So there are three types of Holocaust distortions that frighten me particularly because they embody a distorted historical understanding of the past that is intended to support anti-democratic conceptions in the present. In the past, nationalists and fascists simply denied the Holocaust because it cast a heavy shadow over the history of their peoples. Today the trend is different: many recognize the Holocaust and honor the memory of the Jews, but " we "( Hungarians, Poles, Bulgarians, Dutch, etc.) they claim, had no part in it. We were on the good side of history. In Germany, the AfD tells a different story. The Nazi period was just a comma within Germany ' s glorious history. And in the Israeli context, the argument about " the uniqueness of the Holocaust " is a dangerous distortion of it, which serves today the genocidal nationalist narratives of the State of Israel and its supporters and has enabled the Western world to support the occupation, apartheid, and now genocide in Gaza. I think that any memory that does not examine the political and historic foundations of mass violence in order to better understand it and prevent it, but focuses only on suffering and victimization, is a distortion.
sacred to me, not even Holocaust memory. At the end of Imre Kertész ' s( a Hungarian Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize laureate in literature) book " Fatelessness," the protagonist, a young Holocaust survivor, raises the possibility that he too will forget the horrors of Auschwitz. In 1988, the Israeli intellectual and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana wrote a long article called " In Praise of Forgetting " because he thought that Holocaust memory was politically and morally corrupting Jewish society in Israel. The more important question then, in my view, is what values and forms of identity do memory or its distortion establish?
So there are three types of Holocaust distortions that frighten me particularly because they embody a distorted historical understanding of the past that is intended to support anti-democratic conceptions in the present. In the past, nationalists and fascists simply denied the Holocaust because it cast a heavy shadow over the history of their peoples. Today the trend is different: many recognize the Holocaust and honor the memory of the Jews, but " we "( Hungarians, Poles, Bulgarians, Dutch, etc.) they claim, had no part in it. We were on the good side of history. In Germany, the AfD tells a different story. The Nazi period was just a comma within Germany ' s glorious history. And in the Israeli context, the argument about " the uniqueness of the Holocaust " is a dangerous distortion of it, which serves today the genocidal nationalist narratives of the State of Israel and its supporters and has enabled the Western world to support the occupation, apartheid, and now genocide in Gaza. I think that any memory that does not examine the political and historic foundations of mass violence in order to better understand it and prevent it, but focuses only on suffering and victimization, is a distortion.
4. In the context of the current conflict in Gaza, comparisons have been made between the actions of the State of Israel and the Holocaust— both by those who condemn them and by those who justify them in the name of preventing future existential threats. How do you interpret these tensions in the use of Holocaust memory in such opposing discourses?
I don ' t think there is symmetry and I also don ' t think one should always think in symmetrical terms. There is no comparison between Hamas and the Nazis, and between Israel ' s situation and that of the Jews in Europe in the thirties and forties. Hamas is a local and relatively weak organization in one of the poorest places on earth, that managed to strike Israel heinously, criminally and unprecedently on October 7 with extremely meager means. Some of its ideological manifestos like the 1988 charter contains clear antisemitic elements( though it was amended in 2017 and those antisemitic notions were not included). Nazi Germany was a huge empire who ruled over almost of all of Europe and beyond. The Jews in Europe were powerless. Israel is one of the strongest military powers in the world, even if it suffered a huge and very traumatic blow. Without justifying Hamas ' criminal attack, it can and should be explained politically. It was launched because Israel had almost succeeded in eliminating the Palestinian people politically with the Abraham Accords, the change of status at Haram al-Sharif( The Temple Mount), because of the siege on Gaza, the apartheid, and the annexation. We should also remember that some 70 % of the population in Gaza are refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing( the Nakba). The Nazis murdered the Jews because they were Jews and had all sorts of insane conceptions about them, among other things that they were the most dangerous enemy to Germany. There is no comparison. Those who make this comparison do it in order to defend Israel ' s genocidal response and to dehumanize the Palestinians. I should note that I do not include in this critique those victims of the October 7 who described their experiences in the first days following the attack by using Holocaust related
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Observing Memories ISSUE 9