Reading a new book Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race: Exploring Identity and Power in a Global Context, by Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan (I.B. Tauris), I noticed a reference to an article I published online written in 2006. Regrettably the link is to a website that has since closed. I am taking this opportunity to republish the referenced article, The Holocaust and Defense of the Palestinians.
Today in 2020, the political situation has changed only in that Iran is not only again under threat by the United States and its satellites but also in greater danger as is the world’s people. — Suzanne Weiss
Forces responsible for slaughter of Jews now oppress the Palestinian people
By Suzanne Weiss
This article is based on a talk given to a meeting of Muslim Unity of Toronto on December 23, 2006.
Sixty years ago, a mass slaughter – a holocaust – was carried out against European Jews. Today its memory is being misused to build support for Zionism and to oppress and murder the Palestinians.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper says that Canada must not talk with Hezbollah or Hamas, organizations that defend the Palestinians, because they “advocate wiping Israel off the face of the Earth” — an objective that he says is “ultimately genocidal,” that is, another holocaust. (Globe & Mail, Dec. 21, 2006) He uses this excuse to justify punishing Palestinians for electing Hamas by cutting off aid to their government.
This is the Stephen Harper who on July 14, 2006, called Israel’s slaughter of the Lebanese a “measured response” to the abduction of two Israeli soldiers.
The Harper government and its allies are trying to make it a crime to oppose the Zionist state of Israel. For this supposed crime they punish Hamas and the Palestinians with bombs, shootings, and blockade. And even here in Canada, universities discipline students and professors that speak out against Zionist crimes.
And how can they call replacing the Israeli state with a democratic, united Palestine “genocide”?
The country of Czechoslovakia was dissolved in 1993 – wiped off the face of the map! The apartheid state of South Africa was abolished in 1994. In both cases, this was not genocide but a peaceful settlement.
Why do Canadian officials speak so irresponsibly? They use the Holocaust as an excuse to smother dissent. Because the German Nazis killed six million Jews, the U.S., Canada, and Israel insist that Palestinians must pay the price today.
Misuse of the Holocaust
We are told that because Hitler killed the Jews, the Zionist state is needed today, supposedly to protect the Jewish people. Protect against them whom? Against the Nazis? No, against the Palestinians.
This is the motivation for Canada’s governments’ public campaign about the Nazis’ Holocaust.
Canadian school children today know more about the Holocaust than they know about crimes in our own country: crimes such as stealing the lands of the indigenous peoples or throwing Canadians of Japanese descent into concentration camps during the Second World War.
In Washington, the U.S. government has sponsored an imposing Holocaust Museum. Why is there no museum to the Vietnamese, millions of whom were killed in the U.S. war against their country?
When the Nazi campaign against the Jews was in full swing, Canada’s prime minister at that time, Mackenzie King, praised Hitler (see Irving Abella, None is Too Many). Few voices protested Hitler’s mass murders. The Catholic Church kept silent. The U.S. and Canada excluded Jewish refugees.
For several decades after, governments said little about this horrendous crime.
But as the Israeli army proved it could defeat in battle the neighboring Arab states, the U.S. moved to build up the Israeli military as a weapon against the Mideast peoples. They needed an excuse for this provocative campaign, and they found it in the Holocaust. They insist that the Zionist state of Israel must be protected in order to prevent another Holocaust.
To answer this argument, we must know what the Holocaust was.
What was the Holocaust?
First of all, the basic facts are indisputable. The Holocaust is one of the best documented historical events of all time. The Nazis were methodical — they counted their victims and kept meticulous records. In my family’s Polish home town, of Piotrkov there were 30,000 Jews, only 100 survived. On the train that took my mother from France to Auschwitz, of 1,000 Jews, only a dozen survived.
Yes, this was genocide. Six million Jews were killed simply because they were Jews, and the goal was to kill them all. Even the innocent children were hunted down and sent to the gas chambers.
Of course it was not the first genocide. European colonialists exterminated almost entire peoples. Study the Americas, Australia, and Africa.
But the genocide against the Jews was unique in two ways.
First, it took place not in the industrially undeveloped Third World but in Europe. It was the first case of genocide against a white, European people.
