“In the spring of 1940, when the Nazis overran France from the north, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south. In order to cross the border, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion.
The Portuguese government—which had little desire to accept any of these refugees—sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.”
—Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
I imagine that most Jews would have no issue with Holocaust comparisons and using the Holocaust as a rhetorical device if that was all there was to it. But there’s a broader context. A context that Jews cannot divorce ourselves from (and I would imagine the same is true for Rromani, but I don’t want to speak for them). In the same breath, people who say “X is just like Hitler” or that “this is just how the Holocaust started” will also say they don’t care about Jews or antisemitism.
They call Israeli or diaspora Jews with whom they disagree over Israel: Zionazis, the new Nazis, or just plain old Nazis.
They insert the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into ever conversation even remotely related to Jewishness, Judaism, or antisemitism regardless of whether we’re talking about the present or Israel.
They conflate all the different camps used during the Holocaust into “concentration camps.” They conflate all treatment of targeted groups during the Holocaust so that “it wasn’t just Jews” with the implication that we should shut up and stop because we don’t own the Holocaust.
They think antisemitism began and ended with the Holocaust and we got Israel as a reward for surviving the Holocaust because “they’re white.”
They erase Jewish refugees. The erase Jewish refugees from the MENA. They erase that no countries took in Jewish refugees before, during, or after the Holocaust.
They say: “They’re the new Jews,” as if Jews have ceased to exist, antisemitism ceased to exists, and that things can be inhumane and due to prejudice without using another group’s trauma and history as a rhetorical device.
They call us white supremacists while actual white supremacists call us globalists, oppressors, kikes, and for our destruction.
They erase antisemitism from white supremacy and refer to it as if it as if it’s incidental to white supremacy instead of central to white supremacy. And when we tell the truth, we’re told we’re playing the victim and that we’re claiming to be the most oppressed (we aren’t).
They talk about our historical trauma as an ephemeral and divorced historical event while we still breathe and feel it every day. They talk about our historical trauma as if it was confined to the Holocaust and not spanning across centuries and nations since we were colonized and then expelled from our land.
For us, it’s never just a Holocaust or Hitler comparison. And evil things are evil because they’re evil not because of how closely they resemble the Holocaust or historical traumas sufferers by other groups.
All of this is true… but I think the comparisons are apt in this instance, and there are a lot of Jews using it too. The instant recognizability and emotional punch of the comparison can be helpful if it’s used judiciously… though unfortunately it hasn’t been, which dilutes its power. I think the most powerful and useful aspects of the comparison are that the Nazis were elected; that they built their way up to extermination gradually, by inuring people to lesser monstrosities; and that the political establishment and the international press ridiculed Mussolini and Hitler and believed their incompetence would limit the damage they could do.
An Israeli reserve officer visiting Poland with the Israel Defense Forces will be disciplined for holding up a sign at the Nazi Auschwitz camp that read “You too played a part.”
The incident occurred on Thursday, according to reports.
The officer was participating in the military’s “Witnesses in Uniform” project.
The sign was written in Polish. It was in protest of controversial legislation passed in February by the Polish Parliament which criminalizes blaming the Polish nation for Nazi crimes.
IDF officials with the group of officers at the site took the sign away and told the Polish security guards that they would handle the incident internally. The soldier was not immediately returned to Israel, arriving home with the rest of the delegation. He is scheduled to be disciplined in the coming days, despite Israel’s objection to the law.
The passage of the law has created tension and disagreement between Poland and Israel. The law is under review in Constitutional Court before it can take effect. Poland’s attorney general said in a nonbinding opinion that the court should shelve the parts of the law that have drawn criticism.
Israeli government officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and others have harshly criticized the law, which could lead to a prison sentence of up to three years, because, they claim, while it ostensibly targets those who say Poles collectively were responsible for the Holocaust, it could also be interpreted as criminalizing any reporting of Polish anti-Semitism during the period around the Holocaust, and any reporting of Poles who collaborated with Nazis.
Loki is the Philosopher King 