Zionists are unleashing the same horrors on Palestinians that the Nazis once heaped on the Jewish people.
Maung Zarni
I am a student of and activist against genocide, that is, all genocides, whatever the name of the perpetrators or the victims.
In the significant past, my focus on genocide has been out of necessity. My own country of birth, Myanmar – for whose freedom from military rule I was prepared to give my life – is in the dock at the International Court of Justice.
Its state-organised and popularly supported mass atrocities against the largely Muslim Rohingya people are well-documented and legally deemed in breach of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
I freed myself from the Pavlovian patriotism of “my country right or wrong”: genocide is my absolute red line.
So, last month’s 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation by the Soviet Red Army in 1945 was of natural interest to me, just as similar genocide remembrance events, whether they commemorate Srebrenica, Rwanda, the Rohingya or Cambodia.
But my stomach turned when I heard the words of Tova Friedman, a Polish-born Jewish American who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, as a five-and-half-year-old.
A five-minute video clip on Time magazine featured her address to a distinguished gathering of several dozen fellow survivors, and a dozen heads of European states – including UK’s King Charles III, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump’s Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff.
Now an age-wisened 85-year-old, Friedman shared horrific memories of the snarling German guard dogs baring their razor-sharp canine teeth, of naked women prisoners, and of the black smoke billowing out of the chimneys of the four crematoriums at the vast camp.
She talked about the slightly older girls of six or seven – some barefoot and most shrunk by “starvation” – marching, while shivering and crying, through the snow-covered path to the gas chambers.
Auschwitz to Gaza
As I listened to Friedman’s speech with growing numbness, I said to myself, ‘How could any human being hear these stories of horror and not feel excruciating pain and genuine compassion for the victims of Nazi genocide?’
In all four of my visits to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, I had heard similarly horrendous tales from my Polish guides.
In one of those visits, while walking through the women’s barrack – where prisoners deemed too ill and too incapable of producing any slave labour for the joint projects of the SS and German corporations were simply left to die – I ran my palm on the wooden bed floor of a triple-bunked bed, then covered in visible layers of dust as if my empathetic hand would touch their vanished souls.
I didn’t ask whether they were Jewish or Roma or Sinti or Polish partisan fighters.
Alas, obsessed only with the victimhood of her own ranks – the Jews – there was absolutely no display of compassion for other victims in Friedman’s speech: of not only the Nazi genocide but all post-Holocaust genocides, and in particular, the textbook genocide Israel is perpetrating against 2.3 million Palestinians.
From talking about the horrors of the Nazi genocide she experienced first-hand, Friedman abruptly switched gears and told the emotionally-charged audience about the defiant spirit she had discovered at Auschwitz.
She then proceeded to repeat the tired and old line of Israeli propaganda, linking the creation of Israel and the Holocaust: “Our revenge is to build the strong Jewish state. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East … fighting for its very existence.”
I listened to the clip repeatedly to make sense of her words and to make sure that I, an anti-genocide campaigner supporting Palestinians’ right to live and raise their families in peace, wasn’t reading anything she did not intend to mean or convey in her remembrance address.
But the only two words that sprang to mind were Kafkaesque and Orwellian.
The message she was driving home from the podium in front of the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum – and against the props of the rail track, the Nazi SS administrative building and a cattle car – signified the complete delusion that Israel is currently projecting.
That delusion is framed and expressed as a perpetual struggle against the “existential threat” of a world once again soaked in the fear and loathing of Jews.
For all practical purposes, it was a lame effort by Friedman to frame 15 months of genocide and 57 years of illegal occupation of the UN-recognised Palestine as “self-defence”.
As a matter of fact, political Zionism as a settler colonial project was hatched among Eastern European Jews in the early 1880s. That was five decades before the Nazis came to power in 1933, and 60 years before Auschwitz’s first gas chamber began its operation with the Soviet prisoners of war as its first victims.
