by Michael Carberry
On 27th January 2025 the world commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz – Birkenau in German-occupied Poland. As almost everyone knows, during the course of the Second World War the Nazi’s murdered some 6 million Jews (over 1 million in Auschwitz alone) as well as innumerable Roma, homosexuals, mentally handicapped, political opponents of the regime, and sundry other ‘undesirables’. Those who watched the ceremonies at the former death camp could not but be moved by the testimonies of the handful of survivors who remain alive – most now in their 80s and 90s – and of the horrific and inhuman treatment they received at the hands of their Nazi captors. Speaker after speaker rightly stressed the importance of remembering what had happened so that “never again” could such an atrocity be permitted to occur. But while some speakers stressed the importance of protecting all vulnerable groups from hatred and discrimination whether based on race, religion or other grounds, I was saddened to hear others who could only see the problem in terms of antisemitism. They pointed to increasing incidents of attacks on Jews or Jewish schools, synagogues or cultural centres around the world, as well as vociferous antagonism towards the State of Israel. While all this is true, the speakers were drawing the wrong conclusions and failing to see the lessons of history.
The attempted extermination of the whole of European Jewry was uniquely horrific because of the scale of the atrocity and the industrial nature of the way the plan was put into effect. It is therefore right that we reserve the term ‘Holocaust’ for that unspeakable crime. And the singling out of the Jewish people for total extermination was indeed driven by historic antisemitism. But that was not the only reason. The fact is, that while the Jews were far and away the largest single group of victims of Nazi war crimes, they were by no means the only ones. The figure of 5 million non-Jews murdered, originally floated by the Jewish Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, is widely circulated, but is disputed by Jewish sources. They claim the 5 million figure was deliberately inflated by Wiesenthal to promote interest in the Holocaust by non-Jews but is now used by right-wing groups to detract from the exceptional nature of the crimes against the Jewish people. The Jewish historian Yehuda Bauer estimates that no more than half a million non-Jews were murdered for racial or ideological reasons in the concentration camps. On the other hand, most modern estimates (as published on the Statista website) give the total number of people, including Jews, killed as a result of Nazi genocidal policies or crimes against humanity (i.e. excluding those killed a result of warfare) as 17 million or approximately 11 million non-Jews including 5.7 million Soviet civilians, 2.7 million Soviet prisoners of war and 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles. Most of these were not killed in the concentration camps – in that respect Bauer may well be correct - but rather by SS death squads in mass shootings or being starved or worked to death in prison camps or forced marches, individual killings or simply brutal ill-treatment. Recognising this fact is not to diminish the exceptional nature of the crimes against the Jewish people in any way but rather to put them in in the context of a much broader atrocity impacting many other peoples across Europe. The Roma too were singled out for total extermination and ultimately even more non-Jews than Jews were murdered. So, we must recognise that antisemitism was not the sole cause of the genocidal policies of the Nazis but rather one element, albeit a uniquely horrific one, of a wider racism derived from their fascist ideology.
Fascism is a much-misused word, often thrown about by those on the far-left of politics to denigrate anyone of even moderately Conservative views. The historian and specialist on Nazi Germany, Sir Ian Kershaw, has said that “trying to define Fascism is like trying to nail jelly to a wall.” Nevertheless, the crimes perpetrated by fascist regimes are such that it is important to understand their ideology. Although there is considerable variation, nearly all fascist movements display a common characteristic: a far-right populist ideology which exploits the idea (often untrue) of national decline, humiliation or victimhood, harking back to a supposed age of greatness and often drawing on myths of racial, cultural, ethnic or national origins to promote militarism, anti-liberalism, the resort to political violence without ethical or legal restraint , the “cleansing” of the nation by targeting of ethnic, religious or immigrant minorities and external expansion. Fascist regimes typically show contempt for democratic norms, press freedoms, the rule of law and basic human rights. Why is this important? The tragic irony is that, 80 years after the horrors of the Holocaust, the fascism which gave rise to it is alive and well and living in Israel itself.
It was noticeable that, among the many world leaders attending the Auschwitz ceremony, including King Charles III, President Macron and Chancellor Scholz, the most glaring absentee apart from Vladimir Putin, was Israeli Prime Minister, Benyamin Netanyahu. The reason, of course, is that Netanyahu is the subject of an international arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The ICC judges were unanimous in their decision that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and his former defence Minister Yoav Gallant, bear responsibility for the war crime of starvation and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. The judges said the lack of food, water, electricity, fuel and specific medical supplies created conditions “calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population in Gaza,” including the deaths of children due to malnutrition and dehydration. They also found that by preventing hospital supplies and medicine from getting into Gaza, doctors were forced to operate, including performing amputations, without anaesthesia or with unsafe means of sedation that led to “great suffering.”
