Commentary
Israel and the betrayal of the memory of Auschwitz
For far too long, Israeli politics has instrumentalized the singularity of Auschwitz for unrelated political purposes.
The Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy beat me to it: in a recent op-ed entitled “From Auschwitz to Gaza, with a Stopover in The Hague,” he addressed a topic that I also wanted to talk about in my own op-ed. So I will begin by quoting Levy’s words.
“Benjamin Netanyahu will not travel to Poland next month for the main ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, over concern that he could be arrested on the basis of the warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court in The Hague,” Levy writes. “This bitter and not-so-subtle irony of history supplies a surreal confluence that was nearly unimaginable before now: merely to imagine the prime minister landing in Krakow, arriving at the main entrance of Auschwitz and being arrested by Polish police at the gate, under the slogan "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work sets you free").”
He continues: “The fact that of all the places in the world, Auschwitz is the first that Netanyahu fears going to, shouts symbolism as well as historical justice.” He goes on to paint the picture of “a ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz” where “world leaders march in silence, the last living survivors march alongside them, and the place of the prime minister of the state that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust is vacant. It is vacant because his state has become a pariah, and because he is wanted by the most respected court that tries war criminals.” Levy concludes: “Netanyahu will not be at Auschwitz, because he is wanted for war crimes.”
This “event” is indeed paradigmatic. However, even though it is a fact that about half of the Israeli population is hoping for Netanyahu's political demise, that many are also hoping he will end up in prison at the conclusion of his trial, and that he has committed so many crimes (within Israel’s borders) that one can understand the popular hatred toward him (and his family), Netanyahu himself is only a secondary character in the drama that Gideon Levy describes.
Low-ranking people are often cynically blamed for mistakes and crimes that were actually caused or initiated “high up” in the hierarchical order. There is a well-known saying in Israel that points a sarcastic finger at the military hierarchy, speaking about blaming “the guard in front of the entrance of the military camp.”
But it’s a different situation when a social or political practice is condemned for which an entire community cannot be punished (like it became possible and was accomplished thanks to international consensus in the case of the boycott of the South African apartheid state). In such cases, the head of state or other high-ranking officials are held accountable as symbolic representatives of the entire collective. Condemning Netanyahu means that Israel has been condemned.
This should be emphasized, because ministerial responsibility for war crimes lies with the ruling institutions, but is generally more abstract in nature. Meanwhile, the (physical) barbarity of the crime occurs “on the ground.” As leader of the government, Netanyahu bears responsibility for the policies he outlines and enacts and thus for the resulting attitude of the military in the current war.
Although he is consistently refusing to accept any responsibility, especially for the October 7 disaster, the orders that led to the concrete war crimes are not necessarily his. Something else must be taken into account here. What has been seen in the IDF’s operations in the Gaza Strip over the past year is an extreme brutalization of the combat troops in action, whose war crimes have accumulated, and are still accumulating, to such an extent that people soon began to speak of a genocide against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.
The debate as to whether this effectively constitutes genocide should be left for another occasion; the dispute that has flared up over this only distracts from the substance of the matter: namely, the conspicuous barbarism of the Israeli military and its actions in war. It is enough to focus on the accumulation of war crimes to understand that something has manifested in this war that goes far beyond the person of Netanyahu. A way of conducting combat has become the norm that has turned an unconscionable number of dead and wounded civilians, mostly women, children and the elderly, into “a matter of course,” together with a monstrous devastation of infrastructure and the destruction of vital civilian facilities.
In an article I wrote recently on the research of Dr. Lee Mordechai of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I pointed out that the accusation of committing war crimes has long been proven and that no one will be able to claim afterwards that they didn’t know. The fact that the mainstream media is hiding reports of the barbarity practiced in its name from the people of the country, practically covering it up, cannot be accepted as an explanation for the public silence about the crimes: those who want to know are able to find out about everything. Of course, one must want to know.
Neither does the “justification” of invoking the war crimes against Israeli Jews committed in the October 7 pogrom have any acceptable basis if one rejects the notion that it is legitimate to put the army in the service of collective drives for revenge and retaliation. The killing of children by an army (as “collateral damage”) cannot be “reparation” for a wrong previously suffered. This is even more outrageous as the effects grow to such shocking disproportionality.
What is more striking than anything else is the relish, sadism and vile pleasure in harming others on the part of the soldiers, in a massacre that doesn’t seem to want to end. October 7 has been relegated to a license for excessive destruction and erasure of lives without any qualms. It is true that in no war in history have the soldiers on the battlefield shown themselves to be paragons of humanity. As Brecht wrote in the Threepenny Opera, “the troops live under the cannon's thunder” and when they meet the enemy “chop them into beefsteak tartar.”
For the civilian population of the enemy, the situation becomes particularly horrific when modern bombers are deployed on a massive scale. But things that might be explainable on the battlefield according to the internal logic of what war has always been in its essence – the legitimization of complete disinhibition in killing and devastating material living conditions – can only make one shudder when it is apparent that an entire community supports the crimes of its national army.
What little the Israeli population has learned about the horrors of the real situation in Gaza has been (and still is) rejected with terrifying indifference as untrue, as exaggeration, as insidious propaganda by the other side, or is cavalierly rationalized by putting the blame for the war crimes on Gaza’s residents themselves (“they started it”); or is dismissed with the open admission of being unable to feel any compassion for them.
Both the brutalization of the soldiers and the indifference of the Israeli civilian population stem from the dehumanization of the Palestinians, which has been conducted incessantly and for a long time. Fifty-seven years of the occupation's barbarity and the persistent erasure of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the political agenda of Israel and the world (carried out mainly by Netanyahu on the international stage) have shown their inevitable effect. For most Israeli Jews, Palestinian human life is not worth much; even less so after October 7, and less still when it comes to the inhabitants of Gaza, nearly all of whom are branded as “Hamas terrorists” by the current Israeli government.
No comparison between the Gaza catastrophe and Auschwitz can be justified, something that Gideon Levy also rejects in his op-ed. But that is not the point. For far too long, Israeli politics has instrumentalized the singularity of Auschwitz for unrelated political purposes. As it should have become obvious by now, one cannot draw lessons from the Shoah – not even the ideological postulate of how necessary it was to create a “refuge for the Jewish people.”
If anything, the only abstract message that could be drawn from the Shoah would be the guiding principle for a society committed to minimizing, if not making it impossible, for human beings to continue to produce human victims. This might be what Walter Benjamin meant by the “weak messianic power” that each present generation has in relation to past generations.
And it is precisely on this point that the horrendous betrayal that Israel has committed against the memory of Auschwitz (not only on this occasion, but this time with a disproportionality that it itself has chosen) becomes obvious. And therein, more than anywhere else, lies the terrifying nature of the symbol that the Israeli prime minister will not attend the commemoration ceremony of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz because he fears being arrested as the war criminal he is, as a representative of Israel.
Originally published in German in Overton Magazin.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/israele-e-il-tradimento-della-memoria-di-auschwitz on 2025-01-08