Israel proclaims itself chief mourner, as Gaza lies in ruins

On the Jewish Day of Atonement (12 October) the killing in Gaza and Lebanon continued unabated.

This is the holiest day of the year in the Jewish calendar. A day when Jews are required to fast from sunrise to sunset. Refraining even from water, Jewish people must pray for forgiveness and personally ask for forgiveness from all they have harmed in any way. Is Israel asking for forgiveness of the thousands they have massacred in Gaza and Lebanon?

Or has October 7 become the new "holy" day — one that absolves Israel in advance of genocide?

In Australia, in a stunning testimony to hypocrisy, October 7 became a day of officially declared mourning. Politicians and some self-proclaimed Jewish spokespeople claimed the day as theirs alone. Whatever happened before, or since that day, was not to be acknowledged in the collective conscience. Except for the Nazi Holocaust, which was deemed to bestow upon the Israeli propaganda machine, the right to claim supreme victimhood.

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PM Albanese attended the October 7 vigil in Melbourne, acknowledging the suffering of Jews on that day and used the term, "Never Again". This is a famous post-Holocaust cry.

Peter Dutton went even further, declaring October7 to have resulted in the "greatest loss of Jewish life on a single day since the holocaust".

The Age proclaimed October 7, ‘A modern Holocaust'.

The regular marches in support of Palestine scheduled for the weekend of October 6 in Sydney and Melbourne were declared a threat to social cohesion.

The police and PM Albanese gave solemn speeches warning against pro-Palestinian marches. No warnings were given regarding pro-Zionist/Israeli demonstrations.

Bans on these marches were sought (unsuccessfully).

Growing up in what a Jewish psychiatrist termed a "Holocausted community", my strongest experience of exclusion came from vehement adherents to the view that Israel was on the side of the good. Alongside this was the deeply entrenched view that Arabs were bad and inferior. Therefore, in advocating for Palestinians or criticising Israel (in adulthood), I and many Jews who criticise Israel are seen as traitors, self-hating Jews or promoters of antisemitism.

The extremist far-Right Israeli Government refers to Palestinians as "animals" and has openly called for the razing of Gaza. This rhetoric became part of the evidence in the International Court of Justice's case of plausible genocide being committed by Israel.

But Israeli self-justification sinks to its lowest bar when it claims the holocaust as its forever justification for committing atrocities. Any resistance is decried as anti-Jewish. Israel – purporting to represent all Jewish people, past present and future – has permanent immunity because of its claimed ownership of the Jewish history of persecution.

I am not alone in my view that Zionism besmirches the memory of past Jewish suffering. Holocaust survivors have denounced Israeli violence as a travesty and horrifically disrespectful towards Jews who suffered the Holocaust.

Israel’s claim to the holocaust as a right to annihilate all feared enemies is not merely political insanity, it is a pathological response to generational trauma by reenacting that trauma upon others. Israel and its supporters have become the new Nazis.

"Never Again" has morphed into, no one will do it (to us) again.

Naomi Klein writes in The Guardian that Israel has made 'trauma a weapon of war':

What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialisation and weaponisation? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?

And what does it mean to do so while Israel actively produces more grief on an unfathomable scale, detonating entire apartment blocks in Beirut, inventing new methods of remote-controlled maiming, and sending more than a million Lebanese people fleeing for their lives, even as its bombing of Gaza continues unabated?

In a proposal that officially acknowledges October 7, Prime Minister Albanese also put forward that Parliament officially acknowledges that as well as 1,200 Israeli deaths, 40,000 Palestinians have been killed and that:

'every innocent life matters – every Israeli, every Palestinian, every Lebanese – every single innocent life.'

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton objected, declaring that the day belongs to Israel. It was one small step for Albanese but a giant and unacceptable leap for Dutton.

Even as Palestinians outside Parliament pleaded for their voices to be heard.

Even as Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanese men, women and children were being brutally slaughtered.

The killing continued throughout the highest holy day of Judaism – Yom Kippur – The Day of Atonement. When Jews ask for a clean slate for the coming year and pray for life through the coming year.

In my unknowing youth, I didn’t enjoy fasting, but it was a day to get dressed up, as we called it, and hang out with my peers outside the synagogue. The breaking of our fast with lemonade and cake felt pretty good.

But I knew it was a very solemn day, as even those who seldom attended the synagogue turned up on Yom Kippur. Congregants paid for a seat for the entire year to ensure a place in the packed-out synagogue on The Day of Atonement. It is a day of judgement.

Israel may have decided that after being attacked in 1973 by Syria and Egypt on Yom Kippur, no holds would be barred. Zionists expressed outrage about this violation of a Jewish holiday at that time but seemed to be okay about continuing to bomb civilians on The Day of Atonement in 2024. All under the guise of self-defence.

Palestinians in a constant state of mourning as second Nakba unfolds

The trauma of our Palestinian parents is now ours — we are living in a constant state of mourning.

The Palestinians are under a brutal occupation. Israel does not have the right to attack people who are under its occupation. This is not a war any more than Nazi soldiers attacking the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto was a war. It was brutal extermination. This is what is now happening in Gaza and beyond.

The ghetto is being liquidated.

As a late client and Holocaust survivor told me, sadly, Israeli atrocities are like those that she had experienced in the Warsaw Ghetto.