Holocaust or No Holocaust?
To all commentators on a previous post who argued for and against comparing the Israeli atrocities to the holocaust, I found a relevant article:
A ‘holocaust’ for the Palestinians too
Hasan Abu Nimah
Israel and the Zionist movement have never permitted the word “holocaust†to be applied to any tragedy except that of the attempted annihilation of the Jews in Europe, perpetrated by the same countries that now look on indifferently at the suffering of the Palestinians.
Israel has tried to appropriate the debt rightly owed to Europe’s Jewish victims by their persecutors in the form of unconditional support and obedient silence, not only from the successor governments of those countries that harmed their Jewish citizens, but from everyone else in the world. In using the tragedy of European Jews for this manifestly narrow political purpose, the Zionist movement at the same time claims that keeping alive the memory of the Nazi holocaust and wider European collusion with it is a constant warning that such horrors should happen never again.
Thus, Palestinians who often complained that they alone had to bear the price of historical crimes that occurred in Europe early last century, including the destruction of their country and society, and the dispersal of the people into an excruciating exile, have been severely criticised if they ever dared to compare their own torment to that experienced by some of their Israeli tormentors at the hands of the Nazis.
Perceptions shifted suddenly, however, after Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defence minister threatened the Palestinians with a “bigger shoahâ€, using the Hebrew word usually reserved to describe the Nazi holocaust. Immediately after that, Israel began a series of massacres, killing dozens of Palestinian civilians, as well as resistance fighters defending their beleaguered communities in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. At last it was an Israeli minister, a partner in crime, who gave Palestinians permission to refer to their tragedy as a “holocaustâ€.
For many, no other word can describe the debasement of human values, of common decency that allows Israel to treat the Palestinians like nothing more than millions of troublesome animals who must be kept in a zoo. Pity the world for what it has become, and for what still awaits its people!
It is painful, even revolting, in such dark times to reduce our concerns to mere haggling over what to call our calamities rather than to commit to halting and preventing them. How can we explain the shocking, damning impotence of the self-appointed “international community†as one of the mightiest armies in the world turns its full firepower on an occupied, refugee population, using tanks, fighter planes and missiles under the most ridiculous pretexts.
"It is painful, even revolting, in such dark times to reduce our concerns to mere haggling over what to call our calamities rather than to commit to halting and preventing them." this is the subject’s essence, nothin else need to be spoken.