Opinion
I Don’t Want to Hear About Your Holocaust Any Longer
October 16, 2024
by Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler,
Director and Chief Visionary, Faith Strategies,
I do not want to hear about the Jewish Holocaust any longer, particularly as Israel carries out a Holocaust in Gaza and the West Bank, and have spread their pogrom into Lebanon, Iran, and Syria. It is not that I do not believe that the European Holocaust should cause pause and demand that the horrors of it be contemplated and the victims honored, but one holocaust does not justify or excuse another. When the cry in the aftermath of the European holocaust is “Never Again!” that should apply to everywhere in the world, but evidently those words are reserved for one particular group of people and at one particular moment in history. I do not buy that, however. To only define a holocaust to a particular group in Europe is to ignore the many holocausts that have existed in history – past and present. I think of the Middle Passage, chattel slavery in the US, the treatment of Indigenous people in the Americas, Darfur, The Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, or the Tutsis in Rwanda to name a few. Wherever and whenever people are faced with a blatant disregard for their existence because of governmental policy or mob incitement that is an ingredient to a holocaust. “Never Again!” should apply to all history and even in this current moment. Each holocaust should be just as startling that demands condemnation as the European one has.
I know someone is going to argue that the word “holocaust” only relates to the pogrom in Europe carried out against Jews. Someone may argue that the term holocaust is particular to that moment in history and only the people who suffered and died in the death camps of Europe. But that assertion would be incorrect. In 1909, for example, Ida B. Wells campaigning against the lynchings targeting Black people in the US used the term holocaust to describe what was happening. Her use of the word was offered more than thirty years before its application to the Jewish experience in Europe. Therefore, holocaust was not meant to be applied to only one terrible event in Europe. It is something that should be applied in universal ways – wherever it happens and for any people who are targeted.
Part of the problem in the Israel/Gaza/Lebanon/Iranian conflict are words deliberately attached or omitted to either accent, diminish, or deny an event or people. The holocaust has been cemented in the international narrative as something that is particular to a people and time and is elevated to the apex of horrors that historically demands worldwide condemnation and guilt from the world for allowing it to occur. The current massacre in Gaza has claimed more than 42,000 recordable deaths, which includes more than 17,000 children, and outstanding is at least 10,000 others who have not been accounted for and believed dead beneath the rubble of Gaza. Furthermore, Israel has been blocking more than 80% of humanitarian aid trying to enter Gaza. There are 1.9 million people – nine in 10 Gazans – internally displaced at least once, and forced to move from one unsafe place to another. With estimates of the number of dead exceeding 100,000 people should demand from the world, equal if not greater, condemnation and collective world guilt for allowing something like this to occur.
The use of word holocaust is interchangeable with genocide. This is a genocide, a holocaust. Yet, President Biden has insisted that what is happening in Gaza is not a genocide, and he joins with a chorus of voices like The American Jewish Committee, The Anti-Defamation League, and the American Enterprise Institute to decry the use of the term. In denouncing the use of the term genocide, which is crystal clear to anyone watching indiscriminate bombings and the increasing death toll, is an attempt to shield Israel from being considered the culprit of genocide or a holocaust. We must remember that one of Israel’s claims for existing is to protect themselves from genocide. But it is perplexing how the victims of one holocaust would inflict a holocaust on others.
Though Israel was founded as a refuge from the European holocaust yet it seems to have no problem perpetuating a holocaust against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and have been doing this for more than 76 years. This lapse in moral and ethical judgment should awaken and alarm all of Jewry because Jews once oppressed would today and since 1948 be the oppressors of Palestinian people. Ta-Nehisi Coates coming from a visit to Israel-Palestine declares “your oppression will not save you.” In part, he means that your experience of oppression does not give you the right to oppress others. The experience of a holocaust should awaken a spirit to not have that visited upon anybody else. The words “Never Again” should apply to everyone and to every place on the globe. And yes, it should also apply to Gaza, the West Bank, and wherever Palestinians are confronted existentially.