (a work which necessarily entails the containment, or preferably elimination, of any disruptive factors), racism was indeed resonant with the world-view and practice of modernity. And this, at least, in two vital respects.

 

First, with the Enlightenment came the enthronement of the new deity, that of Nature, together with the legitimation of science as its only orthodox cult, and of scientists as its prophets and priests. Everything, in principle, had been opened to objective inquiry; everything could, in principle, be known – reliably and truly. Truth, goodness and beauty, that which is and that which ought to be, had all become legitimate objects of systematic, precise observation. In turn, they could legitimize themselves only through objective knowledge which would result from such observation.

Hitlerism thus embodied the most extreme expressions of modernity or, from a certain modernist perspective, its logical culmination: racial ideology, hyper-rationalism, and an uncritical faith in science (scientism).

This perspective is crucial to bear in mind today, especially as Europe witnesses a renewed embrace of similar narratives, though this time it was directed towards other “non-European diasporas,” more specifically those with immediate or even ancestral ties to the Islamic world.

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Zionist Ambiguities

It has been a year and a half since Gaza was forced to begin enduring what many observers have described as a state of total war. Comparisons to the Holocaust have even emerged within some circles. It is in this context that I’d like to reference a chapter from The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction, a collection of essays on the Palestinian question authored by various scholars, including several from a Jewish background.

The specific piece I will be focusing on here is titled “Gaza’s Holocaust” by Dr. Elias Akleh, written in 2008, almost two decades ago. His writing makes it quite clear that the “situation in Gaza” is anything but a recent phenomenon (p.103):

Holocaust is the genocidal crime against people based on their ethnicity. This genocide could be perpetrated through different means such as poison gas, guns, tanks, air raids, biological warfare, economical siege, starvation, destruction of vital natural resources, eviction into desert, and deprivation of basic vital materials, among others, to produce the same result: mass deaths. For the last sixty years Palestinians have been victims of all these methods in a deliberate programmed holocaust. The perpetrators are not Nazis, but those who claim to be survivors (and their descendents) of the Nazi-caused holocaust: Zionist Jewish Israelis.

 

The threat of the Israeli deputy defense minister, Metan Vinai, to inflict “bigger Shoah” (Holocaust) [British Telegraph 2/29] on Gaza’s Palestinians reflects the adopted policy of the Israeli government towards Palestinians. Encircled by an eight-meter-high cement wall on three sides and a sea filled with hostile Israeli gun boats on the fourth, Gaza, with a dense population of 1.5 million people, has become the largest concentration camp ever on this globe. The Israeli army acts as the prison guards of this concentration camp. Controlling all sea and air borders, the Israeli army controls and restricts all vital materials going into Gaza. Life in Gaza is dependent on the whims of the Israeli army guarding all crossings into Gaza. They close these crossings whenever they want, for long periods of time, to starve Palestinians.

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These exact lines could easily have been written today. Even more striking is the following excerpt, which discusses how Zionist Jews had abandoned those Jews who “refused” to embrace the Zionist project at its peak (p.105):

The sad and unfortunate fact about this holocaust is that the political figures and humanitarian organizations who appointed themselves to defend the victims are the same people who implicitly approved, encouraged and allowed the holocaust to continue, either through cooperation with the enemy or by overlooking the genocide. Zionist Jewish leaders and Jewish organizations openly withheld support, financial and otherwise, to save European Jews from death. In 1938 the Jewish Agency headed by Golda Meir ignored the German offer to transfer German Jews to other countries for the price of $250 a head. In February 1940 Henry Montor, executive vice-president of the United Jewish Appeal refused to rescue a shipload of Jews stranded on the Danube River because they were old. He wanted healthy young Jews, instead, to enslave them in establishing the Israeli terror state in the heart of the Arab World. Zionist Jewish leaders rejected German offers in 1941–42 to transfer European Jews to Spain for deportation to the US or to the British colonies, as well as the 1944 offer to safely deport Hungarian Jews to any country except Palestine, knowing very well that such rejection would cause the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Yitzhak Greenbaum, chairman of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency expressed such rejection policy in his famous statement “One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Europe.” The Jewish Agency and Zionist leaders sabotaged the efforts of Rabbi Michael Ber Weissmandl, who pleaded for help from the World Jewish Congress and the Jewish Agency to pay the sum of $50,000 to save the lives of forty thousand Slovakian Jews in 1943 (see TV documentary Among Blind Fools trilogy by Verafilm).

 

Despite the imprisonment and death of thousands of their German Jewish brothers, the terrorist military organization “Fighters for Freedom of Israel”—better known as the Lehi or Stern headed then by Avraham Stern—offered Hitler a proposal in January 1941 to join Germany in its war against Britain in return for German support to establish Israel.

In the Zionist worldview, the absolute worst kind of Jew is the one who refuses to make ‘aliyah, i.e., to travel to Israel. Such a Jew is considered to be perpetuating the Diaspora, which Zionists view as a history of humiliation and failure. The non-Zionist Jew thus becomes an internal enemy, whose existence is not valued. This mindset explains why Zionist leaders were so reluctant to assist Jews in Europe during the Holocaust—they thought that, by remaining in Europe, these Jews had rejected the Zionist project, thus they became apathetic to their fate.

In conclusion, it appears that those who truly need to learn the “lessons of the Holocaust” are not always those we might immediately expect.

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