On Holocaust Memorial Day, Twitter has been loaded with those who have the audacity to state that Israel is somehow repeating the atrocities committed by the Nazis to the Palestinian people. That said, it is high time for some serious rebuttal to put the frankly blasphemous assertion to bed, once and for all.
To quote Wolfgang Benz, a German historian:
...the six million murder victims make the holocaust a unique crime in the history of mankind. The number of victims—and with certainty the following represent the minimum number in each case—cannot express that adequately. Numbers are just too abstract. However they must be stated in order to make clear the dimension of the genocide: 165,000 Jews from Germany, 65,000 from Austria, 32,000 from France and Belgium, more than 100,000 from the Netherlands, 60,000 from Greece, the same number from Yugoslavia, more than 140,000 from Czechoslovakia, half a million from Hungary, 2.2 million from the Soviet Union, and 2.7 million from Poland. To these numbers must be added all those killed in the pogroms and massacres in Romania and Transitrien (over 200,000) and the deported and murdered Jews from Albania and Norway, Denmark and Italy, from Luxembourg and Bulgaria.
Genocide is a key word here. We can look at the scale of death and destruction, we see millions dead over the space of a few years. We see manufactured killing, the use of industry and technology for the sake of eradicating a certain race and people off the face of the world. We see one third of an entire ethnicity, religious group and culture wiped out, with full intent to do so by the Nazis. We see death on an unprecedented scale, unrivalled in human history. We see the furthest and sickest extent of human debauchery exposed in this painful point in human memory. Concentration camps were sites of murder, forced labour, starvation, rape and execution. This is the ugly face of genocide that is commemorated every year by the world on this day.
So 'genocide against Palestinians'? Palestinians are part of the Arab nation, they speak, read and write in Arabic and they identify as Arabs. They are part of the Islamic faith, that they share with billions of others. They celebrate and live Arab culture. Israel does not wish to eradicate the Arabic culture, the Islamic religion, the Arab race. Indeed, many old Yemenite, Iraqi or Moroccan Jews speak Arabic, Arab Jews or Sephardim are a majority of Israel's Jewish population, and the Arabic culture is very much a part of a vibrant Israeli one. As for the "Palestinian People"? There is not one to destroy! There is no Palestinian religion, culture, language that is seperate from that of the Arabs. And there is no attempt to eradicate the streams of the Arab culture and language that have been developed by Palestinians, at all, by Israel. There is no mass killing, mass extermination, mass murder of Palestinians at all. Indeed, 14,000 people have died in the entirity of the conflict (Jews included) over the course of six, almost seven decades- The conflict has lasted well over ten times the duration of the Holocaust, and resulted in less than a thousand times less than the total death toll including non-Jewish political, ethnic and racial victims. Moreover, Gaza is a self-governed entity, and the Red Cross denies that there is a humanitarian crisis there.
It is a shame and a scandal that it is necessary to spend time explaining the immensely simple fact, that the Holocaust is incomparable to the situation of the Palestinians. But the amount of ignorance that exists in the world is tremendous, and that same ignorance is that which is penetrated by the dread spear of hatred all too often. That spear penetrated the minds of millions of Germans and ended in millions of impure ashes haunting the air of Europe forever. That spear is now entrenched in the minds of millions of Arabs across the Middle East, their hearts filled with hate for Jews. Israel is calculated as being the tenth strongest country on Earth and could wipe out the Palestinians in a day. Instead, it built a dozen universities for Palestinians where there were once none. It raised the Palestinian life expectancy by decades. Israeli food stocks the shelves of Gazan shops and Ramallah markets. The Israeli Prime Minister stands by the hope of two states for two people and a future of friendship and cooperation. Despite this, the Palestinian narrative is still laced with hatred and sustained by the hope of eradicating Israel forever. Rockets are fired at Israel; one every day since the start of 2014. The Palestinians have created a shambolic Government for themselves, with Mahmoud Abbas' Presidential term having ended over 6 years ago. Hamas runs a dictatorship of Sharia law in Gaza, constantly spewing anti-Semitic diatrabes and anti-Israel threats. It is responsible for the death of hundreds of Israelis. If the Nazis did what Israel does for the Palestinians, for the Jews- Jews who did not rise up against the Germans and who did not hate the Germans and who did not scream "Kill the German!" in their Synagogues and at their political rallies- they would not be branded by history as it's most vile perpetrators of evil. Yet they are. Those who invoke the memory of the Holocaust to apply to the Palestinians are not merely ignorant- they are committing a vile perversion of history and insulting the memory of all of the dead.
Never Forget the Holocaust, the Shoah, for what it was. The lowest point in human history, a time of mass murder and hate and evil.
Never Forget the Holocaust and the lessons that we can draw, and must draw from it, on the importance of truth and the consequences of bigotry and hatred.
Never Forget.
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