The language of protest and the lessons of memory

For as long as I have written about the equality of Palestinians, Jews have been insulting me in the language of the Holocaust. A small minority of my own community resorts to the ugliest imagery as if it will obscure their inability to disprove the equal rights and the full humanity of Palestinian people.

The effect of splattering ugly historic words around is to rob them of specificity. Even the most shocking reference is gradually emptied of any meaning beyond ‘someone who disagrees with me’.

That is what antisemitism is coming to mean: someone who protests Israel’s devastation, starvation and genocidal intent toward the people of Gaza. Those who purport to speak for the Jewish community are draining that word of its specific meaning by splattering it over anti-Zionism, expressions of Palestinian identity, and protest consistent with international law and our equal human rights. They have robbed us all of an essential category and they are distracting us from the rise and mainstreaming of real antisemitism by the far Right.

When ceasefire is equated with genocide or when the very sight of Palestinian protest is unbearably triggering, the speaker is making their own fragility the point of their statement. They are speaking of their own intolerance. We ask, what is the matter with you that you equate the cessation of violence with the very worst form of violence? More than one percent of Gaza’s people have been killed, the population is being starved and the cities are rubble – and you have fainting spells at the sight of a flag?

Such absurd efforts to proscribe the peaceful expression of Palestinian rights and international law are an evasion. Such sweeping claims say that the Jewish community need not engage in any conversation that is not predicated on seeing Jews in existential danger — a danger embodied by Palestinian identity and rights.

But look, whose are the weapons and whose homes lie in rubble? What are the proportions of dead, missing, hostage, maimed, homeless and starving civilians? We Jews are more than victims. We are agents.

As part of this squandering of language, Israeli government leaders and others use the language of the Holocaust to help incite total, perpetual, genocidal enmity. They call Palestinians Nazis, subhuman, Amalek.

We will not repeat more of the offensive language here because repetition makes anything feel more normal. The Israeli settler-Right is adept with that language. The antisemitic far Right has long used it. It peppers Israeli government and military incitement against Gaza.

In our own country, Nazi imagery and language have been mainstreamed in particular through the website of David Cumin, former member of the NZ Jewish Council and Community Security Group; founding member of the Free Speech Union and director of the Israel Institute.

These Zionist voices are not really complaining about the use of Holocaust- or genocide-related language at all. They wield it freely. They are objecting to anyone else using it, too.

Well, we also object. Let the Holocaust stand alone as itself. ‘Genocide’ is a category for everyone to use wisely. Within that category, the Holocaust is specific. Cambodia is specific. Rwanda is specific. We remember each instance of genocide in its specifics. We ask the questions and teach the lessons, live with compassion for the people affected, and try to learn from it.

Holocaust Memorial Day is coming. One of the legacies of having watched the devaluation, dehumanisation and extermination of six million European Jews is the vow, never again. What have we learned from it?

First, to the degree that we vowed ‘never again’, we have failed. In a way more public than in any previous genocide, Gaza is being destroyed and starved before our eyes and we have failed to stop it.

Second, within the Jewish community, those who support or tolerate Israel’s genocidal campaign have learned only tribalism: never again to Jews. They are prepared to dispense with 2000 years of Jewish pluralism. In the interests of Jewish power, Zionism has sought to wrap Jewish identity in the Israeli flag. Having spent enormous energy insisting that ‘Jewish’ must mean ‘Zionist’, Jews everywhere now reap the consequences as Israel’s actions drag all of our good names through the mud. Israel’s actions frankly endanger us all. Not-Zionist Jews are attacked as never before in the interests of Jewish ethnonationalist power.

Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, tangata whenua and friends honour Holocaust memories by holding firmly to the language of our principled protest. This is a time for solidarity and impatience as we honour the dead and fight like hell for the living.

Gaza is the existential conversation, and we are deeply disappointed that our Jewish institutions continue to evade it. Perhaps they will use Holocaust Memorial Day to speak with a more humane vision.

Marilyn Garson for

Alternative Jewish Voices