December
13, 2023
Montréal
(Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Pogrom. This Russian term denotes a
violent riot incited with the aim of massacring Jews and destroying their
property. One of the deadliest pogroms (50 Jews were killed and nearly 600
wounded) took place in Kishinev a hundred and twenty years ago, in April 1903.
But the trauma of Russian Zionists facing the oppression in Tsarist Russia over
a century ago continues to inform Israel’s political culture.
The
Russian word has been widely used by Israelis to characterise the Hamas attack
on Southern Israel in October 2023. It had also been used before. For example,
an Israeli general employed it a few weeks earlier when armed Zionist settlers
attacked the Palestinian village of Huwara on the occupied West Bank. These
attacks have intensified since. The term appears appropriate since gun-toting
Israeli vigilantes were attacking unarmed civilians.
However,
the use of this term for the Hamas attack has provoked debate. Some argue that
Hamas conducted the operation as an act of resistance against one of the best
armed states in the world. They would not call the attack a pogrom because it
was ultimately directed at a powerful state enforcing a system deemed
oppressive and illegitimate by its victims. Others put emphasis on the purely
civilian targets of the attack such as the music festival which may justify the
use of the Russian word. They attribute the Hamas attack to antisemitism, i.e.,
unmotivated hatred, rather than see in it a reaction to decades of suffering
and misery inflicted by the Zionist state.
However,
within the state of Israel, despite its formidable military might, including
nuclear weapons, the term has caught on. It was claimed that the number of Jews
killed on one day in the Hamas attack was the highest since the Nazi genocide.
This drew a direct line with the Nazi genocide and created the impression that
Jews were once again powerless in the face of “pure unadulterated evil”, as the
U.S. President put it.
When,
two weeks into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, the U.N. Secretary General
reminded the world that the Hamas attack had not happened in a vacuum, Tel Aviv
indignantly called for his resignation. There is little tolerance for any
mention of the Israeli blockade of Gaza since 2007, and, more generally, of
Israeli responsibility for the dispossession, deportation, and murder of
Palestinians since 1947. These look like the manifest cause of the Palestinian
resistance. Most Israelis also prefer to ignore the fact that the millions of
Palestinians trapped in Gaza are largely descendants of those that the Zionist
militias and the Israeli military expelled from their homes in what is now the
state of Israel. Israeli officials and its fans elsewhere usually deploy
arrogance and self-righteousness to reject rational debate about the Hamas
attack.
Besides
the obvious political purposes of this PR strategy, one can notice a genuine
embrace of the term “pogrom” in Israeli society at large. Ideologically
committed Zionists used to treat pogrom victims of over a century ago and
survivors of the Nazi genocide with shame and disdain. They were blamed for
lacking the courage to fight, for “going as sheep to the slaughter”. Haim
Nahman Bialik, who
later became a cultural icon in Israel, in a poem written following the
Kishinev pogrom, castigated the survivors, heaping shame upon their heads.
Bialik lashed out at the men who hid in stinking holes, “crouched husbands,
bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks, “while their non-Jewish
neighbors raped their wives and daughters. This poem, in the Russian
translation by Vladimir Jabotinsky, remains one of the strongest literary
depictions of the pogrom.
Brenner,
another poet and like Bialik the son of a pious Russian Jewish family,
radically transformed the best-known verse of the Jewish prayer book “Hear, O
Israel, God is your Lord, God is one!” one of the first verses taught to
children and the last to be spoken by a Jew before his death. Brenner’s revised
verse proclaimed: “Hear, O Israel! Not an eye for an eye. Two eyes for one eye,
all their teeth for every humiliation!” This is how these and many other
Zionist writers stoked the fires of revenge and violence. As the Diaspora Jew
was a coward, so the Zionist Jew — the New Hebrew, the Israeli Jew — must be a
warrior.
Later,
recognized as the collective legatee of the victims of the Nazis, the state of
Israel was awarded crucial financial resources from West Germany and other
countries. At the same time, a transformation was taking place: while it was
becoming militarily stronger, the state of Israel was claiming to be recognized
not only as a legatee of past victims but as an actual collective and righteous
victim in its own right.
The
Eichmann trial in 1961 marked a watershed in this respect. From then on, the
state of Israel has emphasised its continuity with the victims and introduced
Holocaust studies into public education. Israeli officials argue that their
country is unfairly treated as a harmless collective Jew. In the face of
opprobrium for the mass bombing of Gaza in 2023 the Israeli delegates at the
United Nations started wearing yellow six-pointed stars, like those imposed on
the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.
The
pretense of being a blameless victim justifies Israeli reliance on military
force. “Ein brera!”, “we have no choice” is a common Israeli explanation of
violence. Jabotinsky formulated the Zionist concept of the Iron Wall, of
terrorising the Arabs into submission, and published it in Russian in 1923. His
concept is being reconfirmed a century later. Moreover, political compromises
with the Palestinians appear suspect and dangerous. Israeli Prime Minister
Itzhak Rabin who tried to reach such a compromise was assassinated, effectively
putting an end to the idea of a Palestinian state next to Israel.
The
European Jewish memory of victimhood has been maintained, cultivated, and
transmitted to future generations of Israelis. The collective memory of the
pogroms in the Pale of Settlement and the death camps in Poland has been
inculcated in Israeli schools. All the students, whether or not their ancestors
suffered at the hand of the Nazis, are led to make the same conclusion: Arabs
attack us just because we are Jews. No wonder this is the way many Israelis
view the Hamas attack, which enables them to support the massive violence being
inflicted on the Palestinians.
Since
October 2023, comparisons of Palestinian resistance with the Nazis have
acquired a new life. One of the best-known precedents belongs to Menachem Begin
who, during Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon, compared Arafat to Hitler. This
was meant to make the massive bombardment of Beirut in 1982 appear morally
sound. Such comparisons are now used to justify a much deadlier bombardment of
Gaza. The proportion of civilian casualties in these bombardments surpassed
that of all the cases of warfare in the 20th century.
The
state of Israel tends also to dehumanize the Palestinians to vindicate what
many experts qualify as genocide. An Israeli high school history teacher was
put in solitary confinement for making
Facebook posts showing the names and faces of a few of the 18,000 Palestinians
killed during Israel’s assault on Gaza. The Zionist state apparently considers
humanizing the Palestinians an existential threat.
The
paradigm of the Kishinev pogrom is rallied to provide a moral carte blanche for
the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
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