As death toll rises, Palestinian holocaust being denied by West

Western enablers of the Palestinian onslaught continue to deny comparisons to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people, writes Lyn Bender.

IN RESPONSE to Nazi Holocaust denial my mother’s tired response was, “I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish it was untrue. But where are all the people?”

The Palestinians today know the answer to this question. Their people are in mass graves, crushed under the rubble, bulldozed while asleep in tents, perpetually evacuating to nowhere, or just struggling to survive amidst the ruins, without enough food, water and health services. No one gets to leave.

Gaza is the ghetto that before our eyes, on TikTok and YouTube reels, is being liquidated. Gazan journalists, hooking their phones to limited power sources, film their appeals to vast internet audiences.

The West, particularly the U.S., has supported Israel for decades.

Zionist entitlement is seen as absolute. It's “Israel right or wrong” from successive Australian governments. The land of Israel was given to the Jewish people by God (and the British).

Israel war a display of hypocrisy and de facto terrorism

As Israel continues to slaughter thousands of Palestinians, backed by the USA, echoes of past conflicts and the hypocrisy around them are being felt.

Anyone who fits the Zionist Jewish identity criterion has the right of return to a land to which they have no demonstrable links.

Israel denies Palestinians a right of return.

There has been continuous murderous violence against Palestinians by illegal settlers on the West Bank. A regular practice referred to as “mowing the grass” is the Israeli Government's term for regular assaults on Gaza.

Any criticism of Israel is decried as anti-Semitic and denounced.

If you are Jewish and call for an end to the occupation, or in any way critique Israel, you are called a self-hating Jew or betrayer of Jews.

All those who identify as Jews in the diaspora are included as being spoken for by this self-proclaimed Jewish State.

Human shields are everywhere that Israel bombs. Palestinians are referred to as human, only when being dismissed as Hamas’ human shields.

If even a whisper of Hamas’ presence is asserted and not even substantiated factually, then hospitals, schools, ambulances and residential apartments can and have been bombed or attacked.

Those fleeing the bombs are bombed.

Those forced to evacuate are bombed.

Medical teams and journalists have been targeted and killed.

The view from Washington: Let the killing in Gaza continue

In aiding the Israeli campaign against Gaza, the United States is perpetuating crimes against humanity.

Israel drops leaflets and “warns” inhabitants, so bombing these people is claimed not to be a war crime.

Like some species of a cruel abusive patriarch, Israel declares: “I warned you. I told you to leave. It’s your own fault if you have been bombed.”

However, any allusions to the treatment of the Palestinians like the treatment of Jews by the Nazis is decried as an outrageous travesty. The message of “never again” is interpreted as “never again, for the Jews only”.

Russian-American journalist and writer Masha Gessen had the ceremony in Germany for her Hannah Arendt prize scaled down due to criticism about her reference to Gaza being like the Warsaw Ghetto.

There is a profound paradox as Arendt, who authored The Origins of Totalitarianism, was committed to in-depth analysis of power and evil. Reporting on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Arendt headed her report, ‘The Banality of Evil’. Ordinary people can commit atrocities.

Gessen wrote:

‘Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoised Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.’

Germany has transformed its Holocaust guilt into a vehement denunciation of any criticism of Israel.

On visiting Israel soon after 7 October, German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz declared:

“The responsibility we bear as a result of the Holocaust makes it our duty to stand up for the existence and security of the state of Israel.”

The requirement to view the Holocaust as incomparable to other genocides and to never criticise Israel is vehemently promoted by Israel and the Israel lobby in Australia. Melbourne spawned the clownish Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev.

In answer to the question about the killing of thousands of children in Gaza, Regev said:

“We don’t know how those children died.”

The blatant lies are breathtakingly banal.

I believe that I can speak with some credibility on this imposition of thoughts; otherwise known as indoctrination or, more colloquially, as brainwashing. I ingested this way of thinking, throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood.

My late father’s declaration with horror-stricken face is seared in my memory: “Maybe I shouldn’t collect for Israel if they kill babies.” He had collected money for Israel for years.

The certainties of my early life were the horrors of the Holocaust, that my family had suffered and the safety for the persecuted Jewish people provided by the holy land of Israel.

Young people in the West stand in solidarity for a Gaza ceasefire

The death toll in Gaza has now reached around 12,000.

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy cites three deeply held beliefs that enable Israelis and many in the Jewish diaspora to live with the brutal reality of the occupation:

that Jews are the chosen people and after the Holocaust, Jews can do whatever they want;
Jews are the victims and the only victims; and
all Palestinians are inferior, even less than human (animals).

In 1948, the phrase, ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’, ominously depicted how Israel swept the Palestinians from their homes as though their presence for centuries was inconsequential. It does have a neat colonial ring to it; rather like Terra Nullius. This was, however, The Catastrophe, or Nakba, for Palestinians who were forcibly displaced, massacred and robbed of their homes villages and fields

Today the Holocaust being perpetrated on the Palestinians is disregarded willfully by the perpetrators and enablers. The USA is the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel.

Israel is a nation forged in lies and steeped in lies and its denial of ethnic cleansing.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappé writes in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint.

But the most bizarrely paradoxical of all cries against genocide is encapsulated by Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem.

It stands for Never Forget and Never Again, even as ethnic cleansing and genocide are being perpetrated under its watch, by its own government.

The Palestinian death toll is estimated at over 22,000.