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Remember Auschwitz, and don't forget Gaza

Syed Badrul Ahsan | January 30, 2025 00:00:00


In this week of a remembrance of Auschwitz-Birkenau, of the liberation of Auschwitz eight decades ago, it becomes the moral responsibility of all nations to inform themselves that the tragedy the Nazis subjected Jews to in the course of the Second World War must not happen again. The murder of Jews by Adolf Hitler and his antisemitic regime will remain a blot on human conscience. It is sinister history which must endlessly be retold for generations to be. That such darkness does not rear its head again is what the world must ensure.

And yet, even as we recall the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we know only too well that human nature, the perfidy with which Machiavellian politicians sometimes operate, has not learnt any lessons from the trauma of the war the Nazis imposed on the world. Observe the sad faces of broken humanity, the despair and desperation written on the faces of the survivors of Israel's killing mission in Gaza as they make the long trek back home to what remains of the northern segment of the strip. Their trek will take them home, where no home exists anymore. Along the way, it is broken, bombed-out buildings, a veritable apocalypse they see.

Yes, a deal has been struck by Hamas and Israel for the release of hostages and Palestinian prisoners. But nothing in that deal speaks of the nearly 50,000 Palestinians who have perished in the fury visited on them by forces unleashed by Benjamin Netanyahu. We remember the victims of the Holocaust with broken hearts. But it remains a shame that not a single political leader in the West has seen fit to condemn the murder of all those thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank and in Lebanon. It is a shame for those who have averted their gaze from the ethnic cleansing Netanyahu and his military have indulged in for the past fifteen months.

Auschwitz was a concentration camp which readied Jews for murder through gassing and hunger and other means of elimination devised by the Nazis. Even as we proclaim 'Never Again', we feel the shame inside us of knowing that what Hitler did has been happening, has been repeated around us in the decades since 1945. Today it is Gaza, it is Palestine which is a huge concentration camp, supervised and operated by Netanyahu and his men. If in the Second World War there were many in the West who sought to appease the Nazis or look away from their misdeeds, today it is their political descendants whose hearts have hardened over the plight of the Palestinians. When Donald Trump speaks of Palestinians relocating to Jordan and Egypt, when Israel's hardline politicians applaud his comments, it is a sign that the brutalisation of people as part of history remains an ugly truth.

The world is right to condemn what the Nazis did between 1939 and 1945. But the world --- and it is the West we point our fingers at --- has never had the grace or courage to condemn the atrocities Israel has been perpetrating since the moment of its creation in May 1948. Palestine was buried beneath Israel; and Palestinians displaced in that moment of shame have never been able to go back home. On occupied Arab land in the West Bank, Jewish settlers have with impunity built colonies in contravention of human rights and all other international laws. The International Criminal Court has issued warrants of arrest against Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, but efforts are being expended to ensure that they remain safe and do not fall into the hands of the ICC.

No, the world has learnt no lessons from Auschwitz. Jews suffered in Hitler's era. Palestinians have been paying a price for the machinations of politicians determined to deprive them of their homes and their land. Gaza is today a mass grave, a place where life used to be despite the travails imposed on it by Israeli occupation. When Itamar Ben-Gvir resigns from Netanyahu's cabinet in protest against the deal with Hamas and wants the war --- a war imposed on the Palestinians --- to continue until Hamas is destroyed, indeed until Gaza is stripped of every living Palestinian --- it is a sign that the souls of the men who caused Auschwitz and the death of six million Jews yet shadow us. There is no sympathy for Palestinians, whose attempts to raise or carry the flags of the country they dream of recreating are pulled down by police in western capitals.

When a Holocaust survivor at the Auschwitz anniversary tells his audience that antisemitism is not dead and goes on to cite the Hamas assault on Israel in October 2023 as an instance, he misreads history. Hamas has been condemned and will be condemned for what it did at the time, but to suggest it was antisemitism at work is to look away from the historical reality. The reality is as clear as spring water: when Palestinian organisations and individuals condemn Israel, it is that old hurt they have carried in their hearts, the pain which comes of knowing that they have no country, that their land has been commandeered through Israeli aggression and western acquiescence of the aggression.

Auschwitz has not gone away. In the decades since the fall of the Nazis, Auschwitz has simply been transported to other regions of the globe. There were the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, with anywhere between a million and two million Cambodians bludgeoned to death; there was the Pakistan army putting the life out of three million Bengalis; there are the Tamils who have suffered endlessly in Sri Lanka; there are the Hutus and Tutsis who will not forget the carnage laying Rwanda waste in 1994; there is the tragedy of Bosnia initiated by Slobodan Milosevic and his ethnic cleansers. There is Timor-Leste.

In a week when we light candles and pray for the more than million Jews who perished at Auschwitz, for all the six million whose lives were brought to a precipitate end by Nazi Germany, we raise our hands in prayer for the nearly 50,000 Palestinians who have been bombed to death by Israel's war machine. We observe, in tears and in heartbreak, the gloomy march back to Gaza of the Palestinians who have survived Netanyahu's ferocity.

Their homes are gone; their families are gone. Their dreams are gone. It is a wasteland they trek back to, a wasteland where trees do not exist anymore, where birds do not sing anymore, where olives do not grow anymore, where mosques and churches do not sound the call to prayer anymore.

The Nazis are gone. Hitler and his henchmen are a bad memory. But the shadow of Auschwitz stalks the world, eighty years after 1945.

ahsan.syedbadrul@gmail.com


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