On pro-Israel use and abuse of holocaust remembrance

 

Twenty-five years ago, Norman Finkelstein detailed how Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry was weaponized against Palestinians. In his 2000 book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Finkelstein, whose grandparents perished in Nazi death camps, argued the US Jewish establishment exploited the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for economic and political gain and to further the interests of Israel. Since the book was written, Israel lobbyists’ reliance on antisemitism/Nazi Holocaust claims to undermine Palestine solidarity has grown substantially.

As Israel’s genocide in Gaza, land theft in West Bank and violence across the region grows, supporters turn to evermore more distant Nazi crimes to defend the indefensible. A recent issue of the Montreal Gazette highlights the city’s “Holocaust Industry”.

Across the top of the front of the April 23 paper there was a photo of a 98-year-old survivor of the Nazis next to concentration camp garb. The article headlined “Antisemitism begins with Jews, it doesn’t end with Jews, Cotler says” promoted Federation Combined Jewish Appeal’s (CJA) “Remembrance to Celebration” campaign, which also marks Israel’s Memorial Day and Israel’s Independence Day. Ostensibly about Nazi crimes, the article largely quoted leading Zionist Irwin Cotler justifying Israeli brutality. The initiator of Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism was quoted saying, “We’re also in the shadow and continuing pain of the unspeakable mass atrocities of Oct. 7, perpetrated, as you know, by a terrorist organization, Hamas, under Canadian law, but (also) an antisemitic genocidal terrorist group, not because I say so, but because Hamas has said so in its founding charter of 1988. And since Oct. 7, Hamas has committed itself — and I’m quoting them again — to commit Oct. 7 again and again and again until Israel’s annihilation… Iran is the sleeper, the elephant in the antisemitic room, where Iran is not only a leading state sponsor of international terrorism, including that of Hamas and Hezbollah, not only a leading exporter of transnational repression and assassination targeting Jews, but where Iran itself is a leading architect of what has come to be known — and I first called it as such 25 years ago — genocidal antisemitism.”  (more...)

On pro-Israel use and abuse of holocaust remembrance