According to Howard Jacobson’s Twisted Logic It is Anti-Semitic To Accuse Israel Of Genocide Since It’s a Jewish State!
Stage Time is Stage Time – Speech from Jewish Comedian Matt Lieb at anti-war protest Los Angeles
On 2 March 1988 Yehuda Elkana, the former President and Rector of the Central European University in Budapest and a child survivor of Auschwitz, wrote an article, The Need to Forget. In it he argued that what had happened in Germany could happen anywhere, and to any people, describing how the ‘majority of Israelis are consumed by a profound hatred of the Arabs’. Elkana talked of:
a profound existential “Angst” fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the holocaust … that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief… I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, “this must never happen again,” and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, “this must never happen to us again.”
If there is one lesson we can draw from the Holocaust it is that any people, given the right set of circumstances, are capable of genocide and extermination. Jews are not exempt from this as Israel is proving today.
Last Sunday the Observer ran an article by Zionist novelist Howard Jacobson whose argument was that to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Gaza was either to deny the Holocaust or to accuse Jews of being
perpetrators of the very crime that killed them in their millions, as a consequence of which that crime is abrogated.
Are Cambodians, Armenians, Rwandan Tsutsis or Afro-Caribbeans also immune from becoming perpetrators of genocide? Does past victimhood prevent people from becoming a perpetrator of genocide?
Are some people biologically and racially programmed by past victimhood from becoming genocidaires? Common sense tells us that this is absurd. Genocide is the product of society not some genetical inheritance yet the Observer had no qualms in printing this rubbish in its determination to justify Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Jacobson and the ‘liberal’ Observer were giving Israel a licence to massacre in the name of the 6 million Jews who died and to question that right is to be guilty of a sophisticated version of holocaust denial.
Implicit in everything Jacobson wrote was the idea that Israel was the collective Jew. That Israel spoke for all Jews, everywhere, including dead Jews. No one gave Israel that right, least of all those who died in Hitler’s gas chamber, most of whom detested the idea of a ‘Jewish’ state founded on the same racial principles as those of their persecutors.
To accuse Jacobson and those who employ his mediocre talents of being tone deaf would be to do him a disservice. He is blind to all reasoned argument. His only talent is as a scriptwriter for Israel’s racist barbarians.
Malcolm X on Palestine
Leave aside the fact that it is today’s anti-Semites, from Orban and Trump to the Christian Zionists, who are the most avid supporters of the war. That the pre-war pro-Hitler Daily Mail and Express are the most full throated supporters of Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign.
Jacobson and those he represents, resent the accusation that they are weaponising the Holocaust. Such a charge would mean that Israel (or Jews as he calls the murderers)
claim exemption from the obligations that constrain everyone else. And that which you seek to profit by, you lose the right to.
Perish the thought that Israel might lose the right to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing in the name of the Holocaust. The Holocaust mortgage might even be settled as Walter Goldsmith once suggested.
The Guardian is not a left-wing paper. It is and always has been a liberal imperialist paper which backed the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I fail to understand why some people are fooled into giving their pennies and pounds to support the exorbitant salaries of the Guardian’s war whores.
Zionism hates the idea that the Holocaust contains universal lessons for humanity about racism and imperialism. Zionism considers that the only lesson of the Holocaust is its entitlement to create a Jewish Supremacist state based on the principles of the Nazi Nuremburg laws.
Separation of the races, opposition to miscegenation and mixed marriages are the principles on which the ‘Jewish’ state was founded. It is not for nothing that the German Zionists were the only ones to welcome Hitler’s race laws, although this is kept quiet today.
The other victims of the Holocaust, such as the Disabled and Roma, are forgotten. The Holocaust for Zionism was unique. It has no universal lessons. The Nazis waged a ‘War Against the Jews’ in the words of Lucy Dawidowicz.
The ‘eternal Jew’ in the anti-Semites eyes was replaced with an eternal anti-Semitism by the Zionists. They held there was something about the Jews that marked them out for persecution. Anti-Semitism was inherent in the non-Jew and therefore anything was justified to maintain Jewish supremacy.
That is why October 7 was such a shock. It was the first time in 75 years that the Palestinians had fought back, overrunning the military bases that had lain siege to the Gaza Strip, before attacking the nearby Kibbutzim.
There is nothing new in this. When the first slave uprisings took place, the slave owners were equally shocked. And they reacted in similarly brutal ways to the Zionists.
There was the Revolt of Nat Turner in Virginia in August 1831 when 55 white people – women, men and children – were killed. In response an equivalent number of Black people were killed and executed.
The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in October 1865 resulted in a protest by nominally free Black people being savagely put down by Governor Eyre. Although only 25 people were killed in the initial rebellion some 800 or so people were killed or hanged.
