Column in Dagens Nyheter 2009-03-10

A MEMORY ONLY?
Diminishing the Holocaust

There is no defense of Israel's war in Gaza. Nor is there any justification for the comparison between Israel's violence against the Palestinians and Nazi Germany's extermination of the Jews. Those who still make that comparison either do not know what they are talking about, or they know very well what they are talking about and have hidden intentions.
The least hidden intention is to portray the war in Gaza as a war in which Jews in general and Holocaust survivors in particular should be charged with a special responsibility. Partly because they should in some way be regarded as a party to the war, and partly because they should know better because of the Holocaust.
This is how I have understood the intention behind former Archbishop KG Hammar's decision to withdraw from an arrangement in memory of the Holocaust with reference to the war in Gaza. "In some situations, the memory of the Holocaust cannot be separated from the State of Israel," KG Hammar argued in an interview on radio. He did not elaborate, and he did not want to discuss his decision in public, but the step to claiming that the State of Israel is behaving towards the Palestinians as the Nazis behaved towards the Jews is not far. In the southern Swedish region of Scania, this line of argument was fully appropriated by the vice-president of the Social Democratic women’s organization, Ingalill Bjartén, who during the war in Gaza had said that she was surprised that "Israel, where large sections of the population were exposed to the Nazis, [could] do exactly the same thing as the Nazis". She has since resigned from her post and backed off from her statement, but the comparison lives on.
Perhaps both she and KG Hammar have been influenced by the slide show that has been circulating online for some time, where carefully selected images from the Nazi concentration and death camps have been placed side by side with carefully selected images from Gaza and the occupied West Bank, with the caption that the Holocaust grandchildren are now doing "exactly" the same thing to the Palestinians that the Nazis once did to them.
The whole thing is very skillfully done - and very false, and very deceptive.

The falsehood is undeniable. One need not have the slightest indulgence with Israel's war in Gaza, or with Israel's occupation, or with Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, to establish that the comparison with Nazi Germany's extermination policy and death factories is incorrect. To note this is not to diminish the criticism of Israel. It is to establish a fact. Auschwitz and Gaza are not comparable events.
The deceptive thing about the comparison is that behind it there may be yet another intention, usually more hidden, namely to diminish and distort the memory of the Holocaust.
That the memory of the Holocaust will fade with time is inevitable. The documents will turn yellow, the witnesses will die and the lived experience will become memory and history. Over time, the Holocaust will be compared with other historical events and become the subject of ever new renditions and explanations.
That too is inevitable.
What is not inevitable is that the specific and unique nature of the Nazi genocide will get lost through unreasonable comparisons and conscious lies. Comparing Auschwitz with Gaza, or Israel with Nazi Germany, is not necessarily the same as denying the gas chambers, but the logic is the same. When comparisons paper over or trivialize the core feature of the Holocaust, or in worst case deny that it happened, then this is other else than criticism of Israel and Palestinian solidarity.

The Holocaust is one of the most tumultuous experiences of our civilization, but it is only by understanding what it is that makes it specific that we can understand what it is that makes it universal. What was specific about the Holocaust was its the state-driven and industrially organized selection and genocide of primarily - but not only - Jews. The all-human significance of the Holocaust is its testimony to modern humans’ capability to dehumanize their neighbors – and themselves.
This is reason enough to appalled by having the specific features of the Holocaust being falsified and abused for political purposes. And here I think not only of the purpose of strengthening the support of the Palestinians by comparing the Israelis/Jews to the Nazis, but equally of the purpose of strengthening the support of Israel by comparing the present-day threat to the Jews by the Arab/Muslim anti-Semites with the threat of Nazi Germany.
For the latter purpose, the situation of the Jews in today's Europe has been compared with Germany in the 1930s, the Jews in France were invited (by Ariel Sharon in the summer of 2004) to pack the bags and the PLO leader Yassir Arafat (while he was alive) was painted as a new Hitler. The fact that Iran has a president who denies the Holocaust and wants to obliterate the State of Israel has not surprisingly been portrayed as the prelude to Holocaust II, which is seductive but basically misleading. Iran is not Nazi Germany and the one is not comparable to the other - other than as propaganda. Continuing this propagandistic abuse of the Holocaust on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict, our civilization's perhaps most important collective experience might soon become a remote and disputed memory only.