When I lived in Key West, my friend and, lawyer and city commissioner Sam Kaufman told me that it didn’t bother him that I talk about my dreams, because Jewish people believe dreams come from God.
In a dream around dawn yesterday, I saw Sam, and then a voice said maybe Sam didn’t understand my MRSA post. On waking, I could not imagine how anyone could read my recent post about Key West and Florida Keys waters being full of MRSA flesh-eating bacteria, and be confused.
After breakfast, I opened my laptop and saw in my email account a new Israel-Hamas-Gaza newsletter from former international war correspondent Chris Hedges, who has rigorously blamed Israel, President Biden and America for everything going on in Gaza, while giving Hamas and Israel a free pass
Chris has a lot of paid subscribers to his newsletter, including me. As I read his latest, I felt it I had found the MRSA in my dream, and I responded differently than I had in the past.
Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust
Chris Hedges
Text Originally Published Dec 29, 2023
Never Again and Again and Again - by Mr. Fish
Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary. The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland.
There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation - for those who want to live - will be the only option.
Danny Danon, Israel's former Ambassador to the U.N. and a close ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told Israel’s Kan Bet radio that he has been contacted by “countries in Latin America and Africa that are willing to absorb refugees from the Gaza Strip.” “We have to make it easier for Gazans to leave for other countries,” he said. “I'm talking about voluntary migration by Palestinians who want to leave.”
The problem for now “is countries that are willing to absorb them, and we're working on this,” Netanyahu told Likud Knesset members.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, the Germans handed out three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to anyone who “voluntarily” registered for deportation. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several hours to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman, one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.”
The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. Israeli leaders are also cynically advertising the proposed ethnic cleansing as voluntary and a humanitarian gesture to solve the catastrophe they created.
This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it.
The most disturbing lesson I learned while covering armed conflicts for two decades is that we all have the capacity, with little prodding, to become willing executioners. The line between the victim and the victimizer is razor thin. The dark lusts of racial and ethnic supremacy, of vengeance and hate, of the eradication of those we condemn as embodying evil, are poisons that are not circumscribed by race, nationality, ethnicity or religion. We can all become Nazis. It takes very little. And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil — our evil — we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters.
The cries of those expiring under the rubble in Gaza are the cries of the boys and men executed by the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, the over 1.5 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, the thousands of Tutsi families burned alive in churches and the tens of thousands of Jews executed by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The Holocaust is not an historical relic. It lives, lurking in the shadows, waiting to ignite its vicious contagion.
We were warned. Raul Hilberg. Primo Levi. Bruno Bettelheim. Hannah Arendt. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They understood the dark recesses of the human spirit. But this truth is bitter and hard to confront. We prefer the myth. We prefer to see in our own kind, our own race, our own ethnicity, our own nation, our own religion, superior virtues. We prefer to sanctify our hatred. Some of those who bore witness to this awful truth, including Levi, Bettelheim, Jean Améry, the author of “At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” and Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” committed suicide. The German playwright and revolutionary Ernst Toller, unable to rouse an indifferent world to assist victims and refugees from the Spanish Civil War, hanged himself in 1939 in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York City. On his hotel desk were photos of dead Spanish children.
“Most people have no imagination,” Toller writes. “If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother? Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.”
Primo Levi railed against the false, morally uplifting narrative of the Holocaust that culminates in the creation of the state of Israel — a narrative embraced by the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. The contemporary history of the Third Reich, he writes, could be “reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.” He wonders if “we who have returned” have “been able to understand and make others understand our experience.”
Levi saw us reflected in Chaim Rumkowski, the Nazi collaborator and tyrannical leader of the Łódź Ghetto. Rumkowski sold out his fellow Jews for privilege and power, although he was sent to Auschwitz on the final transport where Jewish Sonderkommando — prisoners forced to help herd victims into the gas chambers and dispose of their bodies — in an act of vengeance reportedly beat him to death outside a crematorium.
“We are all mirrored in Rumkowski,” Levi reminds us. “His ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit. His fever is ours, the fever of Western civilization, that ‘descends into hell with trumpets and drums,’ and its miserable adornments are the distorting image of our symbols of social prestige.” We, like Rumkowski, “are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”
Levi insists that the camps “could not be reduced to the two blocks of victims and persecutors.” He argues, “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims; on the contrary; it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.” He chronicles what he called the “gray zone” between corruption and collaboration. The world, he writes, is not black and white, “but a vast zone of gray consciences that stands between the great men of evil and the pure victims.” We all inhabit this gray zone. We all can be induced to become part of the apparatus of death for trivial reasons and paltry rewards. This is the terrifying truth of the Holocaust.
