A Holocaust in Gaza

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Previously, this was a day to reflect on the horrors my family endured in the Lodz Ghetto, in Berlin during Kristallnacht, in hiding during the Nazi occupation of France, and in Adolph Hitler’s extermination camps, including Chelmno.

But right now, my mind is on Israel’s holocaust (yes, it fits the definition) against 2.3 million human beings in Gaza.

Like people everywhere, I’m appalled by Israel’s reprehensible acts against Gaza’s refugee-majority population after October 7 and long before that awful day. As a Jew who attended an Orthodox synagogue as a kid and learned some things about Jewish ethics, I relate to Muslims who said after September 11 that Al Qaeda members weren’t real followers of Islam. They saw them simply as terrorists.

“That which is hateful to you do not unto another. This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.” – Hillel the Elder

I’m not prepared to call the Israelis behind this genocide fake Jews. But I know their “crime of crimes” is un-Jewish. And I’ve never felt more strongly about the need to not conflate Zionism, the ethnic-nationalist-political movement that has powered Israeli oppression for 76 years, and Judaism, a beautiful religion.

Zionists will tell you the Nazi genocide against Europe’s Jews was very different than Israel’s actions in Gaza after October 7. They’re right. But I find it ridiculous to debate whether mass killings in gas chambers were crueler than deliberately and indiscriminately blowing up Gaza’s children, women, and men in densely populated neighborhoods with 2,000-pound bombs after a suffocating 16-year blockade that followed decades of occupation and ethnic cleansing.

When we compare timelines, Nazi oppression lasted slightly more than one decade; Israeli oppression has continued for nearly eight decades.

I do agree with Zionists who say the Shoah was a singular atrocity against a people. But I dislike the Zionist tendency to exploit the ethnic cleansing of Europe’s Jews – including my family members – to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, while trying to silence any mention of Nazi crimes against humanity during discussions of Israel’s crimes against humanity. What’s more, I view the belief among many Zionists that Jewish lives are precious and Palestinian lives aren’t – and the notion that Jewish suffering is more consequential than Palestinian suffering – as racist.

As a child, I was asked why Jewish victims of Hitler’s Nazis didn’t “fight back.” Rabbi Meir Kahane, the militant founder of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), said, “The motto ‘Never Again’ does not mean that ‘it’ (a holocaust) will never happen again. That would be nonsense. It means that if it happens again, it won’t happen in the same way. Last time, the Jews behaved like sheep.”

To this Jew and lots of others, the meaning of “Never again” has been enlarged to apply to all of humanity and include the use of nonviolence to bring about social change. We believe Holocaust education should prevent genocide and other forms of unspeakable violence. If far more Zionists took away the right lessons from the Holocaust, Israel wouldn’t be in this mess.

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