Holocaust Comparisons Seek to ‘Exceptionalize’ Hamas Violence, Not Contextualize It

In the 75 years since Israel was founded in 1948 there have been numerous civilian massacres by both Israelis and Palestinians - a context that has been erased in recent reporting on the killings of hundreds of Jewish civilians in towns on the Gaza border, a Jewish peace activist told Sputnik.

At least 260 bodies have been discovered at the site of the Supernova music festival near Sderot, an Israeli town on the border with Gaza that came under attack on Saturday after Hamas militants breached the border fence and poured into the Israeli countryside.

Between Sderot, several other towns that were attacked, and the massive barrage of rocket strikes on Israeli cities across the region, more than 1,000 Israelis have been killed by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another militant group in Gaza.

The massacre at Supernova was widely reported as the deadliest single day for Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, when the Nazis systematically exterminated roughly 6 million European Jews - two-thirds of the continent’s Jewish population.

The assault, dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, came after months of increased violent confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank, including at the Temple Mount where the Al-Aqsa mosque is located.

Israel has responded by declaring a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, severing all electricity, water, and fuel connections to the densely populated territory, and mounting a relentless bombing campaign that has killed more than 1,100 in Gaza.

Ariel Gold, executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a multi-faith peace group, told Radio Sputnik’s Political Misfits on Wednesday that comparisons to the Holocaust were inappropriate and designed to “exceptionalize” the massacre, which is just one event in a conflict that has been replete with mass civilian deaths.

“I think that multiple things can be true at once. I know it’s a gut punch to me. As you said, [I] lost a lot of family members to the Holocaust, that this was the largest single-day loss [of Jewish lives] since then. So that, I think, speaks to Jewish pain, which is very real right now, including Jewish-American pain. That said, the references, as though there is a comparison about the circumstances, I think has to be really carefully not done, and I think when we do talk about that death toll, we have to frame it within Jewish pain, which is a very real thing.”

“At the same time, I’ve heard Hamas compared to - ‘they’re just like the Nazis, they are the Nazis’ - as well as compared to ISIS*. And I think those not only dehumanize Palestinians and distract from the current situation, which is very real, on the ground, but also take away from that Jewish pain, which is about loss of life.”

“That doesn’t have to do with the call for justice and the root causes of this conflict. Instead, it means that revenge is something that nobody benefits from, and in terms of Jewish safety, revenge makes the Jewish people far less safe - specifically the Israeli people. I mean, what is occurring right now, and what is about to escalate, we can only acknowledge as genocide against the people of Gaza, will not make anybody between the [Jordan] river and the [Mediterranean] sea, including Israelis, any safer and it will not advance peace in the region in any way, shape, or form.”

"So if we’re to care about Jewish pain and Jewish safety, then we have to act in the interests of that, which are in the interest of all people, which means pursuing justice and equality, freedom and dignity, for Palestinians,” Gold said.

Addressing the cycle of made-then-disproven claims in the media over the past few days about the killings in Israeli border towns, Gold asked: “Isn’t the reality horrific enough? I mean, the atrocities are bad enough, why do people have to make stuff up?”

“I think there’s a real attempt to exceptionalize the violence committed by the Hamas militants. And the reality is atrocities like that are most mundane - as Hannah Arendt said, the ‘banality of evil’ - and certainly has nothing to do with one’s religion, ethnicity, nationality. We know very well - including Israeli soldiers, including during the Nakba, look at Sabra and Shatila, look at ordinary Germans in the Holocaust - all people are capable of committing atrocities. And there is nothing exceptional about that. Rather, it’s a horrific human condition” that she noted in this instance was set in motion by “such loss of hope, such despair.”

Asked about potential models for reconciliation, Gold noted that peace could only come through complete social and legal equality and coming to terms with the crimes of the past. Unfortunately, such developments seem increasingly far away in the region.

“The first thing we need is a ceasefire, the obvious first thing we need is to stop the killing. We need the ceasefire. And then we need to begin with exactly what [US President] Joe Biden did not say yesterday,” she said, recalling Biden’s use of the phrase “rules-based international order.”

“You have to note when he says that that he’s avoiding international law, because ‘rules order’ when he speaks of it is whatever he wants it to be. It’s whatever the US wants to do in Afghanistan; it’s whatever Israel wants to do, the genocide they want to commit in Gaza; whereas international law has boundaries, there are actually rules of war. I myself am a pacifist, my organization, we are pacifists, but there are, so we can begin there. And then there really needs to be a truth and reconciliation commission. We need to get the injustice, the past injustice [out in the open]. And it’s very simple: we need equal rights and dignity and humanity for all people from the river to the sea.”

However, she noted that the opposite trend was happening in Israel.

“What we have seen over the past decade is really the decimation of the Israeli peace movement and the Israeli left, and we have watched Israeli society embrace far-right, very racist ideology. That’s how Israel ended up with this far-right, extremist coalition that has Kahanists in it. So I certainly think we’re going to see gelling like post-9/11, but that isn’t anything new there. In this case, they’ve now moved from the coalition government to the unity government by bringing Benny Gantz in. But it’s not like Benny Gantz, prior to this, was reasonable. Prior to this, when Benny Gantz ran for prime minister, he bragged about bombing Gaza back to the stone age when he was in charge of the military. So I don’t think you can really make the 9/11 comparison because we’re looking at a society that is already suffering from that,” she explained.

*Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS) is a terrorist organization outlawed in Russia and many other states.