It is hard not to be cynical about the plethora of university courses about the Holocaust given the censorship and banning of groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voices for Peace, imposed by university administrations. What is the point of studying the Holocaust if not to understand its fundamental lesson — when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable? It is hard not to be cynical about the “humanitarian interventionists” — Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Samantha Power — who talk in sanctimonious rhymes about the “Responsibility to Protect” but are silent about war crimes when speaking out would threaten their status and careers. None of the “humanitarian interventions” they championed, from Bosnia to Libya, come close to replicating the suffering and slaughter in Gaza. But there is a cost to defending Palestinians, a cost they do not intend to pay. There is nothing moral about denouncing slavery, the Holocaust or dictatorial regimes that oppose the United States. All it means is you champion the dominant narrative.
The moral universe has been turned upside down. Those who oppose genocide are accused of advocating it. Those who carry out genocide are said to have the right to “defend” themselves. Vetoing ceasefires and providing 2,000-pound bombs to Israel that throw out metal fragments for thousands of feet is the road to peace. Refusing to negotiate with Hamas will free the hostages. Bombing hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances and refugee camps, along with killing three former Israeli hostages, stripped to the waist, waving an improvised white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew, are routine acts of war. Killing over 21,300 people, including more than 7,700 children, injuring over 55,000 and rendering nearly all of the 2.3 million people in Gaza homeless, is a way to “deradicalize” Palestinians. None of this makes sense, as protesters around the world realize.
A new world is being born. It is a world where the old rules, more often honored in the breach than the observance, no longer matter. It is a world where vast bureaucratic structures and technologically advanced systems carry out in public view vast killing projects. The industrialized nations, weakened, fearful of global chaos, are sending an ominous message to the Global South and anyone who might think of revolt — we will kill you without restraint.
One day, we will all be Palestinians.
“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms,” Christopher R. Browning writes in Ordinary Men, about a German reserve police battalion in World War Two that was ultimately responsible for the murder of 83,000 Jews. “In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce ‘ordinary men’ to become their ‘willing executioners.’”
Evil is protean. It mutates. It finds new forms and new expressions. Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews, as well as over six million Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, artists, journalists, Soviet prisoners of war, people with physical and intellectual disabilities and political opponents. It immediately set out after the war to expiate itself for its crimes. It deftly transferred its racism and demonization to Muslims, with racial supremacy remaining firmly rooted in the German psyche. At the same time, Germany and the U.S. rehabilitated thousands of former Nazis, especially from the intelligence services and the scientific community, and did little to prosecute those who directed Nazi war crimes. Germany today is Israel’s second largest arms supplier following the U.S.
The supposed campaign against anti-Semitism, interpreted as any statement that is critical of the State of Israel or denounces the genocide, is in fact the championing of White Power. It is why the German state, which has effectively criminalized support for the Palestinians, and the most retrograde white supremists in the United States, justify the carnage. Germany’s long relationship with Israel, including paying over $90 billion since 1945 in reparations to Holocaust survivors and their heirs, is not aboutatonement, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes, but blackmail.
“The argument for a Jewish state as compensation for the Holocaust was a powerful argument, so powerful that nobody listened to the outright rejection of the U.N. solution by the overwhelming majority of the people of Palestine,” Pappé writes. “What comes out clearly is a European wish to atone. The basic and natural rights of the Palestinians should be sidelined, dwarfed and forgotten altogether for the sake of the forgiveness that Europe was seeking from the newly formed Jewish state. It was much easier to rectify the Nazi evil vis-à -vis a Zionist movement than facing the Jews of the world in general. It was less complex and, more importantly, it did not involve facing the victims of the Holocaust themselves, but rather a state that claimed to represent them. The price for this more convenient atonement was robbing the Palestinians of every basic and natural right they had and allowing the Zionist movement to ethnically cleanse them without fear of any rebuke or condemnation.”
The Holocaust was weaponized from almost the moment Israel was founded. It was bastardized to serve the apartheid state. If we forget the lessons of the Holocaust, we forget who we are and what we are capable of becoming. We seek our moral worth in the past, rather than the present. We condemn others, including the Palestinians, to an endless cycle of slaughter. We become the evil we abhor. We consecrate the horror.
the suck of sorrow
Although I read this article yesterday, it is still as horrifying upon reading today.
Whatever feelings one has for Germans alive during the Third Reich, similar thoughts will exist for Israelis and the populations of Western States today in another 70 years.
Sloan BashinskyWrites Sloan’s Newsletter
Chris, two of my Polish Jew ancestors migrated to America in the late 1800s, and the rest remained in Poland and they and their descendants were killed by the Nazis. My Polish great grandfather married a Southern Baptist lady, and although he did not convert, they raised their children in the Baptist church, and that was how their descendants went about it. So, I do not consider myself Jewish, and I do not carry the Holocaust terror in my psyche, which every Jew I have known did. The Nazis weaponized the Holocaust, and some people today weaponize the inane view that the Holocaust never happened.
