Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.
I write this as Israel’s genocidal practices seem unstoppable, with no ceasefire in Gaza or Jenin.
I am trying to fathom the unimaginable pain of losing a child or a parent.
Aharon Shabtai in his 2003 poem J’accuse, asks how can there be a solution when victims are no longer breathing?
Shabtai’s poem is about the many sectors in Israel that perpetrate these atrocities: The sniper who shot at Muhammad the child
Beneath his father’s arm
Wasn’t acting alone –
I am comparing the German genocide against Jewish people, and the Jewish-Israeli genocide against Palestinians.
The Nazi genocide against Jewish people:
The official estimate, the most conservative and not universally accepted, is that approximately 11 million Jews and millionbso of others were killed in four extermination camps. Children made up at least 1/3 of this total. People were killed in gas vans, gas chambers, crematoriums and in mass graves. In them too people were shot, given lethal injections, gassed, and hundreds of thousands died of exhaustion, starvation and disease. Nazis expelled Jewish children to Poland to be adopted by Polish parents.
Here is the Israeli genocide against Palestinian people, and particularly the targeting of children:
Latest estimate: As of 8 January 2025, over 47,000 Palestinian people, have been killed by Israel.
Children killed in Israel’s attacks on Gaza:
2023 November 15 – UN 4,506 Gazan children killed (not included: incubator deaths, children buried under rubble). No Israeli figures on Israeli children killed in 2023.
2021 Israeli war – 67 Gazan children killed and 2 Israeli children.
2014 Israeli war – 582 Gazan children killed and 1 Israeli child.
2009 Israeli war – 345 Palestinian children, 0 Israeli.
2006 Israeli war – high accuracy missiles killed 56 Gazan children, 0 Israeli
Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children maximizes physical pain and terror. Amputations of limbs without anesthesia withheld by Israel’s blockade. Described as an “incremental genocide”, the IDF targets children’s eyes and knees, crippling children for life, nightly sonic booms cause night terrors and bedwetting, humiliation of parents in front of children, torture in military prisons.
[Lest we forget: USA child separations at border, in juvenile justice system].
In comparing these two genocides:
It is hard to establish what the German public knew about the Final Solution. The extermination camps were far from population centers, were located in Poland, and were carefully camouflaged.
In Israel, the atrocities are widely known, proudly displayed throughout the world.
In Nazi Germany, it was dangerous to oppose Nazism. Killings and terrorizing were random, hard to predict what would lead to imprisonment, torture, killing. In Israel, it is safe for Jewish people to dissent; Jewish people will not be imprisoned or tortured and are free to disseminate information, opposition.
In Germany after WWI due to the Allied blockade imposed by the Versailles treaty, people were starving, severely impoverished and malnourished: the death of three-quarters of a million people between 1914-18, the birth rate declined by half. Infants, children, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers suffered and died from diseases such as rickets, tuberculosis, gastrointestinal diseases, cognitive disorders.
In contrast, Israel in 2008 is an affluent, well-educated, politically and militarily powerful nation-state.
Israeli atrocities are perpetrated in violation of the Nuremberg Code requiring refusal to comply with violations of international Humanitarian Law by people in the military.
The German Holocaust was perpetrated with systematic, streamline efficiency and advanced technology.
The Israeli Final Solution against Palestinians is also organized with maximum efficiency and technology: perpetrated by Israel drones, satellites, intelligence, signal jamming, cyberattacks: including the advanced technology of AI, Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAW), dual use technology, Cyber Warfare, Cognitive Warfare, Electronic Warfare.
How did people die? German techniques of killing included gas vans and gas chambers, crematoriums and mass graves. In them people were shot, given lethal injections, gassed, and hundreds of thousands died of exhaustion, starvation and disease. Here is the shocking description of Bai Yar: “At one moment – we were driving past a long ravine. I noticed strange movements of the earth: clumps of earth rose into the air as if by their own propulsion—and there was smoke: it was like a low-toned volcano; as if there was burning lava just beneath the earth. Blobel laughed, made a gesture with his arm, pointing back along the road and ahead of us, all along the ravine – the ravine of Babi Yar – and said, ‘Here lie my 30,000 Jews’. Colonel Blobel was the Standartenfuhrer.