This is the context for the October 7 rebellion. Israel has done its best to portray it as a savage act of violence on the part of Hamas. There was no reason for it other than the fact that they were attacking Jews.
The Mass Rape of Jewish Women by Hamas that Wasn’t
Israeli propagandists have worked hard to provide a multiplicity of lurid stories – of 40 beheaded babies, a baby roasted alive in an oven (Daily Mail) and in the latest installment the mass rape of Jewish women. As each story is discredited another one pops up.
May Golan was appointed to head an Israeli ‘Commission of Inquiry’ into the allegations of rape. Her commission did not though take any testimony from witnesses. Golan was nominated by Netanyahu as Israel’s Consul General in New York before the outraged reaction from American Jews resulted in her nomination being withdrawn. She was described by Ha’aretz as the Minister for Rolling Back the Status of Women and is fiercely anti-feminist.
Scottsboro Boy Framed for Rape
The current rape allegations surrounding October 7 is eerily similar to the use of allegations of rape and sexual assault against indigenous people. Such allegations were routinely made against Black men in the Deep South as a pretext for lynching. See e.g. the case of the Scottsboro Boys, 9 Black teenagers who were accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. They came within an inch of being executed.
Fear of the sexuality of Black or Palestinian men is an integral part of the politics of racially supremacist societies which believe that ‘their’ women should be protected and racial purity maintained. Zionism is no different in this respect to its counterparts in Southern Africa.
Kedar, a Colonel in the IDF, was invited to address a meeting of Sussex Friends of Israel in December 2014
As Ze’eva Levina Chasen wrote in an Open Letter to Burlington Vermont’s Jewish Community regarding the allegations of sexual assault and rape by Hamas fighters:
condemnation of Hamas over them does not support women and girls, Israeli or otherwise, but it does help support the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians including women and girls. Do you really trust a government that forces birth control on Ethiopian Jews, that heavily restricts women’s access to divorce, has anti-miscegenation laws on the books,… If you do, I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
Furthermore, one cannot truthfully claim to fight for the rights of women and girls if they don’t fight for the rights of women and girls everywhere. Anyone claiming to stand for Israeli women and girls must also denounce the violence committed by the Israeli occupation against Palestinians of every gender and age. Failure to do so is hypocritical to the extreme and should make anyone call into question the accuser’s motives. In addition to that, Eyal Karim, Chief Rabbi of the IDF, has (not only) said that men in combat were allowed to “satisfy the evil inclination by lying with attractive Gentile women against their will”,
Chasen was referring to the appointment of Eyal Karim as the IDF Chief Rabbi despite having said that Jewish law permits ‘raping ‘attractive Gentile women’ as a way to keep up morale’. Is it seriously suggested that a government which appointed a supporter of raping Palestinian girls and women and which has revelled in its homophobic and anti-feminist politics is now seriously concerned about rape on October 7?
The real sexual abuse is of Palestinian women and girl prisoners. 64% of Palestinian children arrested were found to be abused in 2017, an increase of 4% since a similar report by UNICEF four years previously. A UN Report in 2019 spoke of how Palestinian women prisoners ‘are subjected to a wide range of violence, most notably sexual harassment and rape’. The BBC spoke to six released prisoners 7 days ago, all of whom said they were beaten before leaving jail.
May Golan revealed her real motives when she accused Israeli feminists of being silent when Jewish women are raped and murdered. Rape per se does not concern her.
Plea from British Doctor About Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza
The real horrors, the murder of premature babies and children, have been committed by Israeli soldiers across Gaza. Israel’s invasion of Al Shifa hospital on the pretext it was a Hamas base, its murder of 500+ people at Al Ahli hospital and the murder of over 60 journalists.
The Worst Massacre of Jews Since the Holocaust?
According to the Times of Israel October 7 was ‘the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust’. Except it wasn’t. As a simple matter of statistics Israel’s War of Independence (the Nakba) resulted in over 6,000 deaths and 15,000 wounded. 2,656 died in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
But this is a false comparison. Jews died in the Holocaust because they were Jews. Israelis , including non-Jews, died on October 7 because they were occupiers and oppressors. To compare the two is to defile the memory of the Jews who died in the Holocaust. There is no similarity at all between the two and only cheap propagandists like Netanyahu make such a comparison.
A letter replying to the Board of Deputies in the Guardian before the letters column had beene Freedlandised
In fact the largest massacre of Jews since the holocaust occurred, not in Palestine but in Argentina. A neo-Nazi Junta took power on March 24 1976 with a version of the International Jewish Conspiracy Theory (the Andinia Plan) based around a troika of Jews – Marx, Einstein and Freud.
The Junta proceeded to round up and torture to death socialists and trade unionists. They particularly targeted left-wing Jews according to Juan Pablo Jaroslavsky of the Barcelona-based Commission of Solidarity with Relatives of the Disappeared.
