WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO EVOKE HOLOCAUST IN THE CONFLICT IN PALESTINE?

WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO EVOKE HOLOCAUST IN THE CONFLICT IN PALESTINE?

John Lewis Gaddis has noted that much of historical thinking happens through metaphors - that something is like something else. It doesn't mean that the first 'something' is exactly the same as the second 'something', just that there is a resemblance that leads to recognition and reflection.

When it comes to Israeli occupation of Palestine, both the supporters and opponents of the Israeli occupation evoke Holocaust in this manner. But if both sides could use the Holocaust as a valid comparison, it would delude its effectiveness.

So in this particular case the use of past historical event in the context current political question not only justification of why one side can use it, but also denial of the other side's right to use it also.

We can think of the pro- Israeli occupation Labour MP Wes Streeting both denying the Holocaust as a valid comparison to Israel's treatment of Palestinians, while evoking the Holocaust to attack criticism of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

According to this type of thinking, it's abhorrent to compare Israeli occupation to the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators, but it's justified to evoke the Holocaust to show a supposed fate of the Jews in Israel if the Israeli occupation is not supported and its criticism forbidden.

Part of this tactic is to deny that any solution between extremes can exist: Either Israeli occupation over Palestinians will exist forever into the future, or the Jews in Israel 'will face a second Holocaust' as representatives of the Israeli Lobby so often claim. Only the Israeli occupation stands between the past repeating - effectively the occupied Palestinians armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails are exactly the same as Nazi Germany armed with the first jet-fighters like ME-262 and the V-2 ballistic missile.

The basic premise is that Palestinians are all purposes the same as Nazis and to oppress Nazis is to oppose the Holocaust that took place during the Second World War. At the same time the right to compare Israel's actions to those of Nazi Germany are declared to be forbidden for being too far-fetched and too insulting to contemplate; to compare the besieged Gaza Strip to a concentration camp or the archipelago of Palestinian communities in the sea of Israeli occupation on the West Bank to ghettos is declared in itself to be Anti-Semitic in nature.

This, of course, is all about the control of the narrative. Is it a story of 'self-defense' by survivors of a genocide (as the pro-Israeli occupation commentators make it) or the story of a 'resistance against colonization' by a native population against European-led colonialists whose ideology is related to the other extreme forms of nationalism that blighted Europe in the 20th century?

Basically the first would put the conflict in Palestine in European and Jewish history, the second in the global history of European colonialism and the resistance and liberation from it. In the latter version, Zionism as a state ideology resembles that of Nazi Germany in its obsession of ethnic-religious unity of one group of people and the necessity of their victory over 'an inferior' group of people whose very existence is a hostile threat to the dominant group's own existence.

At the heart of the question whether the Holocaust can be evoked in the context of the conflict in Palestine and who can evoke it is this battle of the narratives and the debates over it must be seen as part of the larger argument about the conflict itself; what is basically lacking, interestingly, is any kind of centre that would deny both sides the the right to make comparisons to the Holocaust.

In essence, the right to use the Holocaust in the context of the conflict in Palestine is not denied, what separates people is the question who has the right to use the Holocaust comparison. This shows important the past is understood to be in attempts to make the present understandable to contemporaries and to sway their thinking.

SOURCE:

Gaddis, John Lewis: The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past(2002).