“[O]ver time, Holocaust memory in Germany progressively transformed into a policy of unconditional support for Israel. What was once an example of historical reckoning has become a framework that, in my view, contributes to the erasure of critical perspectives and enables actions that contradict the very principles of justice and accountability that this memory was meant to uphold.
“The focus on the Holocaust, while important, has overshadowed or minimized the memory of colonialism, creating a tension that became more apparent after October 7.
“This ‘aporetic’ memory politics is the premise for ignoring the colonial dimension of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. In the German and Western European discourse, Netanyahu is depicted as the representative of the Jews as victims. Therefore, Palestinians are not a dispossessed people, but a new embodiment of antisemitism.
“Germany is today complicit in the genocide in Gaza, just like France, Italy, and the UK. However, Germany’s involvement is particularly significant, both in terms of its role and its symbolic weight. In the eyes of most of the world population, this means the Holocaust memory has become a political tool of colonial policies: while the Jewish victims of Nazism must be commemorated, Palestinian lives can be erased.
“I was born more than twenty years after the Ethiopian genocide perpetrated by Italian Fascism in 1935–36. I am not guilty of that Fascist genocide, but I think I would be guilty if, as an Italian citizen, I ignored my country’s past and refused to assume the historical responsibilities tied to it. As a responsible Italian citizen, I cannot ignore the crimes that belong to my country’s history.”
[I should add that today one would be guilty if they does not assume their responsibility in fighting the rising neo-fascism and be silent and complacent while states and individual engage in open racism, discrimination, xenophobia, and supports far-right parties, applauding the juwtification of genocide by papers like The Telegraph in the UK.]
“Many people (especially in Germany) think that speaking of Gaza genocide means ‘relativizing’ the Holocaust. This is shameful. Laying claim to the memory of one genocide in order to justify another genocide is morally and politically unacceptable. The memory of Auschwitz should be mobilized to impede new genocides, not to justify them.
We cannot say to the Palestinians: we regret, but we cannot act against, the violence and oppression you are suffering because this could become the pretext for exhuming an old antisemitic tropes. The struggle against antisemitism is not incompatible with the struggle against the colonial oppression of Palestine
“[A]ntisemitism is no longer the primary form of racism in contemporary Europe. In the twenty-first century, racism has been reconfigured, and focusing solely on antisemitism risks being used as a pretext to justify Islamophobic and racist policies.”
Related
“Let’s not mince words here. The people of Gaza are collectively guilty for invading Israel, murdering, raping and kidnapping Israelis and holding them hostage.
The actions of the Gazan people prove they need detoxifying education before the reconstruction should even be able to begin. They are fundamentally evil, and they must pay a price for their actions.
Getting Hamas out of Gaza would also be another blow to Iran. There is hope that the further weakening of Tehran will enable America or Israel to attack the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities and initiate a process that will lead to the regime change that is the key to making Israel, the region and the entire world safer.” (Martin Oliner on The Jerusalem Post)
The Nazis “dehumanized Jewish people. During the period under study, the use of terms invoking emotions and agency remained at high levels, but increased in the lead-up to the Holocaust. ‘We observed that Jews were progressively denied the capacity for fundamentally human mental experiences in the run-up to the Holocaust, suggesting that they were increasingly denied moral consideration during this period,’ Stanford University’s Alexander P. Landry says. This progressive denial would have facilitated the systematic atrocities carried out against the Jewish population. ‘However, after the onset of the Holocaust, Jews were credited with increasing levels of agency. This may reflect an effort by Nazi propagandists to demonize Jews, portraying them as intentionally malevolent agents of evil, in order to justify the violence inflicted on them’.
“Theories of dehumanization maintain that denying a person or category of people the ability to feel serves to remove moral barriers to inflicting harm on fellow human beings. This is why Nazi propaganda, for example, frequently associated Jews and others deemed less-than-human by the Third Reich with vilified animals or infectious diseases. But, the authors of the study claim, the process is more complicated than that. ‘These patterns are consistent with claims that the Jews were subject to demonization, in which their capacity for sophisticated reasoning was perceived to coexist with a subhuman moral depravity,’ the study’s conclusion reads.
“Harriet Over, a researcher in psychology at the University of York, studies theories of dehumanization in cases of mass violence such as the Holocaust. Over says that the concept of dehumanization can refer to different dynamics. ‘Some researchers define it as treating humans in ways they should never be treated,’ she says. ‘If that’s what we’re talking about, then of course the Nazis dehumanized the Jews.’ But for some who study the phenomenon, dehumanization refers primarily to the use of derogatory metaphors, or the act of simply equating people with animals. ‘If we’re talking about that,’ Over says, ‘then it’s also true that the Nazis dehumanized the Jews. Nazi propaganda is replete with references to Jews as vermin, rats or parasites’.
Psychologist David Livingstone “maintains that ‘the Nazis really did regard the Jews as dangerous Untermensch (subhumans).’ But he does not believe that this dehumanization was a simple and straightforward Nazi plan: ‘The Nazis’ dehumanization of the Jews was not a strategy to justify their extermination. Rather, it was the basis for their extermination,’ he wrote in an email. And, he says, those ideas from over a century ago are not merely a thing of the past. ‘We are still creating [monsters],’ Livingstone says. ‘We see it in European attitudes toward Muslim and African refugees, in the genocidal war in Ethiopia, in anti-Muslim propaganda in Myanmar, in Russian attitudes toward Ukrainians, in Hindu Islamophobia, and in American racism against Black people, to cite just a few examples’.”
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