Did we learn from the Holocaust? Apparently, not enough.

By: Ricardo Israel - 05/11/2023

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There is a war in Gaza and a global war against the Jews, says the Wall Street Journal in an editorial.

It is not only an issue of Judeophobia, but what is happening today in higher education in the United States is also an issue of national security, since, just as Europe found itself not many years ago with the Islamic State-ISIS attracting its youth, it would not be unusual for jihadists to graduate from these universities. Furthermore, not only SS and Nazis participated in the Holocaust, but also volunteers from different countries. And they did it for pleasure.

The thing about the United States is surprising because it is about the United States, although in Jewish history great tragedies came when they seemed to feel safe. It happened in 1492, with the Sephardic people of Spain, massively expelled from where they had lived even before Christ, just for not wanting to convert to another religion, even my family. It now happened in Dagestan, with Muslims from the Russian North Caucasus who arrived at an airport, and with a false rumor they advanced to a plane that had flown from Tel-Aviv, in replica of the pogroms that so characterized that part of the world.

There were massive demonstrations shouting death and gas for Jews not only in Muslim countries, but throughout the world, especially in the Western world, including inflammatory words from politicians, although it remains difficult to understand why in London, New York (the second city with the most Jews in the world) and other cities there were more people than in several Arab capitals.

What happens in the USA is especially striking, since, according to the FBI, Jews represent only 2.4% of the population, but they account for more than 60% of attacks motivated by religion. It should not be entirely surprising, since a country as small as Israel is the one that receives the most condemnations in the UN as well as in its Human Rights Council, over known violators.

The seriousness of what is happening is demonstrated in the coexistence in their Judeophobia of bearded old men reciting the Koran with young feminists and LGBTIQ discriminated against, with the doubt if the last two groups will know what would await them if they lived governed by the Hamas that were supporting. For the rest, this relationship almost ensures that anti-Semitism is transmitted from generation to generation as the oldest and most enduring phobia.

What is happening forces us to rethink what we learned from the Holocaust, if we learned anything.

Throughout my adult life I always thought that it had been a unique event in the history of humanity, since for the first time a country had the resources to try to eliminate a people from the face of the earth. And they were close, they devastated European Jewry to such an extent that the number of Jews in the world still does not reach the number before that war.

Matanzas have always existed, before and after, also now. There have been genocides, and the Nazis themselves acted against other ethnic, sexual and disabled minorities, but not on the magnitude and with the will of the elimination of the Jews, so much so that they attracted thousands of people from other countries who also hated them. It was so unique that many prefer to use the Hebrew word Shoah to refer to the tragedy.

Until now, I never thought it could be repeated, but perhaps what is happening today in the streets of the world is a live and direct teaching of the evil that affected a country like Germany. It was not sudden, but the consequence of what had been prepared by the various accusations that were made for centuries, and before the death camps, there were many words of dehumanization of all Jews, even those who did not feel part of the people as well as those who did not know they were, since they only had some distant ancestor.

We know that this horror bequeathed us the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and now, we are also witnesses that Judeophobia remains in force, not as something marginal, but massive. I would like to think that it will not happen again, but it is not only denialism that makes me doubt, since the number of people on social networks, in the media and in the marches who argue another particular denial, that the horrors in Israel of the Hamas terrorists did not occur, they did not rape women nor decapitate babies. Not even the existence of 229 hostages seems to convince them, nor does the television interview with the important leader Ghazi Hamad, who at the end of October declared regarding the massacre of civilians: “We will do it again and again until Israel is annihilated.”

On November 1, 2005, the UN General Assembly did something that is not usual for that organization, since it designated January 27 as the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims, a day that corresponded to the entry of Soviet troops, freeing them from Auschwitz.

Nazi Germany had managed to industrialize death and was the culmination of attacks and inquisitions that had normalized violence against Jews, simply for being Jews. In Germany, it was enough for the majority to applaud or just remain silent to reach the “final solution.”

If one sees university students and ordinary people in the pro-Hamas demonstrations, the Holocaust showed us what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, that is, the terrible truth that those monsters were not people from another planet, but as it was demonstrated to them. during the Eichmann trial, anyone could become one, as has also been shown in studies of torturers. In the case of the concentration camps, neighbors participated in the Brigades, simple inhabitants of nearby villages, who dedicated some day of the week to collaborating in the extermination.