“Jews represented more than 12 per cent of the victims of the military regime while constituting under 1 per cent of Argentina’s population,”
Some 30,000 people are believed to have died under torture or from being thrown from planes over the sea. 3,000 Jews, possibly more, died in what was called the ‘dirty war’ between 1976 and 1983.
One might have expected the ‘Jewish State’ to have strongly attacked the Argentine military’s anti-Semitism. However you would be wrong. Israel was part of the anti-communist Operation Condor in Latin America with Argentina, Chile and other death squad regimes. Israel had a very lucrative arms trade with the regime, especially when Congress put an end to selling arms to the Junta.
Israel is using White Phosphorous in Gaza
I have a chapter in my book on this sordid episode. Indeed the subtitle, ‘The Weaponisation of Memory in the Service of State & Nation’ could have been written with the current crisis in mind.
Ethnic Cleansing – The Real Purpose of the War
The pretext for Israel’s war on Gaza is to eradicate Hamas. This is a lie. Israel has been waging war against the people of Gaza, including its children. The one group that has not been affected is Hamas who are in the tunnels fighting.
It is becoming ever more clear that both the United States and Israel have agreed that the Palestinians of Gaza should be transferred to Egypt and other countries. Although the White House issued a denial:
“The vice president reiterated that under no circumstances will the United States permit the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank,”
the key word is ‘forced’. If Israel bombs every school, hospital and home in Gaza and Palestinians are forced to go to Rafah to escape and then seek to cross the border that will be voluntary. Such is the trickery of those war criminals Biden and Kamala Harris.
Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) urged Congress to reject a supplementary funding bill that proposes funding humanitarian aid to Palestinians who have been displaced from Gaza to neighboring countries. Israeli actions and statements for example the article in the Jerusalem Post of 19 November from Israel’s Intelligence Minister, Gila Gamliel, make it crystal clear that Israel’s intention is to enact a second Nakba. A leaked policy document from Israel’s Intelligence Ministry recommends the permanent forced transfer of Palestinians to the Sinai.
“The Biden administration isn’t just giving a green light for ethnic cleansing—it’s bankrolling it,” said Sarah Leah Whitson of DAWN.
“Gaslighting Americans into facilitating long-held Israeli plans to depopulate Gaza under the cover of ‘humanitarian aid’ is a cruel and grotesque hoax.”
It is precisely now that The Guardian/Observer, which initiated the false ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn decided to gaslight supporters of the Palestinians, including Jews, by running an article by Zionist propagandist Howard Jacobson ‘Charging Jews with genocide is to declare them guilty of precisely what was done to them.’
Editor-in-chief Kath Viner and the Zionist Gatekeeper, Jonathan Freedland, spent 5 years telling us that without the IHRA misdefinition of anti-Semitism it would be impossible to fight anti-Semitism.
The IHRA says that ‘Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’ is anti-Semitic, yet when it comes to protecting Israel’s right to commit genocide, Viner and Freedland, are happy to conflate Israel’s actions with Jews. Such is the hypocrisy of these police-state liberals.
Let this sink in. Alleging that Israel, not Jews, because Israel is a State not a Jew, is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, means accusing all Jews of perpetrating a Holocaust. It is difficult to imagine a more overt act of anti-Semitism by these righteous hypocrites.
The IHRA also outlaws ‘Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.’ However there was always a secret provision in the IHRA which said that if Zionists made these comparisons they were not anti-Semitic!
Jacobson, a lightweight intellectual and minor novelist makes a virtue of his stupidity, denying that Israel is committing genocide because it leafleted the population it bombed beforehand! Presumably it was a suicidal inclination on the part of the 6,000+ children Israel murdered that led them to stay put. Or perhaps the Israeli generals are as big a liars as Jacobson. Freedland is also a columnist on the Jewish Chronicle which has given full-throated support to Israel’s genocide.
Biden Staffers Are Turning Against His Israel Support. We Spoke to a Dissenter
The Genocide Convention 1948, drawn up in the wake of the Holocaust, was clear that an intention ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ by means such as killing members of the group or ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’ is genocide.
The deliberate bombing of Gaza’s hospitals, the murder of premature babies, leaving their decomposing bodies to be eaten by wild animals, may be acceptable in the polite salons that Jacobson and Freedland frequent but no civilized member of society should be seen shaking the bloodied hands of these creatures.
Tony Greenstein
Below is the Diary Entry of Hudia, a Refugee in Rafah on Her Daily Existence as a Consequence of Israel’s War Crimes – It Speaks Volumes to Howard Jacobson’s Use of the Holocaust to Excuse Israel’s Collective Punishment of Gaza’s Palestinians
DECEMBER 5, 2023
I don’t know if my message will reach you today. They cut off communications and Internet from Gaza. The situation here is now even more terrifying since they started operations in the south.
