ErnestoSchwartz

The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, is an international memorial day on 27 January that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust, which resulted in the genocide of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, an attempt to implement its "final solution" to the Jewish question. 27 January was chosen to commemorate the date when the Auschwitz concentration camp was liberated in 1945. Following October 7th, President Biden stated; “It has brought to the surface painful memories and scars left by millennia of antisemitism and the genocide of the Jewish people. The world watched then, it knew, and the world did nothing. We will not stand by and do nothing again. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.” With this, Biden reinforced the rhetorical framework that the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett expressed, in typically unashamed terms, in an interview on Sky News on 12 October: “We’re fighting Nazis” A powerful state, with powerful allies and a powerful army, engaged in a retaliatory attack against stateless Palestinians under Israeli-settler colonial rule, military occupation and siege, is thus portrayed as powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis. The context of the Hamas attack on Israelis, however, is completely different from the context of the attack on Jews during the Holocaust. And without the historical context of Israeli settler colonialism since the 1948 Nakba, we cannot explain how we got here, nor imagine different futures; Biden offered us, instead, the decontextualised image of “pure, unadulterated evil.” This weaponisation of Holocaust memory by Israeli politicians runs deep. In 1982, for instance, in the context of Israel’s attack on Lebanon, the Israeli PM, Menachem Begin, compared the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Adolf Hitler in his bunker in Berlin at the end of the war. Three decades later, in October 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu took this weaponization to new levels when he asserted in a speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem that the Palestinian grand mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini planted the idea to murder Jews in Hitler’s mind. Netanyahu also described Hamas in a press conference, together with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as the “new Nazis” Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party, to take another example, called for “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth”. The fantasy of “fighting Nazis” drives such explicit language, because the image of Nazis is one of “pure, unadulterated evil”, which removes all laws and restrictions in the fight against it. Perpetrators of genocide always see their victims as evil and themselves as righteous. This is, indeed, how Nazis saw Jews. In essence it’s inversion. The way Israel demonises the “other” is usually a reflection of the attributes that Israel possess.