Israel’s Trump Card for the Treatment of Palestinians
The Holocaust as Political Asset
By AMIRA HASS

counterpunch.org
April 20, 2007

The cynicism inherent in the attitude of the institutions of the
Jewish state to Holocaust survivors is not a revelation to those
born and living among them. We grew up with the yawning gap between
the presentation of the State of Israel as the place of the Jewish
people’s rebirth and the void that exists for every Holocaust survivor
and his family. The personal "rehabilitation" was dependent on the
circumstances of each person: the stronger ones versus the others,
who did not find support from the institutions of the state.

During the 1950s and 1960s we saw the demeaning view of our parents as
having gone "like sheep to the slaughter," the shame of the new Jews,
the Sabras, over their misfortunate, Diaspora relatives.

It can be argued that during the first two decades, much of this
attitude could be attributed to the lack of information and the
very human lack of an ability to grasp the full meaning of the
industrialized genocide perpetrated by Germany. But the awareness
of the material aspects of the Holocaust started very early, with
Jewish and Zionist institutions starting in the early 1940s to discuss
the possibility of demanding reparations. In 1952, the reparations
agreement with Germany was signed, by which that country agreed to
pay hundreds of millions of dollars to Israel to cover the absorption
costs of the survivors and pay for their rehabilitation. The agreement
obligated Germany to compensate survivors individually as well,
but the German law differentiated between those who belonged to the
"circle of German culture" and others. Those who were able to prove
a connection to the superior circle received higher sums, even if
they emigrated in time from Germany. Concentration camp survivors
from outside the "circle" received the ridiculous sum of 5 marks per
day. The Israeli representatives swallowed this distortion.

This is part of the roots of financial cynicism that the media is
being exposed to today, due to several reasons: the advanced age
and declining health of survivors, the intentional weakening of the
welfare state, the presence of survivors from the former Soviet Union
who are not included in the reparations agreement, the media activism
of nongovernmental welfare organizations and the welcome enlistment
of social affairs journalists.

They are shocked by the gap between the official appropriation of the
Holocaust, which is perceived in Israel as understood and justified,
and the abandonment of survivors.

Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily
in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one
side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience
of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their
homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred.

The phrase "security for the Jews" has been consecrated as an exclusive
synonym for "the lessons of the Holocaust." It is what allows Israel to
systematically discriminate against its Arab citizens. For 40 years,
"security" has been justifying control of the West Bank and Gaza
and of subjects who have been dispossessed of their rights living
alongside Jewish residents, Israeli citizens laden with privileges.

Security serves the creation of a regime of separation and
discrimination on an ethnic basis, Israeli style, under the auspices of
"peace talks" that go on forever. Turning the Holocaust into an asset
allows Israel to present all the methods of the Palestinian struggle
(even the unarmed ones) as another link in the anti-Semitic chain whose
culmination is Auschwitz. Israel provides itself with the license to
come up with more kinds of fences, walls and military guard towers
around Palestinian enclaves.

Separating the genocide of the Jewish people from the historical
context of Nazism and from its aims of murder and subjugation,
and its separation from the series of genocides perpetrated by the
white man outside of Europe, has created a hierarchy of victims, at
whose head we stand. Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers fumble
for words when in Hebron the state carries out ethnic cleansing via
its emissaries, the settlers, and ignore the enclaves and regime of
separation it is setting up. Whoever criticizes Israel’s policies
toward the Palestinians is denounced as an anti-Semite, if not a
Holocaust denier. Absurdly, the delegitimization of any criticism of
Israel only makes it harder to refute the futile equations that are
being made between the Nazi murder machine and the Israeli regime of
discrimination and occupation.

The institutional abandonment of the survivors is rightly denounced
across the board. The transformation of the Holocaust into a political
asset for use in the struggle against the Palestinians feed on those
same stores of official cynicism, but it is part of the consensus.

Amira Hass writes for Ha’aretz. She is the author of Drinking the
Sea at Gaza.