Our Wednesday News Analysis | Israel has finally made anti-Semitism an empty slogan

People, including a young woman holding a sign that reads: ‘Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism,’ chant slogans and carry Palestinian flags as they arrive at Potsdamer Platz during a “Freedom for Palestine” protest march that drew thousands of participants on November 04, 2023 in Berlin, Germany. [Sean Gallup/Getty Images]

Many people in the Global South think Israel has hijacked the Holocaust and over-politicized it for its political purposes since its creation in 1948. People in the South do not share the burden of guilt over what Christian Europeans did to the Jewish people and their collaborators across the continent.

"The overuse of “anti-Semitism” to describe any individual, state, and world organisation, including the United Nations, made the term more of an empty slogan used to intimidate and bully others into silence. Even practicing faithful Jews risk becoming accused of being “self-haters” if they speak against Israel’s horrendous crimes in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Criticizing its occupation of parts of Lebanon and Syria is also a red line.

Abba Eban, a well-known Israeli South African-born scholar and diplomat, fed up with the depletive deployment of the Holocaust term against critiques, once said, “It is about time that we [Israelis] stand on our own feet and not on those of the six million dead.”

Indeed, Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews, but it also murdered another estimated seven million non-Jews, including Gypsies, Roma, Slavs, disabled people, and homosexuals. Historically, the German State has a long history of mass murder, long before Hitler appeared – and its colonial history from Namibia to Tanzania testify to such atrocities.

This is one of the reasons why the term “Holocaust” hardly invokes the emotions it does in Europe, for example. Victims of colonialism in the Global South see not only Western double standards and hypocrisy but also an attempt to isolate their colonial victims from others and forget about them. The majority of Africans, for instance, see the Palestinian issue as, basically, a colonial issue committed by the victims of the Holocaust against innocent Palestinians with many analogies to the African liberation struggle.

But, over the years, the term “Holocaust” became synonymous to refer only, and exclusively, to Jewish victims while ignoring the others. This fact, well supported and propagated by Israel’s Western allies, made the entire Jewish tragedy a private matter not to be likened or compared to any other—limiting if not denying solidarity altogether...

Read more: Israel has finally made anti-Semitism an empty slogan

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COMPLAINTS ABOUT HAMAS USING ‘HUMAN SHIELDS’ ARE THE WORST KIND OF BAD FAITH

Source: JONATHAN COOK BLOG
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-06-10/hamas-human-shields-bad-faith/

By Jonathan Cook
Published 10 June

By celebrating the carnage in Gaza to free four Israeli captives, western politicians and media are treating Palestinians as sub-human – and enabling the genocide to continue

Western politicians and journalists have hurried to dismiss the murder and maiming of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday in a savage joint Israeli-US military operation to free four Israeli captives.

Not just that, they have suggested that the bloodshed was inevitable and justified given that the hostages were being held in a residential neighborhood of Gaza.

For example, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, observed the massacre that the US actively assisted: “The Palestinian people are going through sheer hell in this conflict because Hamas is operating in a way that puts them in the crossfire, that holds hostages right in the heart of crowded civilian areas.”

Israel’s decades of belligerent military occupation of the Palestinian territories, its 17-year blockade of Gaza denying its population the essentials of life, its intermittent destruction of the enclave by “mowing the lawn,” and now it's carrying out what the International Court of Justice has called a “plausible genocide” have nothing to do with the “sheer hell” the people of Gaza are suffering?

Those trying to win our consent to mass murder and the planned starvation of the people of Gaza by arguing that Hamas is using Palestinians in Gaza as human shields are engaged in the worst kind of bad-faith argument...

Read more: Complaints about Hamas using ‘human shields’ are the worst kind of bad faith

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OPINION | NO, ALL POLITICS EVERYWHERE IS NOT ABOUT THE GAZA WAR, ZIONISTS AND ANTISEMITES

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-06-14/ty-article/.premium/no-all-politics-is-not-about-gaza-zionists-and-antisemites/00000190-1319-d586-abfb-9f7923bb0000

By Anshel Pfeffer
Published June 14, 2024

Despite what pro-Palestinian activists, media pundits and Israeli officials say, Israel and Gaza are far down the agenda of the vast majority of voters in Europe and the U.S. – and won't decide election results

Credit: Menahem Kahana / AFP

Israelis are protesting against the war in Gaza outside the Knesset on Thursday. Many Israelis think that Israel was forced to embark on a justified war in Gaza. Due to the corruption of its leaders and the folly of its generals, it has been criminally prosecuting that war.

Some Israeli officials are enthusiastic at the success of far-right parties in last weekend's European Parliament elections, so Amir Tibon informs us in this newspaper. They believe that along with the losses of the parties of the Greens bloc, it will temper European initiatives to sanction Israel and recognize a Palestinian state.

Our buffoonish Foreign Minister Israel Katz (or whoever operates his X account) certainly shares that feeling. In a departure from diplomatic niceties, he posted a cartoon of the prime minister of Spain and his deputy covered in egg, and he crows at the failure of their left-wing parties in the European elections. "It turns out that supporting Hamas murderers and rapists is not electorally profitable," Katz wrote.

It's easy to dismiss this as a misreading of European politics. Most voters in the European Union's 27 member-states don't see them being as crucial as their national elections, and may use them to lodge a protest vote against their incumbent leaders. In France, the main beneficiaries of this were Marine Le Pen's hard-right National Rally party, but in most of the other countries, including Spain, the far-right barely gained, and some lost ground. The overall picture shows a slight shift to the right, which may change the makeup of the current coalition, though the current president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, a German center-right politician, will probably remain in charge...

Read more: Opinion | No, All Politics Everywhere Is Not About the Gaza War, Zionists and Antisemites