Revolution Online, January 1, 2009
Invoking the Holocaust to Silence Criticism of Israel’s Crimes? NEVER AGAIN!
Watch interview with Alan Goodman outside the Holocaust Museum
As Israel carries out a massacre of the population of Gaza, the Nazi holocaust is again being invoked to suppress, silence, and declare “beyond the pale,” any exposure and criticism of Israel.
This is ludicrous and obscene: The mass murder of six million Jews was a horrific crime carried out by the German imperialist ruling class. And—in fact—the rulers of the “Western democracies” made conscious decisions to ignore, cover-up, and do nothing about it at the time—including the policy of the United States to turn away ships with Jews trying to escape the Nazis.
Israel was not established as a “response to the Holocaust” but as an instrument of the imperialist powers—especially the U.S.—to further their economic and political domination of the nations and peoples of the Middle East. There is no logic or justice to invoking the holocaust to justify the systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine, or the apartheid-like imprisonment of the Palestinian people in their own land—especially when Palestinians had NOTHING TO DO with the mass murder carried out by the Nazi regime.
Today Israel is maintained by massive military and financial aid by the United States, and acts not only in its own interests, but most fundamentally as an enforcer of the U.S. empire. The result has been death, destruction, torture, and terror in the Middle East, and beyond—from South Africa to Guatemala.
Never again can it be the case that the holocaust (or ludicrous claims of “self-defense” on the part of Israel) is invoked to justify the truly Nazi-like policies and actions which the rulers of Israel, and its founders, have carried out over the past sixty years and more, and which they are now carrying to new depths of brutality and depravity with the slaughter in Gaza.
Never again must it be the case that the Holocaust is invoked to justify Israel’s great crimes without this being met with determined and passionate opposition, including from among Jewish people who can be won and mobilized to oppose this.
In this light, this statement by Bob Avakian, the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA is something that needs to be confronted by everyone, and poses a critical moral challenge: “After the Holocaust, the worst thing that has happened to Jewish people is the state of Israel.”
| After the Holocaust, the worst thing that has happened to Jewish people is the state of Israel.
Bob Avakian, |
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.