The Holocaust taught us that everything begins before, with the loss of all dignity and humanity, the idea that those who are going to die do not deserve to live, that is, total contempt preceded the gas. It was also learned that we must react, that we must not allow habituation, which has generated, for example, the discourse that Israel does not deserve to exist.

In Spain it was religion. For Germany it was race and now, it is Israel, whose very existence bothers, is considered unacceptable and not only for the Ayatollahs of Iran, but also for those who march or speak on social networks showing their ignorance of history and facts real, since one of the characteristics of our time is the illusion of knowledge, of those who ignore their lack of knowledge and give their opinion as specialists, after having read 10 lines on some topic on their cell phone, just as Humberto Eco denounced.

It is a fatal arrogance that is suffered today by so many people who do not even know that they use slogans that come from the Nazis and that tsarist pamphlet known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was also learned that totalitarian forces can come to power through the popular vote and grow stronger until they reach impressive levels of popularity, as happened with Hitler.

Today it is not about Hitler, but something different, the Judeophobia that is born from the anti-Israel discourse of university activists and the biased statements that see Israel as the only culprit, as happens with progressive presidents like Petro or Boric, two of the several that have been valued by Hamas these days.

Finally, we also learned from the Holocaust that it was the culmination of violence to impose ideas, present in so many movements, which from the left to the right also use fascist methods such as cancellations or angry cyclists to attack those who think differently, which which recalls the phrase attributed to Churchill, who, when responding to a journalistic query, would have said in the USA that in the future it would be those who described themselves as anti-fascists who would use the methods and symbols of fascism.

It is true that a lot of damage is done when the singularity of what happened is eliminated, calling any massacre with many victims a “holocaust”, and, above all, with its trivialization. But it would be a mistake not to learn from the past.

To begin with, the mixture of ignorance and evil that is seen on the streets coexisting with the good will of many and the naivety of others is not surprising. Also stupidity, which recalls Einstein's phrase that he was not so sure that the universe was infinite as that stupidity was.

It is not the defense of the Palestinians or the unbearable situation of those living in Gaza, sentiments that are shared by the pro-peace movement that has always existed in Israel. In fact, almost sarcastically, some of its most enthusiastic supporters live in those collective villages called Kibbutz, like those that were attacked, and among the hostages are several men and women who are activists for that cause, who, without going any further , organized the public event where a Jewish extremist murdered Isaac Rabin. That musical festival where so many young people were murdered and kidnapped by Hamas, just for being there, was also a pro-peace act.

Peace is not the issue of the protesters who shout their hatred of Jews. It's something else. It is the defense of Hamas and the refusal to feel sympathy for the victims of October 7, Israelis, citizens of other countries, and those with dual passports, in what the terrorist group called the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” after the mosque. of Jerusalem near the Wailing Wall.

Those who feel sorry for what is happening in Gaza do not always realize that it is the consequence of something, and that that something was initiated by Hamas in 2007, long before 7/10, with its coup d'état against the Palestinian Authority and the assassination. of its officials. Israel had already withdrawn in 2005, taking with it the army all the Jews, living and dead, so, since that year, it has been a land free of them, which perhaps happened for the first time in the history of that strip.

All productive investments were left, but Hamas destroyed them as well as the buildings where synagogues had functioned. From that day on, rockets and suicide attacks began to fall in Israel. Iran's support made it worse, and not only Hamas is there, but other terrorist forces such as Islamic Jihad and other minor ones are active, so much so that today the hostages are mostly in the hands of Hamas, but four other organizations also have them. .

The truth is that two needs can coexist, and the destruction of Hamas will hopefully allow the second, the creation of the Palestinian State, in peace, to fulfill the original proposal of the two States, one side by side, not one instead of the other. . The Palestinian partner has been missing, since many peace offers have been rejected, not only the UN one of 1948, which was responded to by the invasion of neighboring Arab countries. The Camp David wars were also rejected after the 1956 and 1967 wars by the Arab League, and directly by the Palestinians, with the proposals of Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak. With several Arab countries at peace with Israel, the problem is not so much that the Palestinians accept its existence and more that it accepts Israel as the only Jewish country in the world. That seems to be the stumbling block, the unacceptable, accepting Jews as Jews, whether they are religious or not, and a significant percentage in Israel is not.

