Liars, damned liars and Zionists on the Palestine Nakba and the Nazi Holocaust

Zionist 'logic': recognising the Palestinian 'Nakba' means denying the Nazi Holocaust
Mick Napier, May 2007

It is truly a sign of desperation how far defenders of Israel will go to smear their opponents who presume to include Palestinians as worthy of the same human rights as an Israeli Jew.

Since defence of ethnic cleansing gets a bad press these days, Zionists don’t even try much. Their usual tactic instead is to deflect discussion and condemnation of Israeli crimes by smearing their opponents as anti-Semitic in some way. It is, with a few exceptions, utterly baseless, mere sand in the eyes, and is now becoming increasingly transparent. Recently, this attempt to force Palestine solidarity into the Procrustean bed of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial has reached comical proportions as ‘black’ is called ’Zionist white’.

In an article in the February 2007 Zionist journal Engage, “The Left and the Holocaust”, David Rich sets out to neutralise the effect of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign initiative in working for inclusive Holocaust Commemoration events. We promoted Jim Allen’s play, Perdition, debates, and lectures by historian Lenny Brenner as integral components of the (otherwise very meagre) official UK-wide HMD programme. The well-established and unsavoury record of the Zionists in collaborating with extreme anti-Semites, including the Nazis, was one aspect of the Nazi Holocaust that was covered.

Rich airily dismisses Brenner/Allen and many others’ “allegation of collaboration between Zionists and Nazis [as] an invention” and lumps the SPSC with Nazis like Faurisson, the BNP and a bag of other racists. He attributes to Brenner the absurd “notion that the Zionist movement could act as equal partners with Nazi Germany”, whereas Brenner and many others have extensively documented where some Zionist leaders took the option for collaboration over resistance, while others joined in the resistance to Nazi occupation. The collaboration was between extremely unequal partners but there remained real, even though limited, possibilities for resistance under nazi occupation. Thus a critique of collaboration with the Nazis, a phenomenon found in varying degrees throughout every population in Nazi-occupied Europe, is characterised as a malevolent anti-Semitism by Rich. What else can a Zionist do, faced with the historical record?

David Rich describes the attempts of the SPSC to work within the official Holocaust Commemoration framework, including our wholesale acceptance of the official Holocaust Commemoration Day statements of aims, as part of “the growing hostility of parts of the left to official Holocaust commemorations.”

Rich claims, moreover, that there is an SPSC position “that Holocaust commemoration needs to be undermined”. He derives this from what he calls “Napier’s claim that ‘an accurate understanding of the Nazi Holocaust is essential to grasp modern Israeli savagery towards the Palestinian people.” Since one of the many editorial advisors for the Engage journal is a Professor of Logic at Edinburgh University, they really need to talk!

How on earth do we ‘undermine Holocaust commemoration’ by organising collective Jewish, Russian, Gypsy, homosexual and other collaboration to explore the full extent of the Nazi genocides and point out the silence of so many in the face of ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people?

Rich denounces us for propagating the fairly obvious argument that there is a “political link between Palestine and the Nazi mass murder of Jews in 1942” which needs to be discussed. In the mental world of Zionism there can be no commitment to universal human rights or any attempt to see a knock-on effect of Nazi genocide leading to current crime. Rich, therefore, cannot allow that we acknowledge and honour victims of both, or that we can sensitise participants to all past and ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing, including the crimes against the Palestinian people. Rich sees in this approach our rejection of “Jewish suffering at the hands of European antisemitism; instead, it is the Palestinians who are the true victims of the Holocaust, are still suffering the consequences today and to whom Europe owes its historic moral debt.” Rich tries to force us to choose – to support Palestine, he says, we must play down the Holocaust.

This Zionist position is dishonest, of course, and is a view we repudiate. They are driven to this sleight of hand, however, time and again, remorselessly, tediously, because it is one of the few remaining weapons they have left to distract discussion away from Israeli ethnic cleansing, ongoing child murder, and other crimes.

This distortion of Brenner’s and others’ critique of Zionism is not a detail – it is dishonesty, politically driven by Rich’s need to align Brenner and the SPSC with a ragbag of Nazis and racists. The tactic is increasingly desperate as Rich turns words on their head, and works to prove that Holocaust commemoration is really hostility to Holocaust commemoration He hopes to place us in the same camp as the Holocaust deniers of the BNP, Faurisson, and other neo-Nazis, the better to marginalise and neutralise a force which works to actively assist the Palestinian people and oppose Israel crimes. Rich accuses the SPSC of “denial, distortion and manipulation of the Holocaust” whereby there is “another point of commonality between these political extremes”, i.e. Palestine solidarity and the extreme-right.

Defenders of Israel have to portray us as Holocaust deniers, even when the evidence, not just our words but also our actions, point in the opposite direction. Our active, unselective linking of genocides past and present is what drives Rich and Engage to such transparent illogicalities. As the official HMD website makes clear, they wish to link the Nazi Holocaust to current mass killings their British Home Office funders approve of, and prevent any mention of current mass killings in Iraq and Palestine.

The attempts by some to import Holocaust revisionism into the Palestine solidarity movement is manna from heaven for the beleaguered pro-Israel lobby. It is not only a repulsive thing to do in itself – in an era of mass Holocausts what could be the point of it? – it is exactly what Zionists need to blunt rising popular hostility to Israeli crimes.

http://www.engageonline.org.uk/journal/index.php?journal_id=14&article_id=55