Image by Alex Shuper.
With competing narratives of victimization, one narrative is abused.
One man looks up to the sky crying at the top of his lungs as their wife and two young daughters have become crushed under rubble after being hit by American missiles. The other looks far afield to a distant, white-clothed table where great-grandparents talk of living in Polish ghettoes and being placed into concentration camps for being Jews.
The more extreme among the latter, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, speaks of the necessity of bombing food and aid depots and the American GOP’s support of this. In late April, in response to the International Court of Justice’s hearing on Israel’s international law obligations to allow humanitarian assistance into Gaza, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar claimed that the ICJ was an antisemitic body. Perhaps the most outlandish claim supporting unmitigated violence against the Palestinians is Netanyahu’s assertion that the Palestinian Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini of Jerusalem persuaded Hitler to kill 6 million Jews.
One party sits on the floor, grieving over lost family members, asking how any people could bring complete devastation to another and not allow food, water or medicine into Gaza in two months. Meanwhile, the other’s eyes fixate on 80 years ago, to a horrible crime committed in the first half of the 20th century; they don a phony survivalist mask and set out to destroy another population. To any criticism of Israel’s abusive behavior, it excuses antisemitism, invoking the Holocaust.
Yet who is the present-day victim? Certainly not the Middle East hegemon, Israel. True, it did suffer a terrible terrorist attack on its soil on October 7, 2023. But such an attack was a far cry from an existential threat and was nothing in comparison to its year and a half genocide against an entire people.
Also, the question arises about the plethora of victims’ descendants across the Global South and peripheries within the West – do they, too, have a right to wear a similar mask to Ben-Gvir and brutalize any group that competes or comes into conflict with them? In other words, do the descendants of a historical victim have the right to unleash mass violence and atrocity on whomever they choose nearly a century after the initial crime? For example, because the Congolese were brutalized by Belgian imperialists, could they now conduct genocide against Rwanda? Because the Irish were oppressed and disposed of their land by the British, do they now have the right to brutalize Ireland’s immigrant population? As the Herero people of present-day Namibia were victims of the first (German orchestrated) genocide of the 20th century, do they now have a right to commit atrocities against their Botswanan neighbors?
Such questions may complicate Western popular history that tends to ignore all the genocides, deliberate/ignored famines, mass atrocities and land thefts caused by European and American colonialism. Instead, the primary focus of historical crimes, requiring continuous reference, is the Holocaust. In the US, even slavery and Native American genocide is not magnified much and certainly not used for political ends. In fact, the opposition to Americans learning such history has been censored, even though there was never much of an educational focus on African American slavery or Native American genocide before, except at the university level.
This is a stark contrast with the Holocaust, which has been used since the Six Day War, when Israel became deemed a strategic asset to the West. With implicit reference to the Holocaust, there is the ever-present antisemitism allegation that allows for Israel to dispossess and commit mass atrocities against the Palestinians with complete impunity. When some, even Jews, take the side of the contemporary victim, the Holocaust comes into the equation and those seeking justice are often labelled anti-Semites.
Because one group has been considered by the West to be virtually the world’s only victim, those who criticize the state, consisting of that group, are analogous to Nazis. It doesn’t matter that this state, Israel, has nuclear weapons and is the most powerful nation in the Middle East. Nor does it matter that it receives continuous armaments from the US and $4 billion in annual military assistance, along with $20 billion since Oct. 7th (as of October 2024).
Such magic-trick-logic attempts to pull the wool over the eyes, allowing impunity from judging a state for its actions against the population that it occupies and, presently, commits genocide against. Because of such hocus pocus, which is generally apparent to those in the Global South outside the West’s propaganda echo chamber, it has become necessary to penalize protesters or those who criticize Israel, particularly in the US and Germany. Under the Biden administration, it was over-policing First Amendment rights at universities and within institutions, leading to mass student expulsions and firings. This has been ramped up under Trump with ICE disappearances and deportations.
With competing narratives of victimization between Palestinians and Israel, one cannot criticize the abuse of the Holocaust and antisemitism to wipe clean Israel’s aggression because so much is riding on it. Paraphrasing Mishra and many other scholars, Israel is a Western neo-colonial fortress that has been backed, ultimately, to advance American and Europe’s own geostrategic ends.
On the other hand, when voicing support of the contemporary victim, Palestinians, students are expelled or disappeared.
Thus, we need a profound change in how we think about victimhood and the idea of prioritizing past victims over present ones if we are ever to change anything. To that end, it is important to recognize, just as we do the Holocaust, the historical and present-day victims of colonialism and neo-colonial imperialism.
We must also transcend racist preferences that heavily fuel the West’s uncritical support of Israel and, rather, apply Kant’s categorical imperative – everyone is an end unto themselves throughout the world.
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