Robert Fisk’s World: When it comes to Gaza, leave the Second World War out of it
How do Holocaust survivors in Israel feel about being called Nazis?
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Independent Minds
Exaggeration always gets my goat. I started to hate it back in the 1970s when the Provisional IRA claimed that Long Kesh internment camp was "worse than Belsen". It wasn't as if there was anything nice about Long Kesh – or the Maze prison as it was later politely dubbed – but it simply wasn't as bad as Belsen. And now we're off again. Passing through Paris this week, I found pro-Palestinian demonstrators carrying signs which read "Gaza, it's Guernica" and "Gaza-sur-Glane".
Guernica, as we all know, was the Basque city razed by the Luftwaffe in 1937 and Oradour-sur-Glane the French village whose occupants were murdered by the SS in 1944. Israel's savagery in Gaza has also been compared to a "genocide" and – of course – a "holocaust". The French Union of Islamic Organisations called it "a genocide without precedent" – which does take the biscuit when even the Pope's "minister for peace and justice" has compared Gaza to "a big concentration camp".
Before I state the obvious, I only wish the French Union of Islamic Organisations would call the Armenian genocide a genocide – it doesn't have the courage to do so, does it, because that would be offensive to the Turks and, well, the million and a half Armenians massacred in 1915 happened to be, er, Christians.
Mind you, that didn't stop George Bush from dropping the word from his vocabulary lest he, too, should offend the Turkish generals whose airbases America needs for its continuing campaign in Iraq. And even Israel doesn't use the word "genocide" about the Armenians lest it loses its only Muslim ally in the Middle East. Strange, isn't it? When there's a real genocide – of Armenians – we don't like to use the word. But when there is no genocide, everyone wants to get in on the act.
Yes, I know what all these people are trying to do: make a direct connection between Israel and Hitler's Germany. And in several radio interviews this past week, I've heard a good deal of condemnation about such comparisons. How do Holocaust survivors in Israel feel about being called Nazis? How can anyone compare the Israeli army to the Wehrmacht? Merely to make such a parallel is an act of anti-Semitism.
Having come under fire from the Israeli army on many occasions, I'm not sure that's necessarily true. I've never understood why strafing the roads of northern France in 1940 was a war crime while strafing the roads of southern Lebanon is not a war crime. The massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila camps – perpetrated by Israel's Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli soldiers watched and did nothing – falls pretty much into the Second World War bracket. Israel's own estimate of the dead – a paltry 460 – was only nine fewer than the Nazi massacre at the Czech village of Lidice in 1942 when almost 300 women and children were also sent to Ravensbrück (a real concentration camp). Lidice was destroyed in revenge for the murder by Allied agents of Reinhard Heydrich. The Palestinians were slaughtered after Ariel Sharon told the world – untruthfully – that a Palestinian had murdered the Lebanese Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel.
Indeed, it was the courageous Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz of the Hebrew University (and editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica) who wrote that the Sabra and Chatila massacre "was done by us. The Phalangists are our mercenaries, exactly as the Ukrainians and the Croatians and the Slovakians were the mercenaries of Hitler, who organised them as soldiers to do the work for him. Even so have we organised the assassins of Lebanon in order to murder the Palestinians". Remarks like these were greeted by Israel's then minister of interior and religious affairs, Yosef Burg, with the imperishable words: "Christians killed Muslims – how are the Jews guilty?"
I have long raged against any comparisons with the Second World War – whether of the Arafat-is-Hitler variety once deployed by Menachem Begin or of the anti-war-demonstrators-are-1930s-appeasers, most recently used by George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara. And pro-Palestinian marchers should think twice before they start waffling about genocide when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem once shook Hitler's hand and said – in Berlin on 2 November 1943, to be precise – "The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews... They have definitely solved the Jewish problem." The Grand Mufti, it need hardly be added, was a Palestinian. He lies today in a shabby grave about two miles from my Beirut home.
No, the real reason why "Gaza-Genocide" is a dangerous parallel is because it is not true. Gaza's one and a half million refugees are treated outrageously enough, but they are not being herded into gas chambers or forced on death marches. That the Israeli army is a rabble is not in question – though I was amused to read one of Newsweek's regular correspondents calling it "splendid" last week – but that does not mean they are all war criminals. The issue, surely, is that war crimes do appear to have been committed in Gaza. Firing at UN schools is a criminal act. It breaks every International Red Cross protocol. There is no excuse for the killing of so many women and children.
I should add that I had a sneaking sympathy for the Syrian foreign minister who this week asked why a whole international tribunal has been set up in the Hague to investigate the murder of one man – Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri – while no such tribunal is set up to investigate the deaths of more than 1,000 Palestinians.
I should add, however, that the Hague tribunal may well be pointing the finger at Syria and I would still like to see a tribunal set up into the Syrian massacre at Hama in 1982 when thousands of civilians were shot at the hands of Rifaat al-Assad's special forces. The aforesaid Rifaat, I should add, today lives safely within the European Union. And how about a trial for the Israeli artillerymen who massacred 106 civilians – more than half of them children – at the UN base at Qana in 1996?