Many of the people supporting Hamas in the protests probably never worried about the deaths in Syria or Yemen; nor the Kurds or the Armenians, and apparently, he has never been interested in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who were expelled from Arab countries when the State of Israel was recreated in 1948. Neither did the UN, perhaps because those people were received and incorporated into the new State.

Perhaps they have not been concerned about the situation of Palestinian refugees in those Arab countries where they are still considered citizens in transit, despite the fact that several generations born there have already passed, without them being granted citizenship or being able to work in various professions. Perhaps they are not even aware of this situation, which rarely appears in the media.

With all of the above it is difficult not to conclude in the old Judeophobia, at least major brand hypocrisy. Perhaps not many realize that the Jews were once again the canary in the mine, the one that warns of possible misfortunes on the way. Perhaps they do not realize that, if Israel is defeated, medieval Islam is not going to be satisfied with this, but is going to try to reach a Europe that no longer fights to maintain its traditions, furthermore, it is not sustainable that they only want cut off the heads of the Jews, but they also want to cut off the heads of other infidels, which includes those progressives in the streets of Europe and the USA, whom they also hate, whatever they do marching in favor of Hamas.

It is not that one has not perceived the existence of anti-Jewish sentiments before. In my professional life, in Chile I also felt it at times in the places where I was, in universities, in the Constitutional Court, in the Court of Appeals of San Miguel, where there was a minister who, when we were part of the same court, gave me some I commented on a caricature of myself, reminiscent of Nazi drawings with a hooked nose. And he was a judge.

I felt Judeophobia in what surrounded my departure from the University of Chile, which is why I took the State of Chile before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and as it was a public fact, as a former government minister told me, which for him was incomprehensible something that I could not answer, the reason for the total silence of the Jewish community.

The truth is that one mistakenly felt it was a private fact, and since I have never liked to victimize myself, I never made use of my public appearance for personal denunciation.

Therefore, only now will I tell what happened to me when I visited Turkey on behalf of the Chilean Constitutional Court, since the Turk was turning 50. At the official dinner, President Erdogan came to greet all the tables. When he shook my hand, I proudly told him about my grandfather who was born in the modern-day Turkish city of Izmir, when it was part of the Ottoman Empire. He put on a bad face when I told him that I was Jewish, and turned into annoyance when he saw my last name on the lapel, turning around and leaving me, talking to myself, with the type of gesture that I had already seen before and that is probably felt only by those affected.

A government official gave me an explanation, saying that the president should leave, and I did not mention it to the minister who accompanied me since he probably did not even realize what happened, which, by the way, was not his fault.

I think it has always been present, the new thing is that now no one hides it. It's in the streets, it's everywhere. Unlike something as minor as what happened to me, and which I described, no one hides it now. The beast came out of its cage.

On September 15, Jews celebrated the 5,784th new year in continuous history, something that even the Chinese probably find difficult to say. Many lies appear and one of the worst is denying the historical ties of the Jewish people with the land of Israel. Since there has never been another State other than ancient and modern Israel, and only since Oslo, this agreement with Israel has given autonomy to a Palestinian government entity, limited by security considerations, but which has not been granted to them. by any Arab empire or country, not even Jordan when it ruled over the West Bank or Egypt over Gaza, occupied from 1948 to 1967, with the argument that since Palestine was the entire territory, both the British and the UN proposals spoke of a State Jewish and another Arab, non-Palestinian. Something that I hope will be corrected, requiring the agreement of two wills in this regard.

But now the issue is Judeophobia, and although there is notable concern, I do not notice among Jews living in the West the response that the situation deserves. By the way, unlike the past, the Holocaust is not repeatable, because today Israel exists as a last defense and refuge for all Jews, but I do not notice that there are reactions in places like the elite universities of the USA, where there are numerous Jewish professors. and so are philanthropists who give away their money. The response must not be individual, but collective, and strong, as appropriate in democracy, starting with the political world and going to the courts of justice to enforce the law, hold responsible the university authorities and those who deploy hate speech in the classrooms. . I don't think anyone will do for the Jews what they don't do for them first.

It is necessary to repeat good historical memory, since what happens deserves to be clear about who shouts against it, the few who shout in favor, and the majority who remain silent. It is a warning bell that deserves to be heard.

@israelzipper

Ph.D. in Political Science, Lawyer, former presidential candidate (Chile, 2013)

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».