The pageant
Each year, the international community embarks on its ritual pilgrimage to Auschwitz, staging a carefully choreographed performance of remembrance. Heads are bowed, solemn speeches are delivered, and declarations of intention to“never again” allow such barbarity are intoned in somber notes.
This ritual, repeated with almost liturgical precision, has long served as a reaffirmation of a moral lesson extracted from the horrors of the Holocaust. Since the liberation of the camp, the history of post-war atrocities at the hands or on the watch of those very pilgrims should have been enough to put the honesty of those pledge in doubt.
But this year, on the 80th anniversary of the day in which the world was allowed to see the postcards of the hell that Germany had built in Poland, the echoes of the barbarity that Israel has unleashed in Gaza make the pilgrimage little more than a spectacle for political consumption and the moral force of the even counterfeit.
The spectacle of penitence appears almost entirely detached from the realities of the world it seeks to shape. It is not merely the utter and pathetic failure to prevent the atrocities but also the complete dereliction of political duties to observe and protect the political order that emerged in the name of preventing those atrocities. The commemoration of Auschwitz has become less an act of historical reckoning than a ritual absolution for those in power.
The Irish Soothsayer
In addressing the audience, Irish President Michael D. Higgins referred to the war in Gaza. He spoke of revenge as a “lessening of the human spirit” and alluded to the devastation and scale of the destruction and death that Israel has visited upon the people of Gaza.
Predictably he drew criticism from Israeli officials. His comments, while not explicitly equating Gaza with Auschwitz, were denounced as the politicization of the event and of the memory of the victims of Nazi crimes. But the clarion call was in order and it served to underscore not only the magnitude of the crimes for which Israeli officials are being investigated for possible incitement to genocide, genocide and crimes against humanity but also the complicity of Western capitals in the slaughter of Gaza.
The outrage over Higgins’s remarks reflects a struggle over the ownership and application of Holocaust memory but this struggle is political and not moral. Auschwitz stood for decades as the very expression of absolute evil and as a symbol of unparalleled suffering but also as the sole domain of Jewish particularity. The result has been a rigid moral doctrine in which Jewish suffering has been granted historical weight and consequence while other suffering—and the Palestinian suffering in particular—however immense, has found no language or means to render it visible.
It is not only the carefully arranged stage set—the theatrical framing of Birkenau’s entrance, the warm glow of spotlights—that has turned Auschwitz and its ghosts into little more than a political spectacle. It is also the profound and ongoing failure by political figures and national leaders to uphold international humanitarian law and defend the integrity of the institutions that were meant to make Auschwitz truly unique in the history of human cruelty.
The weight of its memory was supposed to serve as a foundation for a world in which such atrocities would never be repeated. Instead, the invocation of Auschwitz has become an empty gesture that, at best, coexists comfortably with the very political conditions it was meant to repudiate and, at worse, is used to aid and abet enormous cruelty while keeping the moral conscience of the West safely distracted by speeches and genuflexion.
The Banalisation of Evil
The Israeli government, its promoters and emissaries, as well as its clients across Western capitals find the analogy of Auschwitz and Gaza objectionable. Yet both of these episodes of murderous brutality , albeit in different way, belong to the foundational crimes of the state of Israel. The Israeli qualm is, however, that the analogy of the violence that Jews underwent and the violence that Israelis committed commit the sin of trivialization. The absolute uniqueness of the holocaust, they imagine, should have no parallel or analogue.
Yet, for decades Israel has produced a much more grotesque facsimile of the icons, gestures and mechanisms of Auschwitz which far from being mistakes about the order of magnitude of the holocaust (as the presumed mischaracterisation of Gaza might or might not be) is the full construction of an industry of Auschwitz merchandise and assortments.
Examples abound. The March of the Living in which jewish teens under the pretence of reclaiming the fields of Birkenau from the pangs of historical terror, put up a carnivalesque parade with songs and Israeli flags included among the derelict barracks of the camp. The use of the victimisation of Jews in concentration camps as an ideological scaffold to buttress the ideological project of Zionism. In recent memory, however, few compare to the appalling performance offered by Israel’s former UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan when he sported the ultimate symbol of Jewish suffering—the yellow Star of David—to shield Israel from the rule of international law.
The actions of the Israeli diplomat at the highest level of international representation were a sobering display, not only of the shameless theatrics of a bully acting on behalf of a rogue state but also of the sheer depravity involved in reducing the profound suffering of millions of Jews to a mere logo and catchphrase. This was not just a trivialization of antisemitism; it was an egregious desecration of Jewish suffering and a profound violation of Jewish memory.
Gaza and Auschwitz
It is in any case true that the comparison between Auschwitz and Gaza is infelicitous and as matter of indicating a difference of degrees should be avoided. Gaza is simply much worse than Auschwitz and to present Gaza as a continuation of Auschwitz is a trivialization of the monstrosity of Gaza.
For one thing, Auschwitz operated largely concealed from the everyday life and line of sight of those who were meant to benefit from its atrocities—the German people. While its existence was not entirely unknown, its full horror remained hidden from the public. The fabrics of death were both physically distant and shrouded in deliberate secrecy.
Not so Gaza. Until they started to be haunted by authorities around the world during their vacations, Israeli soldiers happily boasted their murderous exploits on social media platforms across the digital ecosystem. Meanwhile, the victims of Gaza armed with cellphones recorded and broadcasted their own extermination. Nobody with a computer could claim ignorance of what the Israelis did in Gaza and more importantly, none of its putative beneficiaries in the Jewish community could could plausibly deny knowledge of the extent of the crimes committed in their name.
Gaza has another particularity which makes it considerably worse than Auschwitz. In Gaza, the Israelis have enlisted the ghosts of Auschwitz in the murder of children, women and men. The Israeli machine deployed the victims of Auschwitz and their memory as instruments in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and in the commission of what by most lights increasingly looks like a genocide.
The monstrosity of asserting the complicity of the million of dead Jewish children of Auschwitz in the killing of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza is nothing less than the geometric proliferation of evil. An evil built on the evil utilisation of the evil of all evils because while evil preserved the moral integrity of the victims, the Israelis desecrated their silence.
Auschwitz after Gaza
If one is to believe Israel and its clients, between the keffiyeh or the word Palestine and Auschwitz there is not a difference of kind but merely a difference of degree. Well, it seems fair and perhaps critical to say that antisemitism both in its history and its actual unfolding has little in common with the products that emerge from the assembly line of Israels Auschwitz industry and the holy of holies that the money merchants have turned into a Jewish suffering theme parks.
The conflation of all things that Israelis dislike—from keffiyehs and watermelons to Bernie Sanders and Karim Khan—into the ranks of antisemitism have made antisemitism trivia. The ideological engine that once drove the extermination of large parts of the Jewish population of Europe has been reduced to nothing more than a cry of wolf, shrugged off and dismissed. In doing so, Israel’s campaign of trivialization has turned both Auschwitz and its evils into mere trifles.
In my Auschwitz, the one in my mind, I mourn for Gaza. I mourned for Hind Rajab, I mourn for Zina Al-Ghou, I mourn for Mohamed Al-Masry, I mourn for Shaban al-Dalou who burned alive, I mourn for Refaat Alareer, I mourn for Ayat al-Khadour, who announced her death to anyone willing to listen.
And I mourn for the ghosts of Auschwitz buried, under the ruins of Gaza along our moral certainties, our sense of humanity and the magnanimity with which I was able to look at my fellow men. My hand runs constantly over their names.
Beautiful piece. Thank you for saying it all so eloquently.
This is beautifully written. Israel has, indeed, succeeded in trivializing the Holocaust.