Much has been researched and written about the advanced, unprecedented planned organization of the extermination camps where gas chambers efficiently killed millions of people.
The Palestinian Final Solution is also highly planned. The killing methods maximize physical and psychological pain and terrorism. Weaponry and technology developed and used by Israel include DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosives), flechette weapons, weapons classified as “unconventional “, DU (depleted uranium) , white phosphorus, poison gases in Gaza.
Israel strategically uses black flag operations such as surreptitious provocations aimed to foment some form of retaliation that justifies an Israeli overwhelming scorched earth “self-defense”. This is how Henry Siegman describes Israel’s surreptitious violation of many ceasefire agreements with Hamas, and is described by Chomsky in his analysis of the “kidnapping” of Gilad Shalit leading to the 2006 Israeli scorched earth attack on Gaza. These surreptitious provocations is the pattern of Israel’s provocations of Iran, and Ben Ehrenreich on the Netanyahu government intentionally withholding evidence from Israeli settlers on the identity of the murderers of three Israeli youth. Withholding evidence gave time to stoke mass rage and vengefulness by the settlers, days of rampage and murder, and the most horrific, unimaginable atrocity against a Palestinian teen named Mohammad. “He was sixteen, a small, thin boy with large and slightly mischievous eyes. Before the morning was over, the police had found his body in a forest outside Jerusalem. His corpse had been badly burned. … the boy’s body was too disfigured to display…the autopsy report was leaked to the press. The medical examiners had found soot in Abu Khdeir’s lungs, bronchi, and that – he had been breathing when his kidnappers lit him on fire…”(p 344ff).
In trying to understand the sadism and guilt, I have learned much from Gitta Serenyi’s very probing and thorough study, An Examination of Conscience. It is about her extensive interviews with Franzz Stangl and with his family members. He was the commandant of Treblinka, the largest of the five Nazi extermination camps. .” P 39 She asks “Why were The killings organized systematically to achieve the maximum humiliation and dehumanization of the victims before they died. This pattern was dictated by a distinct and careful purpose … not by mere cruelty or indifference; the crammed airless freight-cars without sanitary provisions, food or drink, far worse than any cattle transport, the whipped up (literally so) hysteria of arrival, the immediate an always violent separation of men, women and children; the public undressing, the incredibly crude physical examinations for hidden valuables, the hair cutting and shaving of the women, and finally the naked run to the gas chamber under the lash of whips…. Why, if they were going to kill them anyway, what was the point of all the humiliation, why the cruelty? To condition those who actually had to carry out the policies. To make it possible for them to do what they did. To achieve the extermination of these millions of men, women and children, the Nazis committed not only physical but spiritual murder; on those they killed, s on those who did th killing, on those who knew the killing was being done, and also to some extent for evermore, on all of us who were alive and thinking beings at that time.”
A recent documentary, Israelism, shows much about Israel’s sadistic treatment of Palestinians but also about the Jewish people who refuse to follow orders and who genuinely repent and who speak up. There is horrible footage of the physical and psychological terrorizing and humiliation of Palestinian children and adults. It is not obscured but often seems to be proudly exhibited to the world, as if to show strength and power. Unlike the German Nazis, there is no attempt to hide or camouflage.
A complicated history: Hitler’s personal history did not start with anti-semitism and intentions of genocide. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (in his book Childhood and Society) wrote about Hitler’s family, about Germany during Hitler’s youth, with speculation about his psychology. According to Dan Ellsworth, Hitler was not interested in conquering the whole world and was not interested in nuclear weapons. Serenyi reports that Hitler curtailed the euthanasia program when people jeered at him – but there is no written record of this order.
Hitler’s earlier intent was to expel Jews to Madagascar. The eventual extermination system was devised and formulated in 1942 at the Wannsee Conference by Himmler, Heydrich, and Goebbels.
For Zionists, the plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine was planned and formulated before the Holocaust. It was called Plan Dalet, and used the extensive data compiled by the Jewish National Fund to identify all the Palestinian communities, to identify who to expel and who to kill. Clearly the Jewish settlers knew that there were at least 750,000 Palestinian inhabitants, that Palestine was not a “land without people”. The planning long before the Holocaust allowed the Zionists to train militarily and to acquire a large arsenal of weapons.
