Lest They Forget...

Yesterday was International Holocaust Memorial Day, marking 67 years since the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in Poland was liberated, and when the Norwegian Prime Minister publicly apologised for the role his country had played in the arrest and deportation of Jews after the Nazis invaded.  Of course it wasn't just the Jews who were imprisoned and murdered during the Holocaust - political dissenters, Communists, intellectuals, homosexuals, Gypsies and many others were also systematically targeted and murdered by the Nazi regime - but due to the sheer numbers of Jews who were exterminated in the camps and the liquidization of the ghettos the two have become almost synonymous.

And yet while the vast majority of the civilised world stood and remembered the atrocities inflicted upon the Jewish population all those years ago, it seems the Powers-that-Be in Israel seem to be suffering from a prolonged and ongoing attack of collective short-term memory loss.  Now this isn't intended in any way to diminish what happened in the Holocaust or anything - I've never understood those idiots who claim the Holocaust never happened and when I visited Dachau last year the sheer futility of the loss of life was utterly overwhelming - but the attitude of the Israelis as a nation has always struck me as being faintly hypocritical and yet very few people ever stand up and point out the double standards.  Those self-same Western leaders who wring their hands in public and apologise for events which happened seventy-odd years ago have not once ever called the Israelis out on their policy of land grabbing; have never once publicly compared the wall they have built around Bethlehem and the rest to the walls which sprung up around the ghettos of Lodz, of Krakow.  The ghettoisation of the Jews stands out as a black mark in the history of the twentieth century while the ghettoisation of the Palestinian people remains un-discussed.

When the UN Partition of 1947 was drawn up, it allowed for a Jewish state and an Arab one; Israel and Palestine were destined to sit side by side on the map.  There was always contention - the holy city of Jerusalem, for example, has been fought over by the Jews, Muslims and Christians since time immemorial - but nevertheless there were to be two states, two nations, sanctified and enshrined in law.  The very same nations which interfered to bring about the state of Israel now stand by and do nothing as they continue to encroach and build on land that doesn't belong to them and which legally they do not own.  Britain, America and the rest say nothing when Netanyahu and his cronies decide they're going to build another 2000 homes on occupied land, or that they're going to extend their ridiculous wall another few hundred yards into Palestinian people; they say nothing when hundred of thousands of men, women and children are denied access to health care and are living in the bleakest poverty, except to condemn those who take the only course of action they feel is open to them.  I don't condone what the bombers and the shooters do, but I think perhaps I understand their motives: Israel refuses to negotiate with them and they are denied any recognition by the rest of the political world and so desperate men resort to desperate measures.

On the 27th December 2008 the Israelis bombarded Gaza and murdered 1,300 Palestinian people.  Approximately 6,537 have been killed since the year 2000; since 1948 over 1.5 million Palestinian men, women and children have died.  While this may pale against the approximately 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered during the years of the Holocaust, nevertheless it begs the question: where is the sense of outrage and anger?  In 1945 the world looked at the ghettos and concentration camps, the forced marches and the mass graves and said "never again": how many more times must we say "never again"?  How long will it be before the rest of the world rises up and puts its collective foot down over Israel's policy of murder and containment, when they of all people - with their long memories and their shared history - should look at what they're doing and realise that they are perpetuating almost the very same deprivations and misery which they and their ancestors were subjected to during the war?

The answer, clearly, is never.  America fears the backlash of its large number of Jewish voters and, anyway, don't they and the rest of the Western world sneakily suspect the Palestinians of being nothing more than Arab terrorists, what with their bombs and their guns and shiz?  There was a hugely interesting article in the Independent today (here) about how the present (and perhaps the future) stands no chance when the past has such a sway over the state of Israel - thousands more Palestinians look as if they'll be moved from their land so Israel can build a park to glorify some conquest of King David's three thousand years ago that may or may not have happened.  Even the Palestinians themselves believe the Israeli leftist Miko Peled (whose father was a legendary Israeli general) when he says the state of Israel wants to "eliminate the existence of people who live on their land to solidify the myth of a glorious past".  It's not really surprising given that the self-same President of the USA who told them they they deserve their own state subsequently vetoed their demand for statehood when they approached the United Nations; wouldn't you feel a little confused and a little hacked off about the state of affairs (or the lack of a state to have affairs about?)

But Israel will keep building, the Palestinians will keep dying (as will the Israelis, when the bombings start again) and the rest of the world will keep looking away, ignoring the similarities between what's going on in Gaza and the West Bank and the events they come together to collectively flagellate themselves over once a year.  What happened in the Holocaust was more than despicable; there aren't enough words to describe the horrors of that catastrophic event or how, even now, you can stand in what used to be a concentration camp and weep at the pointlessness and the horror of it all.  But what's happening in Israel right now is equally despicable and horrific, and it's about time the Western politicians stood up and brought the Israelis to heel before yet another systematic extermination of a people is complete.  We went charging into the Balkans when the Serbs were being slaughtered; how can we stand by and do nothing as thousands of Palestinians are turned out of their homes and treated as less than human?