Second, it was industrially organized. Not random killing, but managerial, bureaucratic, assembly-line slaughter. Even pieces of the body were recycled: the skin, the hair; and the gold fillings of the teeth.
In a deeper sense, though, the crime against the Jews was only too familiar. The Nazis said that the Jews were not Europeans but members of an inferior, subhuman race, Asiatic race. The Nazis sought to reorganize the globe along racial lines, with the Germans and North Europeans as the elite. Such racism is opposed to our most fundamental beliefs about the worth of human beings.
Where does this racism come from? Not from the House of Islam. Recall how the great U.S. Islamic leader and freedom fighter, Malcolm X, said when he visited Mecca that for the first time he saw peoples of all races worshipping together in equality.
No, this racism is the ideology of Euro-American imperialism.
The British imperialists used racism to rationalize building an empire around the world. Racism was used to justify enslaving the Africans and pillaging India.
And the U.S. empire today rests on racism, in its own country through the oppression of Blacks and immigrants but also internationally. And the racist oppression of the Palestinian people is part of this.
Governments who subjugate races and set races, religions, and nationalities against each other have an economic objective. Imperialist racism aims to enable the owners of capital to make the highest profits by exploiting oppressed peoples. In South Africa it was diamond mines. In the Middle East it is oil.
Given the proven hostility of European and North American governments during the Holocaust, many Jewish survivors in Europe saw Palestine as their only possible refuge. This was a historical tragedy, for which imperialism is ultimately responsible.
Four hundred and fifty years earlier, the Jewish victims of the Spanish inquisition were welcomed by the Muslim societies on the Mediterranean, where they lived and flourished into our times. But the Zionist project that steered twentieth-century Jewish refugees from Europe toward Palestine aimed not to enhance Muslim society but to displace it by taking the land.
Israel would not have been born except for the U.S. and Great Britain. It lives today only because of the support of the U.S. and British who fund it through massive government subsidies in various forms to supply the Zionist government with the weapons of destruction.
These governments wage war on Iraq and Afghanistan for the same reasons they support Israel. They want power; they want oil. Israel is the weapon that they use to keep the peoples of the Middle East in check.
We must defend Iran
But the Holocaust is now being used not only against the Palestinians but also against Iran. Bush calls Iran part of the axis of evil and wants to overthrow its government. The U.S. is planning for a possible attack against Iran, perhaps even with nuclear weapons, and perhaps using their proxy, the Israeli military.
They do this because Iran, in a great revolution in 1979, kicked out the U.S. puppet shah. Iran seized control of its oil; and won its independence. Washington has never forgiven the Iranian people for that great act.
Of course Washington will never admit this. Among their excuses is the fact that Iran opposes Zionism. And more recently, the fact that Iran held a conference and set up a commission questioning the historical truth of the Jewish Holocaust.
From several points of view, this conference was a blow to the struggle against imperialism. It divided the anti-imperialist movement, while pointing toward an alliance with the openly anti-Jewish forces in the imperialist camp. This orientation was symbolized by the presence on the conference platform of the openly White supremacists such as U.S. politician David Duke and apologists for Nazism. And the conference provided a platform for the absurd charge that Holocaust survivors’ testimony is a hoax. Such slanders target the Jewish people, not Zionism, as the enemy. The Holocaust deniers’ verdict that imperialism is innocent of this historical crime feeds illusions regarding the nature of this murderous system.
It would have been better for Iran to sponsor an international conference on Zionism and Israel’s crimes against the people of the Middle East.
By raising the Holocaust issue, Iranian president Ahmadinejad has diverted attention from his proposed solution of the Palestinian crisis, namely to abolish the Zionist regime and hold elections among “Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner.” (Jerusalem Post, December 12, 2006) This is the historic goal of the Palestinian movement for a democratic state embracing the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, a goal widely supported by progressive people around the world.
Anti-Semitism and Zionism
The Zionist state of Israel carries out its crimes in the name of the Jewish people, and conscripts Israeli Jews to enforce this oppression.