The bombing doesn’t stop for a second. The firing of missiles & rockets happens around the clock. The artillery shelling is endless, too. Its sound is horrific. Where we are in Rafah is close to the eastern border of Gaza. We do not sleep because of the intensity of the bombing. The bombing of homes over the heads of those who live in them has become Israel’s preferred method of killing. Fear for the lives of everyone has crept into me. It haunts all my waking moments.
They ask people to leave so they die on the way to displacement, and if they manage to arrive, they die in the areas they reach. Rafah has now become overwhelmed with displaced people from Khan Yunis as well as the north. There is no place for them in shelter centers. People sleep in the streets. Literally, there is nothing here except the pervasive smell of death. I do not know how we will end up.
No. I know.
We can’t find anything anymore. There is nothing left in the markets. I can no longer find my blood pressure medication in pharmacies. In fact, there is nothing in pharmacies, markets, or supermarkets. Life has become difficult beyond description. Here, my brother Hisham was able, after a great effort, to find a medication similar to what I take which, I hope, is better than nothing at all.
Honestly, though, cutting off communications and the Internet hurts me more than the war itself. I cannot check on my family or friends. I remain tense every time I hear the sound of bombing. I do not know if they are alive or dead. I feel like I will lose my balance and collapse at any moment. The situation is unbelievable.
No one would believe we are supposed to be living here. It is a slaughter house; a last stop on the train taking us to our deaths. Let them kill us all at once! This would be merciful now.
We are tired. We are tired of losing more and more people every day, hour, and minute. Walk around Rafah and you see huge bomb craters filled with human debris. Is this really my home? Endless destruction and seeing children in pieces. It is unspeakable.
There is nothing left in north Gaza: homes, people, or life.
Diseases have begun to spread among children, including gastroenteritis owing to air pollution, undrinkable water, and a collapsed sewage system because there is no fuel. You don’t want to imagine what this means in real terms here, and for two million people. The lines, the filth, the sadness, and yes – the smell.
The children have yellow faces – full of sickness and fear. They cry into their mothers’ laps during the bombings. They look thin and sickly from terror and trauma. By destroying the healthcare system Israel has destroyed any return to a semblance of real life.
A sad joke is going around. After the occupation’s aggression against Gaza, when a violent earthquake strikes a place, reporters will say: “It is as if an Israeli bombing struck the place.”
Director of UNRWA Operations in Gaza:
Even in Rafah, where people are forced to flee, the sounds of air strikes punctuate the day. People are crying for help to get a safe place. We have nothing to say to them.
War Criminals All
DECEMBER 6, 2023
Gaza City and northern Gaza are completely annihilated, with only rare media coverage. The central part of the Gaza Strip is now annihilated by hunger, & high prices; its supplies of vegetables and goods were cut off after the south was separated from the central governorate.
In addition, it is being bombarded relentlessly day and night. Khan Yunis – the southern section of Gaza – is also being destroyed by displacement and continuous bombing. Rafah is bombed around the clock (I’m counting 8-12 seconds between bombs) and has received newly displaced people from Khan Yunis, but where are they supposed to go?
People sleep in tents and in the streets or in the shadows of shuttered businesses. The sounds of artillery, air and sea bombardment, and tank shells echo across the Gaza Strip from Rafah to Beit Hanoun. It’s a constant rush in your ears. There is no escape.
This situation requires no political, military, or strategic analysts. No sermon about steadfastness from leaders and media are going to help us right now. Gaza is absolutely no longer fit for life and it makes sense because I don’t think we are alive. We are ghosts and we should go and haunt the world revealing what has happened to us.
Whole families have been tossed grieving along the streets. Shelter centers and schools are overflowing with broken, displaced people. Most stores have shut their doors because they’re empty of any supplies. What remains is small and non-essential. Prices are astronomical and crazy.
Lines from wherever there are any goods at all – long, long lines where you are stuck waiting for half the day.
Exhausted refugees are wearing filthy clothing (where can we wash dirty laundry?) Most of the women are in their prayer dresses. Wood burning stoves fill the main streets. Everything is cooked on wood fires now and they fill the air with smoke. The ground around them is blackened and peoples faces are blackened. This is a preview of the apocalypse: yes, right here in Gaza you can witness what the end of the world will look like.
As you walk, you pass faces of those who used to be proud and generous but are now humiliated and betrayed. They half-whisper, brokenly, in your ear: “I swear, I am not a beggar. But I was displaced from my home here and here. My family and children have nothing to eat. If you give me five shekels…”
This is only part of the picture, which is getting darker, more unbearable, and more painful every day with the siege and death. I do not know if death is worse than what people are experiencing now. What new, unthinkable circumstance will be thrown our way tomorrow? It’s too horrible to contemplate. I want to run away…
