Shoah, the Memory between Europe and Gaza, by Bruno Montesano (Micromega)
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day and you will find this op-ed by Bruno Montesano, originally published in Italian by Micromega. The newsletter will be back on Jan 30.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Poland, 2020, by Rafal Zambrzycki / Sejm RP from Polska, CC BY 2.0
Shoah, the Memory between Europe and Gaza
By Bruno Montesano, published originally in Italian in Micromega
Original version in Micromega, in Italian: https://www.micromega.net/shoah-la-memoria-tra-europa-e-gaza
Two genocides
What is the use in remembering the victims of a genocide if they commit another one? This is the question that many will be asking themselves in these days.
The idea that “the victims become the killers” is foul – and ancient: it has circulated about Israel since the ’70s. The six million people who died in the Shoah did not awake to murder Palestinians on the grounds of the lesson learned. At the same time, it is certainly paradoxical to remember a genocide while we witness what many academics, between History and Law, considered as such- even more if that happens at the hands of a government of a State born out of the dust of the Shoah.
There is then an element of truth in the annoying statement that the victims become the killers: or that the fact that the experience of the victims often operates as an anesthetic for the pain of others. The statement is false when it comes to specific people, but it has elements of truth when it comes to collective identities.
The passage from victims to killers rotates around a defensive attitude; I do not want what I, or my parents have suffered to happen to me and therefore I will do everything to stop it. There can be no mercy because my life, the memory of the late members of my family, and the chances of life of my children are at stake. The justification, besides the mortal threat that has been survived in front of, hoping that it does not occur again, resides in the fact of being victims, and therefore right. End of the story.
The historian Amos Goldberg has underlined the difference between historians and jurists in interpreting the meaning of “intentionality” when it comes to labeling a genocide. However, Goldberg has also stated that, even without the ability to prove “the clear intention of ‘destroying the Palestinians as such’ ‘completely or partially’ Israel is committing morally abominable crimes, justifying them with “the aspiration to ‘permanent security’”, which is the main rationale of mass violence from the state. The Bosnian Muslims, Rwanda’s Tutsi, Burma’s Rohingya, and the Armenians in Turkey were all massacred by their status as a threat to the security of the collective. In this case, self-defence and genocide do not diverge but instead often walk together.
The memory of the Shoah has been focused on a victimhood approach- with the Western complicity, focussed on closing the page on that past without really facing the lengthy extent of racism that continues to plague, even if in different shapes, the Continent. Many Jewish communities in the West, withdrawn in their trauma and wounds, have been deaf to what was happening outside of it- first and foremost, again, to the transformation of institutional racism in Europe, of which that mass grave that the Mediterranean Sea has become can be the symbol.
In addition to this (also because of the limits of part of the Left in understanding the complexities and fears of the modern Jewish world), many representatives of the Jewish communities have ended up (for convenience or belief) establishing more than sympathetic relationships with the far-right.
These same communities, in virtue of the victimhood paradigm, have been deaf to what happened in Israel, the refuge born out of the infinitely bureaucratised and modern massacre that has been the Shoah. A State, that was born on another injustice has developed itself through discrimination and violence, reaching to accentuate the problems of every nation-state; the preference for the national people and the racism for those who are considered external from it.
Europe, between obedience and indifference
All of this should not hypnotise us, though. The history that we talk about is also one of the indifferent masses trained with low-intensity hate in wealthy European countries. Given the fact that remembering the Shoah and Porrajmos is not a favour to the Jewish, Roma, and Sinti peoples, Europeans are not absolved from the duty of interrogating themselves.
An investigation of the reasons for the rise of fascist authoritarian states and post-fascist ones in Western democracies should be at the centre of this self-reflection.
This is what we have in common with Israel. In opposition to the idea that Israel (or a metaphysical version of Zionism) is a symptom or symbol, the concreteness of political dynamics indicates a common tendency across all geographical latitudes, the fascist becoming of the world.
By picking the thoughts of Stefano Levi della Torre ( Italian essayist) , it could be said that, in addition to the justification of the perceived threat, the perversion of the condition of victimhood is also shared between Europe and Israel (on different grounds, of course, a genocide on one hand, and the instrumentalisation of the relative or real impoverishment of large sectors on the population on the other).
Both dynamics are grounded in the same human material, with the ability to enact maximum violence even without a clear idea or prospect of its purpose. The far-right reasons in terms of victimhood, legitimising, therefore, every possible kind of cruelty.
White people, threatened by migrants and ethnic substitution, victims of Europe and its environmental policies, oppressed by the woke Left and gender ideology, crushed by international finance and Soros, are authorised to limit the rights and freedoms of minorities.
