I knew that this event would end up being mentioned, especially at this time of the year.
The usual line is along the line of Alan Dershowitz's Kristallnacht again: Hamas praise & Jew-hatred
Many of the most egregious petitions and protests against Israel occurred even before Israel responded to the Hamas barbarity of Oct. 7. Student groups, lawyers’ groups, Black Lives Matter groups, labor unions, and other hard left, woke progressives praised Hamas for its rapes, beheadings and murders just hours after they occurred. It would be as if these groups increased their support for Nazism following Kristallnacht in 1938, when 91 Jews were killed in Germany and many synagogues and Jewish stores destroyed.
This comparison actually lacks a lot of historical background, but since he starts it with "before Israel responded", let's go with the Nakba. The Israelis have pushed the Palestinians into Gaza and the West Bank and restricted their mobility, among other things. The Nazi also put European Jews into Ghettos. Some of those Jews revolted:
Vilna, Mir, Lachva (Lachwa), Kremenets, Czestochowa, Nesvizh, Sosnowiec, and Tarnow, among others, resisted with force when the Germans began to deport ghetto populations. In Bialystok, the underground staged an uprising just before the final destruction of the ghetto in September 1943. Most of the ghetto fighters, primarily young men and women, died during the fighting.
The Warsaw ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943 was the largest single revolt by Jews. Hundreds of Jews fought the Germans and their auxiliaries in the streets of the ghetto. Thousands of Jews refused to obey German orders to report to an assembly point for deportation. In the end the Nazis burned the ghetto to the ground to force the Jews out. Although they knew defeat was certain, Jews in the ghetto fought desperately and valiantly.
Likewise there was resistance in the concentration camps: Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, among others.
Should we condemn the Jews that resisted German repression the way that the Palestinians have been resisting the Nakba, which is something my learned colleague needs to refresh his memory upon. Of course, as a Brit, I am well aware of Stern Gang/Lehi, Irgun, and Haganah and their activities. Do the names Folke Bernadotte and Walter Guiness mean anything to you, Mr. Dershowitz? Yellin-Mor said this about the assassination of Guiness:
"Really these acts by Lord Moyne were without meaning for us. They were useful only as propaganda, because they allowed us to explain to the people why we had killed him. What was important to us was that he symbolized the British Empire in Cairo. We weren't yet in a position to try to hit Churchill in London, so the logical second best was to hit Lord Moyne in Cairo."
Lehi, Irgun, and Haganah went on to form the IDF.
I can also add that Krystallnacht did not occur in a vacuum. It was an act of terrorism which precipitated that event. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris.
As you know, the Jews in Germany were being discriminated against. But I can ask you whether this act justifies the retribution against the entire Jewish community, as is Israel's undeniable Genocide committed against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Yes, it is Genocide being committed by Israel using the legal black letter definition of that term.
I quoted Sir Gerald Kaufman's speech from "House of Commons Hansard Debates" 16 January 2009 yesterday, and I'll give an excerpt of it today:
My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count...Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It is too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him. Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death, Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed.
The phrase "Never again" is rendered meaningless if it applies only to one group of people, especially Jews. It needs to mean "Never again" for everyone, including Palestinians. Zionists (people who support a Jewish homeland of ANY faith) have been using this as an excuse for the excesses of the State of Israel for too long. And, as I like to point out, a lot of Zionists are Christians who want the state of Israel to start world war III. They couldn't give a shit about the Jewish people. Conflating Zionism and support for Israel with being "anti-Jewish" is a fallacy, as I've also discussed. In fact, Zionism is far more the enemy of the Jews than calling the state of Israel on its treatment of the Palestinians.
You might want to reflect on that fact.
I've also heard it said that look at what you are doing now since that would have been the way you would have acted during the Holocaust. I won't quote Martin Niemoeller since I hope my learned colleague is aware of that quote.
