Holocaust Survivors
Updated 2024-07-25
2024-6-07 Western Leaders Are Exploiting Yesterday’s Genocide to Commit Another Today U.S. political and media elites are—shrewdly, if cruelly—re-traumatizing Jews for the most cynical reason imaginable: to help them aid and abet the unconscionable actions of a foreign country.
It takes a lot of people to mount a genocide: planners, funders, pathologically uncaring politicians, and big-money donors who have corrupted the political process. It also requires an armada of social-media sociopaths willing to call for slaughter from the comfort of their homes.
But the ongoing murder in Gaza wouldn’t be possible if a lot of ordinarily reasonable and empathetic people hadn’t been manipulated by cynics who prey on their collective trauma. The ghosts of past horrors have been summoned, not to end genocide but to perpetrate it in a new context.
There are many Jews in the West, including the children or grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, whose inherited pain is being exploited in service of a ruthless military agenda. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/western-leaders-exploit-genocide
2023-12-21 Understanding Jewish Disillusionment with Israel (w/ Gabor Maté) Author, physician & trauma expert Gabor Maté joins Bad Faith to discuss how left disillusionment with Bernie Sanders style electoral movements, and Jewish disillusionment with Israel, are part of a painful yet positive progressive shift. He weighs in on 2024, Marianne & RFK Jr, holocaust trauma, and more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB3G5HtHbJ0
2023-12-18 Auschwitz Museum Decries Israeli Mayor’s ‘Sick’ Call to ‘Empty’ Gaza The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland on Sunday decried what critics called genocidal remarks by the mayor of an Israeli town who said all of Gaza should be ethnically cleansed of Palestinians and turned into a museum like the notorious Nazi death camp.
“The whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz,” Metula Mayor David Azoulai said in a radio interview on Sunday, according toThe Times of Israel. “Let it be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do. Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust.”
In response, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, southern Poland wrote on social media that “David Azoulai appears to wish to use the symbol of the largest cemetery in the world as some sort of a sick, hateful, pseudo-artistic, symbolic expression.” “Calling for acts that seem to transgress any civil, wartime, moral, and human laws, that may sound as a call for murder of the scale akin to Auschwitz, puts the whole honest world face-to-face with a madness that must be confronted and firmly rejected,” the museum added. “We do hope that Israeli authorities will react to such shameful abuse, as terrorism can never be a response to terrorism.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-genocidal-statements
2023-11-12 Hamas Didn’t Attack Israelis Because They Are Jewish We need a basic analysis of power and history to understand that Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians, while egregious, had nothing to do with those Israelis’ religion and everything to do with occupation and settler colonialism. In all my urgency, I’d neglected the core thing that needed tending to in my Jewish community: the assumption that Hamas’ attacks on October 7 were an expression of antisemitism, and thus, a threat to all of us.
Much of my family was killed in the Holocaust. On my grandparents’ wedding night, Hitler invaded their home country of Belgium. I grew up hearing my grandmother’s stories of narrowly escaping death at every turn, the wails of Jewish mothers over their dead children, fields of lifeless bodies. My grandparents arrived at Ellis Island traumatized by the unfathomable murder of their families in the gas chambers of Auschwitz while the world let it happen.
So I can understand why many of my fellow Jewish Americans’ limbic systems were triggered on October 7, especially in a world where antisemitism still very much exists, particularly in the context of white nationalism. A world where we are told the same story that Elena was, and where Palestinians are demonized to legitimize that story. Jews can grieve for Israeli lives lost and refuse the weaponization of that grief to commit genocide against Palestinians.
Antisemitism is defined as “discrimination against, violence toward, or stereotypes of Jews for being Jewish.” Let me be clear: Hamas’ killings of Israeli civilians were wrong, in clear violation of international law. But they weren’t about antisemitism.