What this is really about is international law. It's about accountability. It's about justice – something the Palestinians have never received – and it's about bringing criminals to trial. Arab war criminals, Israeli war criminals – the whole lot. And don't say it cannot be done. Wasn't that the message behind the Yugoslav tribunal? Didn't some of the murderers get their just deserts? Just leave the Second World War out of it.
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Comments
1) Why is so SURELY that modern democratic state's army MUST be multi-cultural? It is not obvious and need to be proven.
2) Today's IDF, would it be good or bad, is really multi-cultural. There are Jews, Orthodox and Catholic Christians, Sunni Moslems and Druzes in IDF. There are Israeli Jews, Arabs, Russians, Armenians, Ukrainians, Argentinians and many other nationalities that are serving in IDF.
3) Who are Palestinians? Are you able to give any clear definition to this word? What do you MEAN when you write "Palestinian" ?
4) And if Palestinian is somebody who does not possess Israeli citizenship, how would he serve in Israeli army?
5) If Palestinian is somebody who states that Israel commits genocide against Palestinians(who are they?) , how would he be able to serve in Israel army ?
I run a blog where I note different examples of people comparing things to Hitler and the Holocaust (http://worsethanhitler.wordpress.com/
Shame and pity on the fools would hold life so cheaply
I have been reading your articles for many years. Frankly, I am saddened by a your latest article. I really don't know what to make of it.
Firstly, I am a Iranian Muslim who has been in USA for over thirty years. I have always recognized the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians as genocide. I find the Turkish conduct absolutely reprehensible. Furthermore, I find the fact that it is being swept under the rug, mostly by "Western" nations, even more reprehensible. I hope that this was an unambiguous statement by a Muslim regarding the Armenian Holocaust.
Now onto Gaza. I don't know what the bar for recognizing civilian slaughter as Genocide is. Let's say 4,000 civilian deaths. So then would 3,999 civilian deaths not be a genocide? To me, the Israelis are conducting themselves with absolute inhumanity. I don't know if you have children, but what if your child had been shredded by Israeli shrapnel, and you were the one who was carrying your child's lifeless body to a hospital? What if it were you who knew that corpse in your hands had no hope in hell of being revived, but nonetheless you hoped you wished, the way a father would, for the possibility of a different outcome? would it be genocide then? And for what, so a bunch of European Zionist Jews can have a homeland? At what expense? At whose expense?
If Hitler's treatment of the Catholics, Gypsies, ..., and Jews can be labeled genocide, why isn't Israel in the middle of Deutchland? Wouldn't it be more appropriate? To me it seems that the Palestinians are paying with their lives for the shame and guilt that Europeans feel. Bottom line, no matter what you label it, I doubt if too many people in "Western" nations are looking at buying water-front property in Gaza anytime soon.
did you protest before the gaza war?
what are we expected to do..be sitting ducks for the sake of the iranians?
By the way, mentioning of the Armenia killings and the statement of a priest doesn't justify the brutal cold-blooded murder of the Palestinians in front of the live camera. Why are you attempting to justify the brutal occupation of the Palestinians by the lawless Israeli leaders when you fully know that Israel has rejected all the UN sanctions against her?
Mr. Fisk, I have always admired you, but no this time. This time, I say, "Et tu, Fisk?"
In war, few armies are blameless in this respect. Which is why I, for one, do not recognise war as a legitimate instrument of policy. It is the reason I have opposed the wars both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
WW2 has fostered many myths and we in Britain are haunted by them over 6 decades later. We had only ourselves to blame for the plight we found ourselves in in 1940. We survived because of our Spitfire pilots and the English Channel. Can we really say the mass bombing of German cities such as Dresden later in the war was justified, with the huge civilian casualties from the firestorms? Beside the antrocities of the SS, it was of a less magnitude but let's have no illusions.
My father in law, who fought in WW2, was always saying "we want no more wars". My own father was a conscientious objector. WW2 stands as the most awful warning of what unleashing mass violence against fellow human beings can do. Will we ever learn? The recent experience in the Middle East makes depressing reading.
at times we have to resort to war after great patience and lip biting.
The long-term solution will not come from Israel trying to manipulate Palestine. It will come from Israel recognising Palestinian borders and a Palestinian state, and Palestinians recognising Israel. This is a very long way off today, but it is the only way that this conflict will truly end.
The problem is that since the Shoah was more "efficient" and therefore cruel than the Armenian Genocide, now people (Israel in particular) refrain from calling it a genocide altogether... because it was "not as bad as"...NO: we can't settle for this. Otherwise, as long as nobody does worse than the nazi nobody can be found guilty of genocide anymore. So, given that it is fairly improbable that any state today would be able to set up gas chambers to kill people, why should we need a law prohibiting genocide in the first place? It would be useless.
According to the 1948 definition, a genocide is defined by its objectve and not by its means! A genocide is any attempt to eliminate a nation or any other defined group for the sake of it.
