Yossi Schwartz the ISL the section of the RCIT in Israel/Occupied Palestine, 20.04.2023
This year, the central theme of Holocaust Remembrance Day marked in Israel will be the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
“A recent survey by the Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Victims revealed that 22% of the supported survivors had to give up products and services they needed, including clothing, medical tests, absorbent products, electrical appliances, home maintenance and other services. Starting next month, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, as part of its ongoing support for the Foundation for the Welfare of Holocaust Victims, will donate approximately $100,000 to subsidize the electricity bills of approximately 300 Holocaust survivors” [1]
The question to ask is what is the connection between Israel and the Jewish Holocaust?
On the Passover Eve in the Warsaw Ghetto, on April 19, 1943, explosions were heard. They were the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—the single largest Jewish resistance to the Nazis during the Holocaust. The rebels were members of the Polish Stalinist party, Bundists (non-Zionist Jewish socialists), Zionists of both the right and left, religious and secular. The majority fought under the banner of the Socialist Zionist Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB, trans. Jewish Combat Organization), while a smaller group of fighters were aligned with the revisionist-Zionist Żydowski Związek Wojskowy (ZZW, trans. Jewish Military Union). The ZOB had weapons from the Polish resistance outside the ghetto. The Uprising’s commanders were aware of their impending defeat but they wanted to die fighting with self-respect. The known commander Mordechai Anielewicz, wrote: “Only a few individuals will hold out. All the rest will be killed sooner or later. The die is cast” [2] The Uprising was especially resonant in Jewish communities around the world. Because of its historical resonance, the memory of the Ghetto Uprising became a valuable political commodity, and it has been manipulated to fit into the Zionist manipulation.
A fake Zionist-Israeli narrative of the Uprising emerged after WWII. The Zionist narrative emphasized the role of the Socialist Zionists at the expense of all others, excluding the many Bundists, members of the Stalinist party, and others. This allowed the Zionist movement to adopt the Uprising as its own in the framework of the Zionist war for a Jewish state in Palestine from both antiquity and the modern period. In the real world, the Zionists in Palestine and in other countries did not send even one bullet to the rebels in the Warsaw ghetto. They saved the bullets for the massacres and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. The names of the Zionists who collaborated with the Nazis like Kastner and the Yudenrat were rehabilitated or hidden while the majority of the European Jews who did not fight the Nazis were categorized as undeserving of respect or recognition as they went “like sheep to the slaughter”.
In the real world, most Jews could not fight the Nazis as they did not have the leadership ready to fight the Nazis. Some leaders like Begin escaped Poland. Some collaborated with the Nazis. Others told the Jews that the storm will pass.
The narrative of the Holocaust through the Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began to shift in 1961 after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, as a more encompassing picture of the Holocaust began to take hold. Nevertheless, by that time the Uprising had been firmly established as a powerful symbol of the Holocaust and the Zionist movement.
The “Zionization” of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took place through 3 stages: first, through the presenting of the Ghetto Fighters as “New Jews”, unlike the rule of Jewish passivity of the “old Jews”. Second, through the connection of the uprising to similar, militaristic myths of Jewish history, narratives that reshaped defeats into moral victories and “heroic deaths”; and third, by establishing the Uprising as a Zionist event led by “honorary Israelis”, inspired by the mentality of the Zionists in Palestine.
Tom Segev, an Israeli historian and journalist, writes, “The attempt of the last Jews of the Warsaw ghetto to ‘die with honor’ contradicted the stereotype of the Diaspora Jews going passively to their deaths. It robbed Israel of its monopoly on heroism. The embarrassing truth was that the rebels had not received any help from the Yishuv…Yishuv mythology took care of this problem in its own way—it adopted the uprisings as if they had been its own operations” [3]
In this process, the Palestinians have been compared to the Nazis who want to murder all the Jews.
Since the real genocide of the Jews took place in Poland it was necessary for the Zionists to claim that the Jews of the Levant and North Africa suffered also from the holocaust. This year we are told that the Jews of Tunisia suffered from the Holocaust. However, to call 5000 Jews who were forced to work for the Nazis holocaust is a form of denial of the genocide of the European Jews.
According to Yad Vashem:
“On November 9, 1942, in response to the Allied invasion of North Africa, German military forces invaded Tunisia and with them a unit of SS men whose role was to apply the anti-Jewish policy in Tunisia. Until the beginning of December, battles raged in Tunisia between the Germans and the Allies, and this made it difficult for the Germans to start carrying out an anti-Jewish policy. They arrested some of the leaders of the community and later sent about twenty of them to the extermination camps in Europe. They confiscated a lot of property from the Jews as well as large sums of money. They dissolved the community committee and established a new committee that was required to recruit 2,000 forced laborers within a day. The community committee failed to raise the full quota that the Germans demanded, and in response the Germans began mass arrests. About 5,000 Jews were sent to forced labor in about 30 labor camps” [4]
In 2013 in a conference, we learned that on December 14-15 2013, a conference was held in Tunis in remembrance of the 5,000 Jews subjected to forced labor during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia and to commemorate Arab Muslims who saved Jews during this period. Cosponsored by the Tunisian Association Supporting Minorities and the New York-based Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, it was one of the first conferences of its kind to be held in an Arab country. Dr. Robert Satloff, executive director of The Washington Institute and author of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands, spoke to attendees in Arabic via Skype. The following is an English version of his remarks.
“Friends, colleagues, I am honored to participate in this special conference, convened to commemorate a forgotten chapter of the Holocaust — the German occupation of Tunisia and the persecution of its Jewish community by the Nazis and their collaborators. I congratulate the organizers of this important event, especially Yamina Thabet, director of the Tunisian Association Supporting Minorities.
I am especially pleased to note the participation of some of Tunisia’s finest historians, including my dear friend Habib Kazdaghli. This forgotten chapter of the Holocaust is, at the same time, a forgotten chapter of the history of Tunisia. I congratulate Habib and his colleagues for their courageous and vital efforts to fill in the missing pages from their country’s history book. This task will benefit all Tunisians… the Holocaust happened in Arab lands. The Nazis came to Tunisia to fight the Allies, but with the Vichy French and the Italian Fascists, they also came to persecute Jews. Quotas. Arrests. Confiscations. Hostage-taking. Torture. Labor camps. Deportations. Executions. Everything that happened to the Jews of Europe happened in Tunisia, in different ways and to differing degrees, except for the most important aspect of the Holocaust — extermination. But that was more by luck than by design. If the Allies had not defeated the Germans by May 1943, the Jews of Tunisia would have known the same fate as the Jews of Poland.”
Thus, the Zionization of the Holocaust takes the form of equating real genocide with an imaginary one. Needless to say, the real role of the Zionists that helped to close the gates to Jewish refugees in the U.S. and other countries is hidden. Yet there are few historians like Leni Brenner who recorded the crimes of the Zionists not only against the Palestinians but against the Jews. [5]
Down with the Zionist apartheid!
For a Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[1] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-739413
[2] Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993, 322
[3] Segev, Tom. The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. New York: Hill and Wang,
1993
[4] https://www.yadvashem.org/he/holocaust/this-month/december/forced-labor-bizaretta.html (Hebrew)
[5] Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: Lenni Brenner