“What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide? The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” – Aaron Bushnell, martyred on Feb 26, 2024.
The basic kernel of truth about the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany is that whatever happened was wrong, and offensive to humanity on a level that all people across the world can relate to. The acceptance that the atrocities of the Holocaust were just that: atrocities. There could be no situational justification or no rationalization of why this evil was necessary. It is a momentous event that should shock us out of the bloodlust of war and make us pause and consider the humanity that had been destroyed in the process. The Zionist actions in Palestine are striking at the roots of what makes the Holocaust stand out in its inhumanity and absolute evil. If the position that it is acceptable to allow Zionism to do what it is doing because of ‘terrorism’, then the essential spirit behind remembrance of that great human catastrophe stands rejected.
All human beings can inherently understand the repugnance of murder and imagine the pain of physical injury and torture. A sense of absolute hopelessness and dread is created in us when we witness the history of those events through records and works of culture (art, films, books, etc.). We can instinctively understand that there can be no justification for treating fellow human beings like this. The ability to feel wronged on another’s behalf, and to be able to place oneself in those who were persecuted, ripped from their families, and denied their humanity: this is what makes the vast majority of the world acknowledge and mourn the Holocaust. By not doing the same for the Palestinian people, the world does a great disservice to the memory of the Holocaust by allowing it to be weaponized by the Zionist agenda.
Nowhere is safe in Gaza
Among the hundreds of disturbing visuals from Palestine, there is one that shows the Star of David cut into the back of a Palestinian man kidnapped and tortured by Israeli soldiers. Susan Abulhawa tells their story, along with those of others, here. It is but one of the many windows into the hell that Israel has created in Gaza. The branding and marking of a tortured body with a symbol of a whole people and religion is a gross disrespect compounded by a terrible crime. It is one of the ways in which Zionism turns Judaism and Jewish identity into a weapon. This recalls the Zionist regime’s ambassador to the U.N. brandishing the Star on his chest, in an attempt at referencing the Nazi segregation of Jews from 1939 onwards in December 2023.
Zionism violently marks the Palestinian body (in a gendered and sexual manner) with visible markers of Jewish supremacy and exceptionalism. It declares that the Jews are exempt and immune to the censure of all humanity and have propped themselves up as a self-righteous exemption to ‘Never Again’.
The many horrendous calamities being deliberately visited upon the Palestinian people have blown any semblance of the ‘post-colonial’ or ‘post War’ world to shreds. What do these terms even mean now, other than being mere academic brackets around random dates? There have been at least four similar incidents after the Rafah flour massacre on March 1. People are being baited with food dropped from the air, made to run around only to be shot at or even to be killed by the dropped ‘aid’ items themselves. Military-grade weapons and equipment mounted on ships, warplanes, and tanks are being used to mow down starving human beings. This reality is infinitely more shocking than the shameless, fake propaganda about Hamas killing babies and raping women by the dozens. Hemmed in without food, water, electricity, medicine, and communication, the Zionist regime stamps its bloody fist all over the land and people of Palestine with impunity. Its actions have discredited the moral and political unanimity that stood behind the condemnation of the Holocaust because of its insistence that the same crimes committed in the name of protecting Judaism do not count. The universality of the human values that were offended by the Holocaust is being openly denied and refuted. Nothing could be a greater representation of the disrespect and failure of the efforts of so many people to preserve the solemnity of the Holocaust and all its lessons for future generations. It has taken six decades of absolute terror by Israel in Palestine for it all to unravel into the ghastly scenes we are witnessing today.
Relentless bombings and massacres of the hungry
Rafah, the last refuge of 1.7 million besieged people, is being bombed relentlessly. Nothing can hide the shame of the fact that Israel is targeting all Palestinians in a bid to completely remove them from their lands. Raids, abductions, airstrikes, children recounting horror after horror, starving people being shot at as they rush at food or try and collect water: the human dignity and spirit of an entire people is under attack as we watch them scrounge for the bare minimum while their cultural achievements, arts, and education is completely obliterated. Nowhere is safe now. The Western-backed Zionist forces have marked Palestine out for complete annihilation. Zionism makes sure that all Israelis share in this great sin. The people of this highly militarized, apartheid ethnonationalist regime bring their children to blockades of aid trucks, declaring openly that they mean to starve everyone trapped behind their high-tech walls. Their children are being conditioned to enjoy the suffering that they will soon be called on to perpetrate with their own hands. By that time, however, they will have completely submitted to the depravity that prompts them to revel in the miseries of others and broadcast their crimes with pride on their social media profiles.
We have seen a repeat of every defining image of the Holocaust over these six months— children emaciated from extreme starvation and dehydration, people put through famine and thirst, families separated and kidnapped for beatings and torture, human bodies crushed by bulldozers and maimed in every way imaginable, surgeries conducted without anaesthesia, and so much more. Is this not the utter and complete failure to honour the memory of that calamity? Can it be said that the Holocaust was never ‘over’ in the first place, but merely shifted to other lands far away?
Some voices roar in a morally dead world
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It takes great sacrifices to make the world beat back the information fatigue and culture of apathy and take a good hard look at what is being allowed to happen in Gaza. The brave actions of two American citizens: an unnamed woman in Atlanta, and USAF serviceman Aaron Bushnell were acts of extreme protest that confronted those of us in our fragile bubbles of comfort with the brutality of what “the ruling classes have decided will be normal” (Bushnell’s final message). The masses in the Arab world have expressed their support and respect for Bushnell for paying the ultimate price in such a heroic manner. What Bushnell achieved with his self-immolation was to make us sit up and take notice and to inspire a renewed faith in moral convictions in a world where things are quickly forgotten and caring for others is scorned. None of this makes up for the loss of his brilliant life or the physical anguish he endured in his final moments. It is up to all of us to ensure that his sacrifice did not go in vain.
Arjun Banerjee is a writer and political commentator. He is a postgraduate in English literature from the University of Delhi. He writes about current events and culture