The key thing to understand is that, in Israel/Palestine, unlike anywhere else in the world, Jewish people—specifically white Ashkenazi Jews—are the ones in power. Jewish Israelis are the occupiers and Palestinians are the occupied. When I spent eight months in the West Bank documenting human rights abuses, I saw the way Israel controls every aspect of Palestinian life, separating Palestinians from their schools and hospitals; torching their olive groves; demolishing their homes; imprisoning them without trial; discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel; and bringing about the slow, sometimes quick, death of Palestinians in Gaza by cutting them off from the outside world, putting them on a collective “diet,” and periodically bombing civilian infrastructure, homes, and families. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/hamas-attacks-not-antisemitic
2023-11-10 “Clear Intention of Ethnic Cleansing”: Holocaust Scholar Omer Bartov Warns of Genocide in Gaza Israeli American scholar Omer Bartov, one of the world’s leading experts on the Holocaust, says Israel’s brutal assault on the Gaza Strip is at risk of becoming a genocide. The monthlong air and ground war has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in the besieged enclave, a majority of them women and children. Israel has also severely limited the movement of food, water, fuel, medicine and other essentials into Gaza. Bartov says the disproportionate killing of civilians by Israel, as well as dehumanizing statements by Israeli leaders and suggestions of mass expulsion, are of grave concern. He recently joined hundreds of lawyers and academics in signing an open letter warning about Israel’s violations of international law in Gaza. “There is an indication that there are war crimes happening in Gaza, potentially also crimes against humanity,” says Bartov. “If this so-called operation continues, that may become ethnic cleansing … and that may become genocide.” Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mZMkNJYr-0
2023-11-10 Congress’ Censure of Rep Tlaib Shows There’s a ‘Palestine Exception’ to Free Speech “I find it horrific that the politicians have the nerve to censure righteous voices for peace and for the lives of Gazans, who are being murdered,” Holocaust survivor Marione Ingram said.
In the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, the nation’s founding documents are on display, including the Bill of Rights, which enshrines free speech. As Israel subjects Gaza to a massive air and ground assault, Congress has reminded us of what has come to be known as “the Palestine exception” to free speech.
On Tuesday, 22 Democrats joined with the Republican majority to censure Palestinian-American Congressmember Rashida Tlaib. As Congressmember Tlaib was being censured, 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Marione Ingram was nearby, protesting at the White House, demanding President Joe Biden call for a cease-fire.
“I find it horrific that the politicians have the nerve to censure righteous voices for peace and for the lives of Gazans, who are being murdered,” Ingram said on the Democracy Now! news hour the next day. “It is a slaughter that is happening. Rashida Tlaib is, in my eyes, a hero.”
She continued, “I am a Jew, my mother was a Jew, my Jewish family was murdered in 1941. Hamburg Jews were sent to Minsk in Belarus. Upon arrival, they were stripped and then shot and dumped into a mass grave. My grandmother was taken by two Gestapo who came to my mother’s apartment and took her away the night before I turned 6 years old.”
The German American Holocaust survivor was adamant: “Netanyahu’s government, Israel’s policies for decades has been the suppression of Palestinians, land grabs, deprivation of Palestinians… I was a child of war. I have experienced all of these things. I have also known for a fact that what Israel is doing will not end this conflict. It will only exacerbate it.”
Marione Ingram is not alone. Over 1,000 Jewish academics, artists, and clergy have signed an open letter that called for an immediate cease-fire, the release by Hamas of all hostages, and an end to Israeli apartheid and occupation. The effort was led by Omer Bartov, Brown University Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, described by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject of genocide. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/tlaib-palestine-free-speech
2023-11-08 “Stop This Madness”: Holocaust Survivor Marione Ingram, 87, Condemns Israeli Assault & Calls for Peace We speak with 87-year-old Holocaust survivor Marione Ingram, who has been protesting outside the White House calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Ingram says experiencing anti-Jewish hate, losing family members to the Nazi killing machine and surviving the Allied bombing of Hamburg as a child all inspire her to speak out for peace. “What Israel is doing will not end this conflict. It will only exacerbate it,” says Ingram. She calls the vote to censure Palestinian American Congressmember Rashida Tlaib “shameful” and describes her as a “hero.”https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/8/marione_ingram_omer_bartov_holocaust_gaza
.
Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
.
progressiveissuesblog 