What Israel is doing in Gaza is reprehensible, but it is not what Hitler and his mesmerized Nazis, condoned by the mesmerized German citizens, in the main, did to the European Jews. Hamas buried itself into Gaza, and it hides behind and underneath the people of Gaza, who cope with or condone Hamas. The only way Israel can fight Hamas is the way it is doing it now. I hate it, but I’m looking at it from a purely military standpoint. In doing that, I also say there is no way Israel can beat Hamas in Gaza, because Hamas is so dug in there, and so well prepared, and Israel is not prepared to lose a lot of its soldiers there, and if IDF goes into the Gaza neighborhoods, fighting hand to had from building to building, and in the tunnels, IDF will lose a lot of soldiers
I think President Biden should be hanged for not cutting off money and weapons and munitions to Israel, after he saw what was happening in Gaza. But who’s going to hang President Biden for that, when half of America is fully behind Israel, and about the same number of Americans will try to overthrow the American government, if it hangs Donald Trump?
There also is the problem that America stockpiled a huge quantify of weapons and munitions in Israel, for America’s military to use in war zones in the Middle East, and Israel has access to those weapons and munition stockpiles and is drawing on them and there is nothing America can do to stop it. There is the other problem that Israel has nuclear weapons, which everyone who isn’t totally unwoke knows Israel will use against Islamic countries and organizations, which Israel feels threatens its very existence.
It’s a really fucked up mess, and, there is another piece to it, which I have yet to see you address in your ongoing assault of Israel. Which is, Hamas’s original charter identifies it as an Islamic entity, and that its reason for being was to destroy Israel. Hamas’s amended charter, using less direct words, calls for the same thing, all in the name of the peaceful religion of Islam, which isn’t even peaceful within itself.
Only the unwoke cannot, or will not see, that Hamas figured out how to punch all of the buttons in Israel’s religious fanatic leaders, and that was the October 7 attack. The reaction of Israel’s political leaders and IDF was precisely what Hamas hoped would happen. Unable to beat Israel militarily, Hamas hoped to bait Israel into destroying its reputation worldwide, and in that Hamas has succeeded, except in the American right, whose leader, Donald Trump, has told Israel that he is their best friend.
Palestine is Christendom’s so-called Holy Land, and the American right will not stand for America abandoning Israel, and every American president candidate knows that all too well. This war dates all the way back to Abraham, and that’s why there is no military solution, and probably no solution, and why America should abandon Israel, but Ameria won’t do that. It’s a shame America did not offer the WWII European Jewish refugees sanctuary in America.
The only solution I see now is for America to offer Israel sanctuary in America. But I can’t imagine Israel going along with it, nor can imagine America offering it, because there would be a huge political backlash. And, the American Christian right wants Israel to stay where it is, doing what it is doing, protecting the so-called holy land from Islam, because that’s where Jesus was born, and that is where Jewish leaders had Jesus crucified. And because, a lot of the American right are as biased against Jews as against blacks and other people of color. They want an Ayyan nation, and if you don’t believe it, look at photos and film footage of MAGA rallies and the January 6 insurrection and the Charlottesville rally, and you will see oceans of white people .
Therefore, Chris, I hope you will devote some of your time and experience to writing about that, and the very real possibility of a second civil war in America, whose military is full of MAGAS and Aryans, etc., who won’t for a heartbeat fight against Donald Trump, who wants to be just as powerful in America as Adolph Hitler was in Germany, and Vladimir Putin is in Russia. The Nazis weaponized the Holocaust, and some people today weaponize the inane view that the Holocaust never happened. I wonder if your newsletter subscription revenues increased while you bashed Israel, President Biden and America, and gave Hamas and Islam a free pass?
Judith DyerWrites Judith’s Substack
No solution to this...the human race is a badly programmed animal. Too bad evolution didn't stop with the monkeys; then there would not be the ruination of the earth. Soon China will bring Taiwan back into the fold like they did HongKong. And, N. Korea will bomb S. Korea. Thugs taking over African countries and forget Honduras...already a hellhole. I am fortunate to be 84 and leaving this mess which I forecast many decades ago. There is no way 10 billion people can live peacefully on this poor planet.
Sloan Bashinsky
I agree, I’m 81. Except, Darwin got it backward, humans devolved from monkeys, and invented FUBAR- apologies to monkeys.
Judith DyerWrites Judith’s Substack
first time I ever came across the word devolved. and I am pretty educated. where is it mostly used? In science?
Sloan Bashinsky
Darwin postulated humans evolved from apes, evolution is a scientific term, it is also a spiritual term. Its reverse is devolutionary, or devolve.
Actually, humans didn’t descend or ascend from monkeys, they were planted here, but religions really got that story twisted, too :-).
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
