Yossi Schwartz, ISL the section of the RCIT in Israel/Occupied Palestine, 28.04.2022
In Israel, Holocaust Remembrance Day began Wednesday evening with the official state ceremony at Yad Vashem’s Warsaw Ghetto Square in the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem. President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett both delivered their speeches.
Speaker of the Knesset MK Mickey Levy (Yesh Atid) has invited the President of the German Bundestag, Bärbel Bas of the SPD, to take part in the various events the Knesset holds this week to mark Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day 2022. Bas has accepted the invitation.
Herzog said: “Casting doubt on Israel’s right to exist is not legitimate diplomacy but pure antisemitism, which must be uprooted,” he said. “We must continue fighting against ugly expressions of antisemitism, which is returning to rear its head in many places in the world, including on social media.”
Bennett said:” “My brothers and sisters, the Holocaust is an unprecedented event in human history. I bother to say this because as the years go by, there is more discourse in the world that compares other difficult events to the Holocaust. But no, even the most difficult wars today are not the Holocaust and are not like the Holocaust” [i]
Bas wrote: “It is with deep sadness and shame that I think of the dead. Germany’s historical guilt creates a special obligation for Israel’s security as well“. [ii]
Thus, according to Herzog, casting doubt on Israel’s right to exist is pure Anti-Semitism but exiling 900,000 Palestinians in 1948, occupation of the West-Bank and Gaza, stealing lands Killing and injuring thousands of children, women and elderly people is legitimate diplomacy.
Bennett is not even aware of the fact “that Only 60% of Jewish Israelis feel that the Holocaust was a unique event and not another chapter in a series of acts of genocide that have taken place globally over the course of history, a poll by the Viterbi Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israel Democracy Institute revealed ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day, marked on Thursday. This was a decrease from 2019 when 75.5% of Israelis said they believe that the Holocaust was a unique historical event” [iii]
The growing number of Israelis who understand that the Jewish Holocaust is a chapter in a series of acts of genocide that have taken place globally over the course of history, are right on this point.
The genocide of the Jews in WWII was only a chapter in the genocide of the human race on the altar of the imperialists’ profit of re-dividing colonies, markets, raw material and cheap labor. The only major state that was not imperialist was Stalinist Russia, a counter revolutionary workers state. Another chapter of that global genocide was the holocaust of the Roma who suffered as much as the Jews.
“Drawing support from many non-Nazi Germans who harbored social prejudice towards Roma, the Nazis judged to be “racially inferior.” The fate of Roma in some ways paralleled that of the Jews. Under the Nazi regime, German authorities subjected Roma to arbitrary internment, forced labor, and mass murder. German authorities murdered tens of thousands of Roma in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union and Serbia and thousands more in the killing centers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The SS and police incarcerated Roma in the Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen, and Ravensbrück concentration camps. Both in the so-called Greater German Reich and in the so-called General government, German civilian authorities managed several forced-labor camps in which they incarcerated Roma… the Nazis and their allies killed between 250,000 and 500,000 European Roma during World War II. It is estimated that the prewar Romani population numbered between 1 and 1.5 million” [iv]
“After the war, discrimination against Roma continued throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany determined that all measures taken against Roma before 1943 were legitimate official measures against persons committing criminal acts, not the result of policy driven by racial prejudice. This decision effectively closed the door to restitution for thousands of Roma victims, who had been incarcerated, forcibly sterilized, and deported out of Germany for no specific crime. The postwar Bavarian criminal police took over the research files of the Nazi regime, including the registry of Roma who had resided in the Greater German Reich.Only in late 1979 did the West German Federal Parliament identify the Nazi persecution of Roma as being racially motivated” [v]
So why the West German Federal government was ready to recognizes the Jewish genocide but not of the Roma people? Because the Jews were considered white European and because the Zionist state was a strategic asset for the Western imperialism in the Middle East and because the US wanted Western Germany to Join NATO and for this it was necessary for Israel to legitimize the West German state. That is what was behind the Ben Gurion–Adenauer deal, the reparation of 1952.
At the end of World War II, the U.S. military authorities restored Adenauer as the mayor of Cologne, but the British, who assumed control of the city in June 1945, removed him from office in October. Rather than withdrawing from public life, Adenauer was reinvigorated by his fall from power. A new anti- communist, party was formed – the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) led by Adenauer.
“The focus of his interest throughout his career lay in foreign affairs. He viewed the expansion of communist rule into the heart of Europe as a direct threat to the West and its values. He had no faith in the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the communist world and felt the need for tough opposition to any aggressive military threats from the Soviet Union and its allies. He considered irreconcilable the differences between individualistic rule of law and totalitarian dictatorship and between humanistic Christian teachings and communist social regimentation. He therefore became a strong advocate of the Cold War politics of containment.” [vi]
“Opposing negotiations on one side of the political spectrum were the Zionist Left (the Marxist, pro-Soviet Union United Workers Party, Mapam) and the non-Zionist Left (the Israel Communist Party, IPC). Both these parties contended that negotiations with the Federal Republic of Germany would constitute a desecration of the memory of Holocaust victims. It would also clearly prove Israel’s subservience to the “imperialist-capitalist bloc” and its readiness to serve the policy of the Western bloc to make West Germany “a military tool against the Soviet bloc in a future third world war.” At the other end of the spectrum, the Herut Party argued that any discourse with the Germans – the “modern Amalekites” – would gravely tarnish Israeli national honor” [vii]
Anyone who knows history is aware of the fact that Ben Gurion made the deal of the transferred with Nazi Germany and sabotaged the sanctions against Nazi Germany and that the Zionists did not send even one bullet to the Jewish resistance against the Nazis. In addition, Ben Gurion and his supporters opposed the opening of the US gates to the Jewish refugees from the Nazis’ persecution and he was responsible for the Nakba.
Yet the Zionist state dares to wear a mask and mark the day of the Holocaust while the real fighters against racist oppression are the Palestinians.
Down with the Zionist and pro Zionist hypocrisy!
Down with the Zionist apartheid state!
For a Palestine reed and Free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-705264
[ii] https://newsrnd.com/news/2022-04-27-israel–bundestag-president-b%C3%A4rbel-bas-on-holocaust-remembrance-day-in-yad-vashem.rkxED7mPr9.html
[iii] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-705264
[iv] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/genocide-of-euro
[v] Ibid
[vi] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konrad-Adenauer
[vii] https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/28248/1001729.pdf?sequence=1