Geopolitics
There is a great deal of Jewish wealth and political power dating from the early 19th century revolutionary and industrial period. The causes and effects of the following facts are complex and varied and obviously fraught because of worries about anti-semitism. The central role of Jewish people includes the political and economic power of Rothschild, Balfour, Kissinger. Currently, five of Forbes’ 10 wealthiest men in the world are Jewish. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) was formulated by Jewish appointees Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz. Richard Perle, Robert Kagan, Irving Kristol and was dissolved in 2009, replaced by the Foreign Policy Institute.
The 19th century also saw the major shifts in ideas and understanding the world introduced by Jewish intellectuals Freud, Marx, Einstein. What contributed to the prominence of these Jewish people? Marx famously wrote that religion is the opiate of the people and it is highly inaccurate to single out Judaism or to assume some genetic determinant. Other religions too have abhorrent beliefs and practices. Political ideologies are also cruel – Athenian democracy includes the foundation story of Agamemnon killing his own daughter, Iphigenia, in order to win the Trojan war. The French Revolution extols the technologically efficient method of the guillotine in the genocide of a whole class.
Understanding the current situation is currently hampered by what Gramsci identified as covert erroneous assumptions about reality. At this time there is the erasure of fact, rationality, realism, objectivity such as in postmodernism. What “is” is blurred with “if”. For example, in her book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Judith Butler impugns the Goldstone Report investigation of war crimes by Israel, asking what “if” Hamas used human shields, and she did not report that the Goldstone Report stated that Hamas did not use human shields but that Israel did. Butler also goes to great lengths to attribute universal humanitarian values to Judaism even though these values were exceedingly rare historically, with Jewish ethical prescriptions applied primarily to treatment of other Jewish people. The Abrahamic God was cruel and genocidal, ordering Abraham to kill his own son Isaac as a sign of loyalty to God. God ordered the slaughter of the people of Amalek: “ Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!” The sanctioned killing of children goes way back. Christ called out to God “Why hast thou forsaken me?” https://revcom.us/a/019/god-original-fascist-part4.htm
Do Judith Butler and many other Jewish people acknowledge the full cruelty within the Abrahamic creed and Jewish history? I find that there is no mention, no information about israel’s nuclear weapons on the progressive Jewish websites like IJV and JVP, and that I am silenced whenever I bring this up in meetings and my information was removed from a website. Seymour Hersh and others have written about the “Samson Option” and the belief that Israel would actually use this world-destroying weapon if they believed they were really threatened. See the superb documentary about the suicide terrorism stories taught to children in Israel, of Masada and Samson, by Avi Mograbi Avenge but One of My Two Eyes.
What kind of religion is this? What reversal and turning into its opposite, its morality of exceptionalism and entitlement due to the Holocaust and ahistorical assumptions about being eternal and inevitable victims? Turning into opposites is a characteristic aspect of primary process thinking, of irrationality and challenges to objectivity, rationality, facts. There is a great deal of pride taken in Jewish guilt. Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year as Jewish people take one day to celebrate repentance. How can one repent or repair the loss of life inflicted on the people of Gaza? Or the West Bank and in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen?
As Aharon Shabtai writes:
That long-term solutions can be found
For any and every problem,
When it’s no longer breathing.
Current geopolitics is also obscured by the considerable obfuscation of interrelationships between powerful people and structures, about who holds sovereignty, and in general their complete impunity. Here I include the WTO, the secure economic zones inhabited by oligarchs in all the major cities of the world (described by Slobodian), the various blocs that cross political lines, the UN Security Council, Trade Agreements and Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), Corporations and corporate personhood, offshore banks, newly formulated legal justifications like the sanctification of torture when it is framed as the “least possible evil” if it prevents more extensive torture. (See Eyal Weizman). Legal opinions and judgments are utterly useless as decisions have no enforcement mechanism.
A brief autobiographical note: I grew up in a largely secular Jewish working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles where as a child I saw concentration camp tatoos on people’s arms. As a psychoanalyst and student of intellectual and social history, I’ve interviewed Holocaust survivors and have treated children of survivors. Through a Palestinian organization I have also worked with several people in Gaza. I have hosted Israeli refuseniks and Palestinians in my home and have heard in person most of the UN Special Rapporteurs on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.