Well...what do we mean by eliminate? Does Israel really need to kill all those people, put them in gas chambers to be guilty of a genocide? No, It is enough to try to make them a non-people a non-group...to trump their own (free?) will, to make them animals, non-humans. And this is indeed Israel's objective in Gaza and with the Palestinians in general: beat as hard as they can as long as it takes to make these people incapable of taking decisions, to make them feel fear even THINKING about asking for justice. This is what we call torture. And it's the worst possible crime, because it goes to the very source of humanity...as long as you hurt somebody's body, she's still a human being, if you trump somebody's conscience (the "internal forum") you're taking humanity out of her. What's the difference with killing? That is is more cruel.
Thank God, "collective torture" never worked. It didn't work in Dresda, never work even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (both Germany and Japan surrendered when they had run out of the last bullet, not because they were trumped)...but this doesn't take away the objective. And as long as Israel actively seeks to achieve it, it should be paired with all other regimes who tried to do the same, more or less "efficiently".
Robert Fisk is usually on the side of the outraged readers of his work. But in this case he is completely on the opposite side.
Robert Fisk does not like the internet. He famously does not use email. His files are paper. Thus he may not have seen the pictures that his readers have seen.
What pictures? These pictures - http://pakalert.wordpress.com/2009/01/0
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words.
It is certainly worth a thousand Israeli Zionist shills promoting genocide.
Fisk does not like comparisons to World War Two. But the internet and the pictures tell a different story. A terrible story.
http://www.msu-uci.com/wp-content/uploa
you see a school bombarde but a terrorist may be using it
to fire upon.
pictures are evidence not the verdict..a prolonged process
Rumoured to be irony; something Americans may be completely unfamiliar with. See UK Private Eye magazine for help. - http://www.private-eye.co.uk/
'Entirely a matter for you.' - How to be a juror, on this trial by world public opinion, of the Israeli conduct in Gaza - Peter Cook - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xi-agPf
(Shome Mishtake Shurely. Ed) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_re
The Phosphor bombs that Israelees dropped on the heads of children in Gaza does equate to the gas champers used, could you claim otherwise? isn't the results achieved the same? just look them Gazzans up, over 1100 laying in the morchary's and 6000+ waiting turn
Sad is it acceptable by us for as long as it is the Palestinian who are on the receiving end? Bush, Rice, Bliar and the rest of free world can sleep peacefully, yes just switch off the TV set and it will all go away
I wonder what article heading you would have had should them phosphor bombs came tumbling down your head in the middle of London? who cares its only the Palestinians, we see it all the time, it must be a BBC repeat. Yap
No difference in my books; phosphor bombs by the murderous Zionist state of Israel equate to champer gas, though the phosphor boms has MADE IN THE US stamped on the side.
Shame
But what is it they want of Gaza and the West Bank but a source of labour to work for them and to quietly suffer their fate as did the Bantustans of South Africa. That is the desired outcome of Israeli offensive.
Do we need to see gas chambers and slave labour to allows up to draw parallels? I think not. When the young people of Palestinian wear stripped pyjamas a a symbol of their suffering they know what they are talking about!
I admire your articles and the way you sympathize with the Palestinians but I'd have to disagree with you this time.
Death toll has risen to at over 1,171 half of them women and children so how many does it have to be so it can be considered a genocide?
And don't you think that the "White Phosphorous Shells" are even worse than gas chambers? I'm sure you have seen the footage of some of the bodies in Gaza.
This is not World War II yes, because the whole world is watching the Palestinians being slaughtered for 22 days now and I personally ask myself how did we get to the point where we watch what's happening and haven't stopped this madness from the first day.
So the world's silence is even worse than what you call a genocide.
In the last year in Gaza the only thing that got hurt in Israel was a greenhouse.
http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_
16. Networks belonging to Fatah/Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were the most prominent and
central in violating the lull arrangement. Their motivation was the desire to show themselves
as the standard bearers of the ?resistance? (i.e., terrorism) and to send a message of
defiance to Hamas, their rivals, even though Fatah in Judea and Samaria renounced the
attacks.5 In certain instances the Palestinian Islamic Jihad or other organizations fired
rockets. In most instances they did not publicly claim responsibility. Such attacks were
motivated by deep internal Palestinian rivalries, especially between Fatah and Hamas, and not
responses to ?violations? on the part of Israel.
17. During the first period Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire and its operatives
were not involved in rocket attacks. At the same time, the movement tried to enforce the
terms of the arrangement on the other terrorist organizations and to prevent them from
violating it. Hamas took a number of steps against networks which violated the arrangement,
but in a limited fashion and contenting itself with short-term detentions and confiscating
weapons. For example, a number of times Hamas?s security services detained Fatah/Al-Aqsa
Martyrs Brigades operatives, including Abu Qusai, an Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades spokesman,
who claimed responsibility for rocket fire (June 29). Detained operatives were released after a
short interrogation and no real measures were taken against them. However, it was clear that
throughout the first period Hamas sought to avoid direct confrontations with the rogue
organizations (especially the PIJ) insofar as was possible, lest it be accused of collaborating
with Israel and harming the ?resistance.? Hamas therefore focused on using politics to
convince the organizations to maintain the lull arrangement and on seeking support for it
within Gazan public opinion (including issuing statements by its activists regarding the lull?s
achievements).
5