Israel's treatment of the people of Gaza mirrors efforts by Nazi Germany to eradicate the Jewish population during the Holocaust, writes Bilal Cleland.
EACH YEAR, Holocaust Memorial Day is observed on 27 January.
It is the date of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp.
Soviet troops on entering the camp, found warehouses filled with glasses, prosthetic limbs, shoes, suitcases, as well as human hair shorn from the murdered.
Nine thousand emaciated prisoners were still there, too weak to be taken on the SS Death March. Through the Polish Red Cross, 7,500 survived.
During the height of deportations to the camp in 1943-44, an average of 6,000 Jews were gassed there each day.
Over 2,772,000 Jews (or 46 per cent of Jewish victims) were murdered at five main killing centres in assembly-line-style killings.
According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia:
‘Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites (including ghettos). The perpetrators used these sites for a range of purposes, including forced labour, detention of people thought to be enemies of the state and for mass murder.’
Centuries of European anti-Semitism
This Nazi mass extermination campaign is rooted in European history, back to the Roman Empire and the destruction of Jerusalem.
Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain in 1492.
Czarist Russia was a cesspool of anti-Semitism and when many Jews supported the revolution which gave them equal rights, the Czarist White Army promoted the Judeo-Bolshevism conspiracy theory, thus linking political and religious bigotry.
This was easily transferred to German racists who feared the rise of the Left.
Hitler, in his speech in Munich on 12 April 1922, stated:
“In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison.”
This racism and religious bigotry proved fertile soil for the Nazi campaign of extermination, defined at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942.
Principal architect of the Holocaust Reinhard Heydrich announced that Reich Marshal Hermann Goering had requested a plan for the "Final Solution" of the European Jewish question.
The most important elements were:
- forcing the Jews out of the various areas of life (Lebensgebiete) of the German people; and
- forcing the Jews out of the living space (Lebensraum) of the German people.
In pursuit of these aims, the accelerated emigration of the Jews from the area of the Reich was encouraged until 1941, when it was replaced by evacuation of the Jews to the East.
Heydrich presented figures showing 11 million Jews in Europe were to be targeted.
The Final Solution involved forced labour in camps to the east, where natural attrition could be expected to reduce numbers.
For those who survived this, Heydrich said “suitable treatment” would have to be administered. They could not be permitted to form “germ cells” of an anti-Nazi opposition.
“Suitable treatment” remained vague in the Protocol. We know what happened. Millions of Jews, Slavs and Roma were murdered.
As a result of the Nuremberg Trials, the crime of genocide was defined and legislated across the world.
Israel established the death penalty for this crime, which included support for genocide.
This was specified as:
(1) conspiracy to commit genocide;
(2) incitement to commit genocide;
(3) attempt to commit genocide; and
(4) complicity in genocide.
Jerusalem Conference 28 January 2024
Unlike the Wannsee Conference, the Victory of Israel Conference: Settlement Brings Security – held as the death toll of Gazan civilians shocked the world – did not represent the state but included at least 27 members of the government along with 12 ministers in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet and 15 other lawmakers.
Despite the provisional ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Israel must ‘take all measures within its power’ to avoid acts of genocide in its war in Gaza, including the ‘prevention and punishment of genocidal rhetoric’, both National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the removal of Palestinians.
They both called for the re-establishment of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the north of the West Bank, known to some Israelis as Samaria.
“We must encourage voluntary migration. Let them leave.“
One speaker was Rabbi Uzi Sharbag, a former leader of the banned far-Right terrorist group, Jewish Underground.
This meeting showed “the nature of this Israeli Government,” according to Mustafa Barghouti, the general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative party.
Dehumanisation a major problem
The Judeo-Bolshevik threat – blaming Jews for defeat in the war and unemployment, comparing the Jewish population to a disease, and portraying them in films as rats – led to the acceptance by many Germans and others of the “Special Treatment” given to Jews.
The same dehumanising tactic was used by Serbian Chetniks to prepare the ground for the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s.
There are very dangerous echoes of this in the rhetoric around the assault on Gaza from leading political figures in Israel, quoted by South Africa in its charges before the International Court of Justice.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog blamed the whole population of Gaza for the presence of Hamas.
Herzog said:
“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime.”
Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip with “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”.
In the background is the 2003 study of Israeli textbooks by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem:
‘They describe Arabs as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop.’
Another concerning feature of recent Israeli history is the law of 2011, which allows towns to exclude certain types of people they don't like.
The Knesset, on 23 March 2011, passed a law authorising “admissions committees” in about 300 Jewish-majority communities to reject applicants for residency who do not meet vague “social suitability” criteria.
According to Human Rights Watch:
‘The measure anchors in law a practice that has been the basis for unjustly rejecting applications by Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel as well as members of socially marginalised groups such as Jews of non-European ancestry and single-parent families.’
Combined with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza being contemplated, plus the Israeli Defence Forces protection being given to violent Israeli colonists on the West Bank, we see the Lebensraum and Lebensgebiete getting too close for comfort.
Proclaiming conspiracy theories about a people, dehumanising them through their portrayal as “lesser beings than us”, and associating them with backwardness and deviance allows them to be given “Special Treatment” by the dominant culture or political group.
Around 26,000 civilians, mostly women and children, have died so far in Gaza under Israeli bombardment, giving cause for reflection about the real nature of Israel.
Bilal Cleland is a retired secondary teacher and was Secretary of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Chairman of the Muslim Welfare Board Victoria and Secretary of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils. You can follow Bilal on Twitter @BilalCleland.
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