Just a few weeks ago in Bethlehem, the renowned Palestinian theologian and activist, Rev. Munther Isaac, perceptively told us – a visiting group of genocide scholars and writers from Japan, South Korea, Canada, the US, UK and Myanmar – which I led, “Israel is a settler colony built on the land with indigenous peoples. Settler colony, by definition, necessitates ethnic cleansing.”
He laid bare the inherently expansionist nature of the state of Israel, pointing out how it continues to seize land in Syria and southern Lebanon through wars of choice.
Banality of evil
This brings me to the deeply disturbing taboo that any individual of conscience has carefully avoided for fear of being labelled “antisemitic”.
That is, challenging the elevation of Jewish “survivors” as if they were saintly figures who command moral authority on mass atrocities and industrial-scale organised human cruelty, in particular Israel and its institutionalised apartheid, sadistic cruelty and international crimes against the native Arabs.
I have a photographic memory of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
About 150 metres away from the podium where Friedman gave her televised address is the SS barrack where the Nazi doctors murdered scores of child inmates by injecting phenol into them.
She talked about starvation as a matter of SS policy, of children marked for gas chambers and their “shrunken” bodies.
And yet Friedman chose not to mention today’s leaders of her strong Jewish country openly declaring the state’s intent to starve the entire 2.3 million Palestinians in the open-air prison of Gaza and exterminating 17,000 Palestinian children as a targeted sub-category of victim population.
Nor did she have anything to say about her adopted country, the US, giving Israel “complete support” in its project to annihilate the Palestinians – as the famous Jewish Israeli academic Lee Mordechai of the Hebrew University put it in his dialogue with our international delegation to Palestine three weeks ago.
Friedman is evidently able to identify and articulate the “moral vacuum” of the West and Europe, which led to the victimisation of the Nazi-occupied European Jews in the 1930s and ’40s.
And yet, she looked the other way while ‘democratic’ Israel destroyed most of Gaza in the last 15 months, subsidised by her taxpayer’s dollars.
She apparently shares Israeli leaders’ view that the worldwide outcry and protests against their crimes in Palestine are an expression of “rampant antisemitism”, a global manifestation of prejudice, suspicion and extremism against the Jews.
In 1995, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC interviewed the late Louis Walinsky, the former president of the World Jewish Congress, who was in charge of vocational training programmes for thousands of Jewish survivors in Germany and Austria in 1947-48.
In the interview, Walinsky shared a “distressing” characterisation of the survivors of the Nazi camps – that they were “not the best people”. That is, not the most morally virtuous lot.
Quoting one person with whom he worked very closely in running these training programmes, Walinsky said, “But you know what he (Jacob Olaseky) told me once, though? It’s very distressing.”
He said, “Louie, the best people in the (Nazi) camps did not survive. We who survived were not the best people. You know what he meant? The people who stole other people’s rations, you know, who really managed at the expense of others. The abnegating, the kind, the gentle, the good. They are the ones who did not survive. He felt this very, very strongly.”
Of Russian Jewish ancestry, Louis was born in London in 1908, and, at four, immigrated to New York with his anarchist revolutionary father, studied economics at Cornell University, and taught as a teacher in Brooklyn, New York.
During World War II, Louis served on the US War Production Board and was subsequently sent to Germany as the director in charge of the vocational training programme for the “displaced (Jewish) persons or DPs” in the US section of the Allied Occupied Germany – in Munich – in 1947.
He was deeply involved in transporting thousands of vocationally trained Jewish refugees and machinery to Palestine before and after the state of Israel was established in May 1948.
I knew him as a very dear friend whom I called with great affection ‘Uncle Lou’. He presided over my wedding in Washington DC, playing the role of my surrogate father, and assisted me in every way he could in my Free Burma activism.
I know he would be turning in his grave over the undue moral elevation of survivors who continue to tell the world their Zionist lies at the expense of Palestinians.
The late national poet of Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish, called Jewish Israelis “victorious victims” – people who, once in a position of strength, power and wealth, consciously allow themselves to morph into genocidal victimisers.
As Uncle Lou recounted, “not the best people”.
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c. TRTWorld
