Humanity can and must do better—not just for Jews, but for all people
“They don’t understand that it was a crappy piece of land with nothing on it. You know, there were several hundred thousand people but other than that, it didn’t produce an economy. It couldn’t grow things, it didn’t have anything on it.”
You’ve probably heard BC NDP MLA Selina Robinson’s colonialist diatribe—an attempt to describe Palestine before 1948—by now.
But you may not have heard the full context, which is as problematic as the content: she said these words while trying to explain that the majority of “18-34 year-old people”—effectively, “kids these days”—are Holocaust deniers. Her contention was that if young people knew the history of the Holocaust, they, too, would grant Israel full impunity for its assault on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice has now ruled is plausibly genocide.
As a Jew who was in that age category on October 7, I can assure Robinson: we know about the Holocaust. We know about the horrors of ethno-nationalism and fascism. We know about genocide.
But it seems that we’ve drawn different lessons from that knowledge than she has.
I spent the last few months organizing against Israel’s ongoing violence with a group of Jews in Vancouver, largely through the organization Independent Jewish Voices. Our rallying cry—and that of Jews and Jewish organizations fighting for Palestinian lives around the world—is one that centres our collective memory of the Holocaust, not one that denies it.
It is a cry issued by Jewish Holocaust survivors and peace activists who recognized years ago what the state of Israel was doing in Palestine. It is a cry that seeks to universalize the lessons of the Holocaust rather than narrow them. It is a cry based on the unflinching belief that humanity can and must do better—not just for Jews, but for all people.
It is the insistence that never again means for anyone. (more...)
Selina Robinson didn’t just abuse her position—she abused the legacy of the Holocaust
No comments:
Post a Comment