Genocide in Gaza?

I had to go to London’s Israeli embassy to collect my visa just as Israel’s war in Gaza was reaching its climax. Anyone in the city at this time couldn’t miss the large protests and nightly vigils taking place outside the Israeli embassy as British Muslims and a handful of Islamist apologists repeatedly attempted to storm the building and attacked the British policemen put there to stop them. Many of those there were holding placards demanding that the ‘holocaust in Gaza’ be stopped.

No one could ignore the fact that the insinuation that the Jewish state, formed as a sanctuary for holocaust survivors, is now committing its own holocaust is a controversial hard hitting claim. And you’d be hard pushed to deny that such claims aren’t both extremely insensitive and highly offensive, not to mention wildly inaccurate, but for most people, Jews included, that’s where it stops. For most this is just mindless unpleasant anti-Semitism. Exactly the same is assumed about all of the many comparisons that Israel’s opponents draw between it and the Nazi’s. But if you think that then you’ve missed the point entirely. Because really offending Jews, in the way European neo-fascist groups might, is utterly irrelevant to these people’s agenda. Claiming that Israel is the modern day Nazi Germany and that the Palestinian’s are its Jews has little to do with being offensive, it’s really about a well thought out strategy for delegitimiseing Israel’s right to exist.

In the minds of Israel’s opponents Israel exists because of international guilt, the Holocaust meant the world felt it owed the Jews a state. However they also believe that if they can demonstrate that Israel has committed its own Holocaust then the world ceases to owe it its existence. It’s a simple equation: some non-Jews commit genocide against the Jews and so they’re owed a state, now the Jews have committed genocide against some non-Jews, so the score is equalled and the Jewish people forfeit their right to their country. Laughable as this may sound don’t assume people aren’t finding it convincing. During this year’s international Holocaust Memorial Day a city in Sweden cancelled it’s commemoration service in ‘protest’ at what had happened in Gaza a few weeks previously. As though to say that because a government in 2009 had accidentally killed some civilians in a military operation to defend itself, it stops being a tragedy that 6 million men, women and children of the same ethnicity as the government in question were murdered as part of one of the worst and most systematic genocides in history.

Claim’s that the Palestinians have been victims of genocide are really farcical when it’s considered just how rapidly their population has expanded since the creation of the state of Israel. Perhaps what claiming that the Israeli’s are Nazis really comes down to is an intense jealousy on the part of the Arab world. Not only do Palestinians desire Israeli land but also the very same unique victim status that Jews have held in the West ever since the atrocities of the Second World War came to light. Nevertheless moderates around the world are still commonly heard to claim that in light of the Jewish holocaust experience Israel should know better, as if to imply that the holocaust was little more than a course in moral behaviour. But it really does seem that the rest of the world expects an unprecedentedly high level of moral behaviour from the Jewish state, indeed one far higher than what is expected of other countries. The negation of Israel’s right to defend its civilians in the face of attack seems to essentially be the demand that Israel turn the other cheek in a way that no Christian country ever would.

There is however one further irony to the claim that a Holocaust has taken place in Gaza. The Holocaust was an attempt to totally rid an area of territory of all of its Jewish inhabitants. That is exactly what happened in 2005 when under international pressure the Israeli government expelled every Jewish man, woman and child from Gaza with the promise that never again would Gaza be a source of terrorism and international condemnation.