We have not learnt the lessons of the Holocaust

 

Horrified as we might be by the killings in Gaza, it is not the eradication of an entire people and its culture.

After decades of querying the numbers of dead Jews and the manner in which they went to their deaths, Holocaust sceptics of all stripes have made common cause. Not in doubting the genocide but in denying Jews the moral right to it. Call it Holocaust Begrudgement. All right, it happened, the begrudgers now concede, but it was wasted on those it happened to.

Instead of learning compassion from what they endured, the Jews flaunt it as a badge of privilege, demanding limitless sympathy and exemption from all criticism on its account. The only lesson Jews can be said to have learnt from the Holocaust, the begrudgers argue, is how to start Holocausts of their own. Those who once suffered at the hands of Nazis have become Nazis themselves.

Though there are no rules as to Holocaust etiquette, it is becoming common to accuse the Jews of breaking most of them. It is true that the concentration camps continue to exercise a fictionalised fascination in popular culture. Striped pyjama novels sell millions of copies and cause a million tears to flow. But sentimentality is not the same as comprehension.

“Never Again” does not work as a warning if there is no understanding of what happened in the first place. As Tanya Gold persuasively argues in a recent study of Shoah schlock in the Jewish Quarterly, the overwhelming effect of this literature is the erasure of real Jews from their own history.

Ask why hatred of Jews persists, no matter how many skies have fallen in on them, and you will find the answer in the question. It is because so many skies have fallen on them. Away from the paperbacks, human nature can only take so many calls on its commiseration. Some years ago, I borrowed the title from the English philosopher John Gray. “It has long been known,” he wrote in his book Straw Dogs, “that those who perform great acts of kindness are rarely forgiven. The same is true of those who suffer irreparable wrongs. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust?”

That is a question for clairvoyants. The question for psychologists is why refusal to forgive the Jews the evils perpetrated upon them nearly a hundred years ago persists in the form it does. Why, instead of just looking away, or simply declaring the Jews a tedious anachronism, do those who have run out of patience with Jewish victimhood go on repeating the vilifications of the past?

Is there a satisfaction that dares not speak its name in concurring with the early Church Fathers, Martin Luther, the Spanish Inquisition, the pogromists of the Russian Empire and even the Third Reich? In a drowning world, is the nefariousness of the Jews a piece of floating wreckage we need to hold on to?

Let us be clear. The antisemitism of today is more than hate that does not know what else to do with itself. This is purposive, orchestrated hate, combining Islamic hostility to the very idea of a Jewish state on Arab land, Christian anti Judaism that goes back two thousand years and which Hamas has been adroit at mobilising to its cause, Leftist mistrust of bankers and financiers with bulbous features, and professorial obsession with settler colonialism, a made up academic discipline that denominates Zionism as an ideology of conquest, no matter that the first Zionists were returning to their historic homeland as refugees from the pogroms of Eastern Europe. Being kicked from pillar to post for hundreds of years is now to be understood as marauding. Behold an intifada well and truly globalised.

As for the argument that you can hate Zionism and not hate Jews, it being a mere coincidence that the same language is employed for both, that was blown apart in the first weeks of October 2023 when all such distinctions were dropped in the carnival excitement of the butchering and raping of Jews wherever they came from and whatever they believed. “Kill the Jews!” The cry went out across the world. Not just Zionists and Israelis, but all Jews. Here was the diabolic genius of the Hamas massacre. It de parochialised the Palestinian struggle, capitalising on that pity deficiency John Gray described, freeing the world’s conscience from a guilt it had never been truly comfortable feeling. In the outpouring of jubilation that greeted the rapes and killings in such centres of feminism and anti racism as Harvard and Oxford could be heard loud sighs of relief. The spell of Holocaust immunity had been broken.

We have come a long way from those first callow deniers who turned up on the roof of Auschwitz like schoolboys on the first day of term with a new supply of rulers and set squares, determined to prove that six million Jews could never have been gassed in such cramped conditions.

Thereafter, denial took more varied and sinister forms. Had not some Jew handed others over to the Nazis. Had not local Jewish leaders connived in the Holocaust in order that fear would swell the numbers wanting to flee to Israel. Did not Romanies and homosexuals suffer as many casualties. And what was so special about this Holocaust anyway. Holocausts were common. A democratisation of the Shoah that led to some Holocaust Remembrance Day events not mentioning Jews at all. After which, Shoah envy began to creep in. Everyone wanted to have one.

