World War III is underway. It is being waged on military, economic, political, and moral battlefields. On one side are the autocratic nations of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. On the other are the mostly Western democracies with distant allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Each alliance is firming up its terms of collaboration and planning for a dire future. Each seeks more collaborating nations or at least firmly neutral ones. And each wishes to prove to the wider world that it provides the best, and most efficient form of governance.
It is the existence of Israel and its recent actions that have incited activities on the moral battlefield. Pankaj Mishra produced an interesting article, The Shoah after Gaza, for the London Review of Books. He provides a timeline for the utilization of the Shoah (the Hebrew word used for the Holocaust) as a cudgel to keep the US and most European nations in line supporting Israel as a politically necessary democracy, and a nation whose security is owed to the Jewish people. Israel’s strategy has been to instill guilt in the nations that are willing to believe that they allowed it to occur, and to remind everyone that it could happen again. This strategy has required that all opponents of Israel policy and actions be compared to Nazis, and labeled as antisemites who might generate another Shoah. Mishra concludes that this Shoah strategy is proving foolish in light of the constant reminders of the violence Israel is willing to unleash in an attempt to eliminate Palestinians in what it, and it alone, thinks of as “its land.”
Mishra points out that Israel never intended for it to be a haven, nor a beacon of hope, for Shoah survivors.
“In its early years the state of Israel had an ambivalent relationship with the Shoah and its victims. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, initially saw Shoah survivors as ‘human debris’, claiming that they had survived only because they had been ‘bad, harsh, egotistic’. It was Ben-Gurion’s rival Begin, a demagogue from Poland, who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation, and a new basis for Israel’s identity. The Israeli establishment began to produce and disseminate a very particular version of the Shoah that could be used to legitimise a militant and expansionist Zionism.”
It would be prominent Shoah survivors who would recognize that Israel was not what they would have wanted it to be. Jean Améry was an Auschwitz survivor who, having been tortured by the Nazis, was troubled by the reports of systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons.
“In one of the last essays he published, he wrote: ‘I urgently call on all Jews who want to be human beings to join me in the radical condemnation of systematic torture. Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end’.”
Primo Levi was also an Auschwitz survivor.
“Primo Levi, who had known the horrors of Auschwitz at the same time as Améry and also felt an emotional affinity to the new Jewish state, quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation ... We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.’ In several works of fiction and non-fiction, Levi had meditated not only on his time in the death camp and its anguished and insoluble legacy, but also on the ever present threats to human decency and dignity. He was especially incensed by Begin’s exploitation of the Shoah. Two years later, he argued that ‘the centre of gravity of the Jewish world must turn back, must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora’.”
“Misgivings of the kind expressed by Améry and Levi are condemned as grossly antisemitic today. It’s worth remembering that many such re-examinations of Zionism and anxieties about the perception of Jews in the world were incited among survivors and witnesses of the Shoah by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its manipulative new mythology. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a theologian who won the Israel Prize in 1993, was already warning in 1969 against the ‘Nazification’ of Israel. In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion: the tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from ‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself’. Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating ‘non-Jews as subhuman’ and replicating ‘racist Nazi attitudes’.”
On the moral battlefield, the autocratic alliance has sided with the Palestinians while the US and most European leaders are unwilling, or politically unable, to be sufficiently critical of Israel and its leaders. The autocrats have taken the moral high ground and are busy using it to turn world opinion against the alliance of democracies. Much of the neutral world consists of former European colonies, peopled by persons of darker skin than Europeans with memories of genocidal actions inflicted on them by white colonial powers. To them, it can be argued that Israel is just another white colonial power taking land and freedom from darker skinned people.
“The answers for many people around the world cannot but be tainted by a long-simmering racial bitterness. Palestine, as George Orwell pointed out in 1945, is a ‘colour issue’, and this is the way it was inevitably seen by Gandhi, who pleaded with Zionist leaders not to resort to terrorism against Arabs using Western arms, and the postcolonial nations, which almost all refused to recognise the state of Israel. What W.E.B. Du Bois called the central problem of international politics – the ‘colour line’ – motivated Nelson Mandela when he said that South Africa’s freedom from apartheid is ‘incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’. James Baldwin sought to profane what he termed a ‘pious silence’ around Israel’s behaviour when he claimed that the Jewish state, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as an instance of gross racial injustice. So, today, do the leaders of the United States’s oldest and most prominent Black Christian denominations, who have accused Israel of genocide and asked Biden to end all financial as well as military aid to the country.”
“In 1967, Baldwin was tactless enough to say that the suffering of Jewish people ‘is recognised as part of the moral history of the world’ and ‘this is not true for the blacks.’ In 2024, many more people can see that, when compared with the Jewish victims of Nazism, the countless millions consumed by slavery, the numerous late Victorian holocausts in Asia and Africa, and the nuclear assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are barely remembered. Billions of non-Westerners have been furiously politicised in recent years by the West’s calamitous war on terror, ‘vaccine apartheid’ during the pandemic, and the barefaced hypocrisy over the plight of Ukrainians and Palestinians; they can hardly fail to notice a belligerent version of ‘Holocaust denial’ among the elites of former imperialist countries, who refuse to address their countries’ past of genocidal brutality and plunder and try hard to delegitimise any discussion of this as unhinged ‘wokeness’. Popular West-is-best accounts of totalitarianism continue to ignore the acute descriptions of Nazism (by Jawaharlal Nehru and Aimé Césaire, among other imperial subjects) as the radical ‘twin’ of Western imperialism; they shy away from exploring the obvious connection between the imperial slaughter of natives in the colonies and the genocidal terrors perpetrated against Jews inside Europe.”
The Western democracies like to think of themselves as “the good guys.” But much of the world remembers when they were the “bad guys.” The insistence in granting Israel license to commit crimes suggests that the good guys are not as trustworthy as they think.
“For most people outside the West, whose primordial experience of European civilisation was to be brutally colonised by its representatives, the Shoah did not appear as an unprecedented atrocity. Recovering from the ravages of imperialism in their own countries, most non-Western people were in no position to appreciate the magnitude of the horror the radical twin of that imperialism inflicted on Jews in Europe. So when Israel’s leaders compare Hamas to Nazis, and Israeli diplomats wear yellow stars at the UN, their audience is almost exclusively Western. Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.”
In the conflict with the autocratic alliance, the moral
battlefield is as important as any other.