The far-right ultra-nationalist parties who maintain Netanyahu in power with their belief in their God-given right to occupy the lands of Palestinians are little different from those Nazis who believed their membershipof a superior Aryan race gave them the right to usurp the lands of inferior Slavs. The conduct of armed Israeli settler groups in the West Bank, harassing and bullying the Palestinian inhabitants, driving them off their lands at gunpoint and on occasion resorting to violence and even murder with impunity while the Israeli Defence Forces do nothing - all repeatedly documented by British and other international film crews – is eerily reminiscent of the conduct of the Nazi SA paramilitaries towards the Jews in 1930s Germany. And the repeated annexations of more and more Palestinian land with the clear object of ultimately annexing the entire West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip for re-settlement by Israeli Jews is little different from Hitler’s annexation of large parts of Poland and the Soviet Union to create “lebensraum” (living space) for Germans. The callous disregard of international law, the restrictions on press freedom by the exclusion of foreign journalists from the Gaza Strip, and the inhuman treatment of Palestinian civilians during the conduct of the war in Gaza are all reminiscent of the fascist regimes of World War II. The increasing incidents of antisemitism around the world are a regrettable but inevitable reaction to these policies.
This is not to say that Israel is a fascist state. Despite the Netanyahu government’s attempts to meddle with the constitution, Israel remains a rather fragile democracy. Many Israelis, including many of the hostage families, want to see a peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians and have courageously spoken out against the war in Gaza and the expropriations on the West Bank. It is possible that Netanyahu may well be voted out in the not-so-distant future, but the corrosive influence of such fascist ideology and policies on Israeli society is only too evident and is increasingly driving liberal Israelis to pack their bags and quit the country altogether.
Apologists for the Israeli government will of course cite the barbarous attacks by the Islamist terrorist group Hamas on 7 October, the brutal murders of 1,139 Israelis including women and children, the seizure of about 250 hostages and the fact that Israel has a right to defend itself. While no reasonable person would seek to justify the horrific atrocities committed by Hamas, and Hamas leaders were also rightly indicted by the ICC, these attacks did not occur in a vacuum. Hamas was established in 1987 during the first “intifada” against the (by then twenty-year-old) Israeli occupation and was initially discreetly supported by Israel as a counterbalance to the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in a cynical attempt at ‘divide and rule’ which grievously backfired. Hamas was able to win the support of ordinary Palestinians and supplant the PLO to gain control of Gaza by its campaign of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation. So, while Israel certainly did not create Hamas, or Hezbollah, or Islamic [MC1] State, there is little doubt that the policies of the State of Israel over many years, particularly since the Six-day war in 1967, have created the conditions for such groups to emerge and to flourish. Moreover, the current cease-fire and exchange of hostages and Palestinian detainees was brokered by the Qataris and the Biden administration a year ago. So, not only did the Israeli government fail to protect its citizens from the 7th October attacks, their grotesquely disproportionate response with the killing of more than 47,500 mainly innocent civilians, including Israeli hostages, another 111,600 injured and the almost total destruction of Gaza, has not only failed in its stated objective of destroying Hamas and prevented or delayed the safe return of the hostages, but has merely increased support for Hamas amongst young Palestinians, boosted its recruitment and gone far to make Israel a pariah state. Netanyahu’s security policy has thus been a total failure.
The Israeli Prime Minister is now pinning his hopes on his dear friend and fellow fascist, Donald Trump, newly returned to the White House. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric, his contempt for the rule of law by pardoning some 1,200 individuals convicted for their involvement in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and dismissing all the outstanding cases, his spate of often illegal Executive Orders, his attempt to sanction the ICC judges, his brutal cessation of humanitarian aid programmes, his targeting of migrants, his threatening and bullying behaviour towards Canada and Mexico and fantasies about annexing Canada, Greenland or the Panama Canal, are all classic examples of fascist behaviour. Fortunately, more sensible heads are prevailing in the United States with no less than 19 States challenging his actions in the courts; and the international community have given his imperialist ambitions short-shrift.
In 1945, As the Auschwitz ceremony reminded us, all the fascist powers were defeated. Germany, Italy and Japan lost not only the lands they had briefly conquered but a substantial part of their pre-war territories. Horrified by the destruction and suffering they had inflicted on humankind; the other nations of the world came together in the San Franscico Conference to create a rules-based international order where conflicting interests would be settled by negotiation and international law rather than military force. Despite the efforts of neo-fascists like Trump, Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin, most countries remain committed to the principles of the UN Charter.
In 1945 fascism was defeated, not just because of the military might of the Allies but also because of the resilience and courage of millions of victims in the occupied countries, Jews and non-Jews alike. So, what does this imply for the Palestinians? One speaker at the Auschwitz commemoration pointed out that the Nazis had tried to exterminate the Jews, but that today Jews were now more numerous, stronger and more confident of their identity than before the Holocaust partly because of the existence of the State of Israel. What the speaker failed to acknowledge, is that what was true for the Jews may also be true for the Palestinians. The last few days since the cease-fire and exchange of hostages has seen thousands of Palestinians flooding back to their devasted homes, determined to rebuild and prevent Israel or Trump from taking their homeland. The nightmare of Gaza may well prove to be for the Palestinians what the holocaust was for the Jews - a defining experience which reinforces their identity as a people and their determination to stand strong in their own land.
So, what does the Holocaust teach us? Firstly, as the world saw in the 1930s, failure to stand up to fascist bullies like Netanyahu and Trump spells disaster for tens of thousands of innocent human beings. Secondly, that in in Gaza and the occupied territories, the fascist policies pursued by Netanyahu and his cronies are doomed to failure. And finally, that the Palestinians will never give up and there can be no peace or security for Israel without freedom, security, justice and dignity for the Palestinians in their own state.
Comments