Obligingly, Benjamin Netanyahu has gone some way to giving the Palestinians a taste of their own. Some way. Ferocious as Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza has been, it began as a response to a brutal attack on innocent civilians. It met war with war. No such provocation sparked off the Holocaust. The camps were not a response to a Jewish massacre of young Germans. There had been no jostle for land. No history of territorial dispute. The Third Reich’s hatred for the Jews was not political. It was brewed up in its imagination, stimulated into madness by hundreds of years of Christian antisemitism.

Let me be clear. This neither minimises nor pardons what has been meted out on Gazans. Whatever we want to happen next, we know this cannot go on. But it is important that we call things what they are and not, whether we are guided by compassion or mischief, what we would like them to be. Gaza is not Auschwitz.

Appropriating the Holocaust for Palestinian use is not novel. Until now, though, the Holocaust in toto has not changed hands. What the present war in Gaza has enabled is a lexical theft of the most potent verbalising of the Shoah’s horror. Genocide. The word reserved for the crime that was like no other, a moral turpitude without equivalent, the ne plus ultra of universal censure. Get the Jews for genocide and that is the Holocaust up in smoke.

Before leaving office as Foreign Secretary, David Lammy said he was unconvinced that Israel was committing genocide. This Labour Government is not renowned for sticking to its guns, so there is no knowing what the new Foreign Secretary might say, but at least there was this moment of courage when our Government held out against a tide of defamation that has otherwise carried all before it.

But now the United Nations has spoken. Israel is committing genocide on the Palestinian people, end of discussion. The Genocide gives the phrase a spurious authority. The Genocide is the real thing, not to be confused with that earlier, fading genocide which the Jews must finally accept they have forfeited.

This definitiveness is infectious. Even the gentle senior citizens, going limp as the police carry them away for supporting Palestine Action, brandish handwritten placards opposing genocide, as though opposing genocide is the crime they are being arrested for. I understand what they feel. The suffering in Gaza has been an unbearable spectacle on their televisions for too long. The extremity of their feelings finds a home in the extremity of the word genocide. And if they had any qualms about using it before, there are now international lawyers telling them it is acceptable.

But lawyers are no less limited in imagination than those first Holocaust deniers who built their case on measurements. Not enough room, no Holocaust. Too many people dead or homeless, genocide. As though words can be measured in the way surveyors and lawyers measure.

Words live somewhere else. They have a colouration and an odour, a context and a history, an association and intention that defy the rigid definitions of the law. Thus, horrified as we might be by pitiless and indiscriminate killing, we cannot call such actions genocide as generations have come to understand that word, when it is not driven by the ambition to wipe a people from the face of the earth.

Indeed, the very word indiscriminate contradicts it. The Nazi campaign to exterminate Jews was not indiscriminate. So precise and complete were they in their killing that they scoured Europe with the intention of not leaving a Jew alive. Genocide meant exterminating a people and their culture, all that they thought and wrote and painted, all that they believed, so that it might be as though they had never existed. The enormity of this ambition was what the word genocide was coined to comprehend, since no existing word came close to covering it.

A near unthinkable determination not just to kill but to wipe away, more metaphysical than it was military, genocide aimed to change the very constituency of humanity. And whatever the horrors of what has been done in Gaza, that is not the story. It is a terrible story, but a different one.

The Nazis were altogether too fascinated by the Jews. Indifference would not have built the camps. And here is a crime with which the Jews of Israel can fairly be charged. They have been insufficiently interested in the Palestinians. More curiosity might have made them kinder, but then again it might not. Yahya Sinwar, the late commander of Hamas, spent twenty two years in an Israeli jail, by all accounts reading up on his enemy. Jews wish he had read about someone else. Curiosity only turned his heart to stone.

There is enough cruelty in the world. Enemies of Israelis, Zionists and Jews, separately or all together, might want to purloin the Holocaust for propaganda purposes, but I would not wish it on the Palestinians. They have lost too much already. There is no honour in wishing to have lost what millions of Jews lost and there is no virtue in denying it. People do not ever forgo the right to their past. You would have your story told. You must allow the Jews to go on telling theirs.

Howard Jacobson