A little less freedom for everyone means more security for some. We feel like victims and we create more. Institutional racism and migration policies are more and more ferocious, like the rise of governments that erode the fundamental rights granted by liberal democracies and this mirrors a misguided idea of protection from threats, sometimes real, but often paranoid and distorted.
The combination of victims’ resentment and ferocity at the core of Fascism, yesterday and today, is something that we share with Israel. It is then needed, in this scenario to pay attention to the other face of command, as suggested by David Bidussa (Italian historian), the combination of obedience and indifference.
If it is true that the Israeli society is anesthetised, in addition to being an active participant in the destruction of Gaza and its population, we need to focus on one fact.
The two sicknesses of the spirit, as a way of saying, are not alien to the societies where we live, just like the specificity of the Nazi-fascist antisemitism must be inserted in the lengthy history of European racism.
The Zone of Interest, the Academy Award Best International Feature winner in 2024 has inspired many parallels between Gaza and Nazi Europe, but it should be read differently.
That movie, facing the problem of indifference and obedience, speaks of Gaza like it speaks of all of us, in a Europe sliding more and more to the Right, a Europe that has not dealt yet with the horror of nationalism, the atrocities of colonial conquests and the violence that it keeps on displaying against the descendants of those who suffered those lootings and that (the European mainstream consensus) does not want to consider as fellow citizens.
After World War II, democratic nations unloaded on antisemitism the wider problem of racism, accentuating the topics of discrimination and oppression of minorities and non-Europeans on the Shoah, therefore avoiding dealing with the other shapes of racism, previous and successive.
Nationalism has become patriotism, in the hope of purifying it from the violence inherent to the idea of Nation (considered to correspond to the idea of race not so long ago), with its permanent minority.
Since the 90s, the destructive core of nationalism has returned, like a karst river, to dictate the political agenda, all the way up to the current phase in which it dominates that agenda, without reserves.
The coldness with which the massacre of Palestinians and their dehumanisation in the media representation has been accepted reflects the same unequal evaluation of the value of the lives of “others” in our societies and beyond our borders.
Gaza, where Western hypocrisy burns
Where Europe has spoken of humanity and human rights, it has killed, so Franz Fanon concluded The Wretched of the Earth, with the research of a new universalism, purified by the racial waste.
Gaza is where Western hypocrisy burns. In Gaza, we can see the weakness of the concepts of human rights and international Law, in addition to the lack of reparation for the colonial domination which feeds the indifference of ¾ of the world for the Shoah, as underlined by Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books. In the absence of a true sword – without a true political identity, instruments of coercion really inspired by truly universal values – the hypocrisy of the strongest triumphs.
Acting like the dogs of Sinai: as there are no dogs in Sinai, the expression means jumping on the bandwagon of the victorious. This is the opening note of the homonymous text by Franco Fortini of 1967.
A year and a half of massacre, genocide, and ethnical cleansing. War crimes and crimes against humanity – whatever this is – have killed between 47.000 and 64.000 people according to the Lancet, 100.000 wounded, 2 million displaced people, and devastated infrastructures, both civilian and social.
Biden has sent weapons until the end, Europe has asked to kill at a less accelerated rate at some point- the EU High Representative for foreign policy Josep Borrel, at the end of his mandate, has raised his voice against the ethnic cleansing; too little, too late. And now, several Europen governments are saying that Netanyahu and his government colleagues have nothing to fear from them (the ICC arrest warrants or anything else).
In the meantime, the AfD, which threatens to deport all the “non-German” runs second in the German elections polls. Le Pen’s National Rally is the first party in France. In Austria, the heirs of the Nazis, the FPÖ may lead the country. In Italy there has been a post-fascist government for the last two years, a government that does not waste a day in limiting the rights and freedoms of migrants and political opposition. The oligarch-fascist second Trump administration has been instated and wants to deport 10 million people.
Michael Mann has written that the modern ethnical cleansing is “ the dark side of democracy which presents itself when ethno-nationalist movements demand the State for their ethnos, that they initially want to build as a democracy, trying afterward however to exclude and ‘cleanse’ the Others”.
Let’s deal with Gaza’s rubble but also with the debris that we have never removed in Europe, and with the new rubble that awaits here, handmade by us.
Bruno Montesano is a PhD student in “Social and Political Mutation” at the universities of Florence and Turin. He writes for Il Manifesto , Gli Asini and other media. He has curated the essay "“Israele e Palestina. Oltre i Nazionalismi” (Israel and Palestine. Beyond nationalism) published by E/O in 2024.
The newsletter will be back on January 30th with a review of the second season of MO on Netflix, and much more, stay tuned.