Capitalism in Decay

It is a common misconception that the sole or main reason for imposing an ethnostate on Palestine in 1948 was to atone for the Shoah. Such a summary is, at best, an exaggeration. Quoting Tony Greenstein’s commentary on The Arabs and the Holocaust:

In actual fact the Zionist movement averted its eyes and kept silent during the Holocaust. Clearly [European Fascism] gave the proto‐[ethnostate] its critical mass and British imperialism would not have been so weakened by 1948 but for the war. However, like the other White Dominions, the Jewish settlers would have achieved independence, probably around the mid‐1950s.

Even so, the ethnostate’s origins cannot be entirely separated from the Shoah, the explosive impact of which originated in Europe and swept over Palestine like a shockwave.

Not only did the Shoah provide (and continues to provide) an effective justification for imposing an ethnostate on Palestine, but a fraction of Shoah survivors chose to contribute to establishing this régime anyway (even though many pre‐1940s settlers disrespected them)! Quoting Amnon Raz‐Krakotzkin in The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, page 94:

Second, many of the Holocaust survivors participated directly in the Palestinian Nakba through their enlistment in the combatant Zionist forces. Statistics indicate that a large percentage of those enlisted in the Zionist forces in 1948 were Holocaust survivors; according to Hanna Yablonka (1997), they made up nearly half the total number of conscripts. In this context, Yair Auron emphasizes the significant rôle played by Holocaust survivors in the battles of 1948 and their significant contribution to the establishment of the [so‐called] State of Israel.¹¹

Auron also notes that at one point their percentage of total personnel in the combatant units would reach a third or even a half, which leads Auron to conclude that “the Holocaust was present through the tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors who reached Palestine after 1945 and participated in the war of 1948, in which some of them were killed.”¹²

As much as I adore the simple, charming image of Jews as history’s underdogs, the complex truth is that they, like us gentiles, have played a wide variety of rôles in the theatre of history, from heroes to victims to villains and sometimes even all three at once. Even the Torah has examples: many of us remember Moses as the hero who liberated his people from Egypt, yet the same scriptures also say that he commanded atrocities!

In what feels like either a dark joke, or perhaps the script for Oscar bait, adults who should have been the least likely of all to commit atrocities did so anyway. This is what has lead many to characterize the present tragedy as an example of the cycle of violence, like the maltreated youth who eventually grows up to inflict the same abuses that he endured on his children. Nevertheless, as with some real cases of maltreated youths, there were some Shoah survivors who recognised these atrocities when they saw them.

Quoting Nawal Musleh‐Motut’s Connecting the Holocaust and the Nakba Through Photograph‐based Storytelling: Willing the Impossible, page 8:

Idith Zertal […] cites the diaries and commentaries of [Jewish] fighters involved in the events of 1948 who were horrified by the cruelty of their fellow [Jewish] soldiers toward Arab villagers, comparing it to [Wehrmacht] troops during World War II.

Zertal stresses the reversal of rôles was finally complete: “The licensed heirs of the Holocaust had transformed themselves into efficient and murderous ‘Germans.’ While the ‘reincarnation’ of the Nazis […] simple Arab villagers, became by this deed the total victims of the misdeed of transposing the Holocaust into the local conflict” (p. 173).

Nonetheless, most of the damage had been done. Rather than making room for Shoah survivors in Poland (as the Allies discussed) or in Germany, the Allies settled on what most of the Zionists already wanted: Palestine, something which I am sure that West Germany and its surviving Axis personnel preferred over allocating European land to Jews. Thus, the Zionists effectively forced Palestinians to pay for the Shoah. Quoting Honaida Ghanim in The Holocaust and the Nakba, page 111:

The attempt to heal the Holocaust survivors’ wounds was carried out through theft of the Palestinians’ homeland. Or, to put it differently: the Palestinians are made to pay the price of a heinous crime that was committed in a faraway land, without having had anything to do with it.

Palestine tragically turns into a sacrifice offered to redeem the victim, in a deadly and bloody relationship that renders the Palestinian a victim of the victim who had become a partner in crime. Or, as Hussein fatally describes it. “Did you flay my arm / to patch the arms which others have flayed?”

In this way, too, the Palestinians were, and are, practically second‐hand victims of the Shoah: do you understand what I mean when I said that its impact swept over Palestine like a shockwave?

Evidence that Zionists consciously use the Axis as an inspiration for their own atrocities may be limited (at least for now), but whatever the case may be, the Nakba remains one of the many consequences of the Shoah, and little about the former can be understood without the latter. To quote one Jewish Palestinian’s work, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, pages 207–9:

[T]here is a link to be made between what happened to Jews in World War II and the catastrophe of the Palestinian people, but it cannot be made only rhetorically, or as an argument to demolish or diminish the true content both of the Holocaust and of 1948. Neither is equal to the other; similarly, neither one nor the other excuses present violence; and finally, neither one nor the other must be minimized. There is suffering and injustice enough for everyone.

But unless the connection is made by which the Jewish tragedy is seen to have led directly to the Palestinian catastrophe by, let us call it “necessity” (rather than pure will), we cannot coexist as two communities of detached and uncommunicatingly separate suffering.

It has been the failing of Oslo that it planned in terms of separation, a clinical partition of peoples into separate, but unequal, entities, rather than grasping that the only way of rising beyond the endless back‐and‐forth violence and dehumanization is to admit the universality and integrity of the other’s experience and to begin to plan a common life together.

[…]

The simple fact is that Jewish and Palestinian experiences are historically, indeed organically, connected: to break them asunder is to falsify what is authentic about each. We must think our histories together, however difficult that may be, in order for there to be a common future. And that future must include Arabs and Jews together, free of any exclusionary, denial‐based schemes for shutting out one side by the other, either theoretically or politically. That is the real challenge. The rest is much easier.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

The Nakba is not merely similar to the Shoah. It is an extension thereof. This conclusion may be the greatest breakthrough that I have made in my time studying the short twentieth century.

For

Edward Wadie Said

1935 – 2003