On October 7, Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel, murdering approximately 1,200 people and kidnapping more than 240 others. One of those kidnapped was my 35-year-old son Sagui, who lived on Nir Oz, the kibbutz I called home for most of my adult life and which was destroyed in the attack. Sagui is one of 120 hostages still held by Hamas.
That horrific day and the devastation of Gaza caused by the Israeli military response led to countless references to the Holocaust and associated terms: genocide, Nazis, pogroms. Some opponents of Israel have vaguely and irresponsibly accused Israel of genocide against the Palestinians. My own government has also invoked these terms, primarily to convince Israelis of the magnitude of the threat Hamas poses to them.
As the son of a father who survived the Holocaust and a mother who fled Nazi Germany, I find our government’s use of such references to the Nazi genocide to be deeply offensive. As the father of a hostage, I find the use of such language atrocious. And as a history professor, I am appalled by the inaccuracy of such statements and frightened by their implications for Israeli society.
There is truth in our leaders’ invocation of the Holocaust: October 7 was indeed the deadliest day for world Jewry since the Holocaust. The comparison ends there.
By invoking the collective memory of the Holocaust, Israeli government ministers and other leaders are effectively abstaining from the horrors of this “Black Saturday” – in effect eschewing their own responsibility for the massacre and their sacred responsibility to bring all the hostages alive.
In fairness to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current ministers, previous governments have also invoked Holocaust imagery to mobilize the country. The practice dates back to David Ben-GurionIsrael’s founding prime minister, and includes Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who compared Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to Hitler in 1982. Since October 7, however, the frequency and intensity of these statements seem much greater.
This month, Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion — speaking to an audience at the gala preceding a conference in New York — talked about attacks about Jews on campuses and in the streets “like we haven’t seen since Germany in the 1930s.” Ofir Akunis, Israel’s consul general in New York, told the conference that Hamas’ goal was to commit “genocide” against Israelis, saying the term referred to “the Holocaust itself and nothing less “.
These are just the latest in a long line of such statements.
“The horrific stories we hear from survivors of the Hamas attack remind me of the stories my mother told us about the Holocaust,” Foreign Minister Israel Katz said. said the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in February. In November, Finance Minister Bezalal Smotrich said the West Bank had “two million Nazis”.
Mr. Netanyahu himself has recently taken a different approach. He said in a speech On May 5, Holocaust Remembrance Day, the October 7 attack was different from the Holocaust because Hamas could not carry out a large-scale massacre, which meant that the Forces Israeli defense forces had stopped an even larger attack. In fact, heroic civilian rescuers and uncoordinated actions by small IDF teams – and even individual soldiers – blunted the attacks with little or no guidance from their commanders.
My parents, who died years ago, would have been devastated by Israel’s failure to defend its citizens on October 7, a betrayal of the fundamental reason for the creation of the country in 1948. I believe they would have had difficulty coping with the physical destruction of our kibbutz, where more than a quarter of all inhabitants were murdered or kidnapped that day. Moreover, the pain they would have felt following the kidnapping of their beloved grandson Sagui would surely have been unimaginable.
Unaware or cynical Israeli officials suggest that anti-Semitic statements and anti-Israeli protests around the world remember Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Yet the protesters received virtually no support from powerful politicians, industrialists and financiers, the kind of people who financed and facilitated the rise of National Socialism in Germany. They also have no common leader, party structure or ideology. They are not protesting in a failed state – like Weimar Germany – that was too weak to deal with violent protesters. On the contrary, one could say that some authorities are overreacting to campus protests by calling in the police and imposing harsh disciplinary measures.
Instead of seriously examining the causes of the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli protests, these cynical officials are bypassing any attempt by Israel to address the root causes of this anger: large-scale civilian casualties in Gaza that have undermined our government’s ability to maintain the moral high ground in this conflict.
The analogy compare the October 7 attack to a pogrom, also, this is false. Historians have shown that pogroms in Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries were almost always cases of collective violence, sometimes encouraged by local authorities or the police. In contrast, the October 7 slaughter was led by Hamas, an organized group that meticulously planned it. References to collective violence only obscure his responsibility.
Invoking the mass extermination pursued by the Nazi regime is just as pernicious. In 1939, there was no sovereign Jewish state with an army. There is now an Israeli army that has protected the Jewish people from their neighbors since 1948.
We must accept this simple truth: the Israeli government and military establishment have become arrogant and self-confident. If they had not been victims of a complete lack of imagination and an unwillingness to take seriously the contrarian analyzes emanating from their ranks, such as has been widely reportedthe Hamas attack probably never happened and certainly would not have been as deadly.
Cynically invoking the Holocaust and pogroms for political purposes is neither historically accurate nor necessary to demonstrate Hamas’s inhumanity toward Israelis and the people of Gaza.
On the contrary, it insults the memory of the countless victims of anti-Semitism in the past, including my parents. The war between Israel and Hamas is proof that the weaponization of language on the part of all sides only prolongs hatred and conflict, in large part by allowing participants to distract from fundamental issues, including inability of the Israeli government to bring all our hostages home.
The true legacy of the Holocaust for Israelis should be a story of redemption and revival, a story in which our people were not eradicated. The legacy should not be one of eternal victimization at the hands of evil forces, as our leaders constantly suggest.
There is nothing more precious in the Zionist project than the continuity of the Jewish people, in a Jewish land, conscious of the collective memory of our past, but not enslaved by it.
Jonathan Dekel-Chen is professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Source photographs from the Library of Congress and Amir Levy, via Getty Images.
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