This state uses many of the methods of Nazism to oppress the Palestinians, including confining them in walled ghettos. It is understandable that many victims of Zionism feel resentment against Jews, but we cannot blame all Jews for the crimes Israel commits in their name, any more than we blame all Americans for Bush’s crimes in Iraq or all Canadians for Stephen Harper’s crimes in Afghanistan. We must focus on our real enemy: Zionism and imperialism.
The Palestinian liberation movement itself has never been motivated by anti-Jewish feeling. It simply wants the right for the Palestinian people, including the exiles, to live in peace with equal rights on their native land.
The Arab communities of North Africa and the Middle East had no share in guilt for the Holocaust. There is no tradition of anti-Semitism in Islamic civilization. The prejudice against Jews grew up in Christian Europe, hand in hand with racism, as an aspect of the growth of capitalism. And imperialism, above all Euro-American imperialism, is still the source from which this poison spreads.
The Jewish Holocaust’s true lessons
There are two important lessons in the story of the murder of Europe’s Jews.
First, that there is no limit to the savagery of imperialism. If not opposed, it will exterminate entire peoples, like the Palestinians.
Second, to fight back against imperialism we need a broad unity of peoples of many faiths and nationalities.
In my own background lies an example of this concept. I was born to a Jewish family in France during the Second World War. The French government was then rounding up the Jews, solely because of their religious and ethnic background, and deporting them to Hitler’s death camps.
My parents belonged to a Jewish resistance organization. It was united with other immigrant groups and with French working people – Jewish, Christian, and Muslim together – in the battle against the Nazis.
The resistance saved the lives of thousands of Jewish children in France, including me. And this resistance struck heavy blows against French racism and anti-Jewish hatred, which are felt to this day.
Today we must join in a similar broad alliance, this time to defend the Palestinians and to oppose Zionism.
The Zionists’ aggressive policies in the Middle East are against the interests of Jewish people and Palestinians alike, all of whom have a stake in a peaceful and united Middle East.
Palestinian liberation offers the Jewish people in the Middle East the prospect of brotherhood and peace.
United against Zionism
Venezuela is today in the lead in building anti-Zionist unity. That country campaigned strongly against the Israeli war in Lebanon.
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez did not hesitate to condemn the U.S. sponsors of Israeli aggression and to withdraw his country’s ambassador from Israel. “The hand of the Americans is spurring [Israel] on,” he told the Arab TV network Al-Jazeera, (Aug. 4, 2006). The “real threat to the world is the imperialistic threat posed by the U.S,” he said.
“We must defeat imperialism in this century, so that this elite will not annihilate the world.” This is Chavez’s message to all of us.
The Venezuelan people have endorsed this policy with a 63% vote for Chávez in their elections. They are repaying the very great debt that their country owes — that we all owe — to all those in the Mideast who resist Zionism and imperialism.
[In a United Nations debate January 26, 2007, Venezuela stated that Israel’s excesses have “led to a new Holocaust against the Palestinian people” and that Iraqis also are “victims of a Holocaust.” —S.W.]
In Canada, we have built a broad alliance for Palestinian liberation called the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA), uniting Muslim, Christian, and Jewish fighters against Zionism. CAIA has a Jewish sister organization called Not In Our Name (NION).
We have launched a nation-wide joint campaign for boycott and sanctions against the Zionist state of Israel. The first focus of action is a boycott of the Chapters/Indigo Bookstore chain whose majority owners use their profits to build Heseg, the foundation that recruits non-Israelis to fight in the Israeli military. As Israeli soldiers, they participate in operating checkpoints that restrict Palestinian freedom of movement, enforcing the occupation of Palestinian land, and has a documented history of human rights violations.
The CAIA initiative is a promising beginning to educate and inform the public on the issues in the Palestinian struggle. It is an excellent way to expose Israel’s crimes in the Middle East, and to rally as we did against South Africa’s Apartheid system. Those who wish to be active in this process should get in touch with the CAIA at www.caiaweb.org, or email endapartheid@riseup.net.
We should press forward these and other efforts to liberate the Palestinians and to put an end to Zionist and imperialist wars and oppression in the Middle East.
This entry was originally posted in Not in My Name (NION) Iran, Israel & Zionism, Palestine on February 3, 2007.