IndyMedia - Vrij Media Centrum Nederland

According to a recent article published in Dutch and not translated in English2 (“Are the Gaza genocide and the Holocaust comparable?”), Doorbraak activists, who have held a very firm line against anti-Semitism for many years, have apparently converted to the “decolonial” ideology that equates Israelis with racist-colonialist-white supremacist Europeans.

This is all the more absurd when you consider that the majority of Israel's Jewish population today comes from so-called “Arab-Muslim countries”, and not from Europe as it was the case in 1947.
Thus, Doorbraak's comrades have the nerve to write that “the current genocide is part of the continuity of a violent colonial tradition, perpetrated by people who often have European roots3”, which is doubly inaccurate: 1) no genocide is under way in Palestine (at least for the moment), but war crimes and crimes against humanity; and 2) today, in 2024, the majority population in Israel is not of European origin.
But of course it's easier to ignore this last fact, as it allows Doorbrak to avoid asking publicly why so many Jews (around 7 or 800,000) were expelled from so-called “Arab-Muslim” countries, stripped from all their properties, and a good part of them had to seek refuge in Israel.
But Doorbraak’s historical inaccuracy and confusion are not limited to this one statement. Thus, in the above quoted article, we learn that “The Shoah was closely linked to Germany's plans for colonial expansion towards the East, in particular towards the fertile Ukraine, where it wished to establish plantations as other Western powers had done in their colonies in America, Africa and Asia.” Doorbrak comrades fail to explain the allegedly “close” relationship between colonial expansion and Judeocide; they just throw this idea in the air because it’s trendy to do so. An irresponsible attitude for people who know better as shown by many articles they wrote in the past....
Have they forgotten the importance and role of anti-Semitism in Hitler's ideology and concrete decisions ? Have they forgotten that, for the Nazis, the Jews were not a bunch of “natives”, or indigenous tribes, or peasants who prevented German colonial expansion in the East, but those responsible for the First World War, and all the evils of communism and capitalism? Have they forgotten that the Jews were considered by the Nazis as responsible for the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the German defeat during WW1, the “moral decay” of European civilization, industrialism, the collapse of “community” and “race” values, etc.? Have they forgotten that, for the Nazis, the Jews were “an anti-race”, a bunch of Untermenschen, who had to be exterminated like a deadly virus, like dangerous insects ?
Moreover, to speak of “colonialism", “ven in relation to the various waves of migration to Palestine from 1881 to 1939, is to deny that most of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who arrived
1 I will develop in an other article what I mean by “Zionist” and “Anti-Zionist” deniers (“négationnistes” in French). Basically I use this expression to qualify those who deny war crimes on the Israeli side or genocidal actions on the Palestinian side, and only accuse the other side. These new “deniers” use partly the same techniques as the far right Holocaust deniers.
2 https://www.doorbraak.eu/zijn-de-gaza-genocide-en-de-shoah-te-vergelijken/
3 I used a translation software to understand this article in Dutch so the comrades can correct my translation if it’s needed.
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in Palestine were REFUGEES4 and not militant "Zionists"5 whatever the meaning given to this word.
These refugees did not head for Palestine for ideological reasons: most of them would probably have preferred to leave for the United States, as more than two million did between 1881 (when the mass pogroms started in Russia) and the beginning of the 1920s (strict anti-migration laws were adopted between 1921 and 1924 in America), before the United States practically closed its doors. This pseudo-theory of the fanatically convinced “Zionist” migrant is propagated by “Zionists” (who rewrite and falsify history, notably in Israeli textbooks) and by "anti-Zionists" (who see these migrants as racist, white supremacist, European colonial settlers6 , but not as refugees).
How can Doorbraak comrades ignore the fact that Jews fled the Russian Empire, Central Europe and then Nazi Germany because of anti-Semitic persecutions and pogroms ? And those who were able to take refuge in the United States did not do so out of love for the ideology of American imperialist “democracy” or the so-called virtues of North American “liberalism”, especially at a time when segregationist laws were still flourishing in that country. (By the way, if Jewish migrants were so racists in Palestine why did they engage so passionately in favor of Afro-Americans in the United States ? Actually “decolonial” militants in the US are more “coherent” today than Doorbraak as they accuse American Jews of being privileged white supremacists who benefited from segregation.)
As regards the tens of thousands of Jews who headed for Palestine between the two world wars, and after the Second World War (including those who rotted in displaced persons camps in Europe when the region was liberated), they “chose” Palestine because Europe and America closed the door in their faces, not because they were white supremacist-Zionist-colonialist-racist- imperialists eager to reach the “promised land”.
By deliberately ignoring these elementary facts, and by suggesting that the Jews were the bearers of a Zionist-colonialist-racist-European-white supremacist project when they arrived in Palestine, Doorbraak activists are taking part in the great brainwashing promoting “anti-Zionist” denial and propagated by “decolonial” intellectuals and activists on an international scale.
They've lost their political compass to such an extent that they see fit to reproduce, without the slightest critical caption, two anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying placards to illustrate their article. The first placard states “If you wonder what you'd do in Nazi Germany, you're doing it right now” and the second: “Stop doing what Hitler did to you!” Both slogans are not only false but criminal, and Doorbraak activists know this perfectly well: during the Second World War, the European Jewish population lost almost 6 million over 9.5 million Jews living in Europe in 1932. In Palestine, the Arab population has grown from around 1.4 million in 1947 to over 7 million today in Israel and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. What a curious “genocide”, resulting in a five-fold increase in a population, which is said to have been the victim of a systematic drive for total physical elimination over several decades...
4 Let’s recall some basic facts : there were around 25,000 Jews in Palestine in 1880; 20 to 30,000 Russian Jews arrived between 1882 and 1903; and 35 000 to 40,000 arrived between 1903 and 1914. The third and fourth waves brought respectively 35,000 Jews from the USSR, Poland and the Baltic countries between 1919 and 1923 and 82,000 Jews from the Balkans and the Middle East between 1924 and 1931. At the end of 1931, 174,600 Jews lived in Palestine. A bit later, 247 000 European Jews arrived in Palestine between 1932 and 1939.
6 Let’s underline an other absurdity in the accusation of colonialism: neither the Russian Empire, nor Eastern European states such as Poland during the interwar period, nor Nazi Germany saw the Jews (and even less so the “Zionists”) fleeing these countries as pawns to be used to colonize or even influence the politics of British Mandate Palestine!
5 Here I have drawn partly on the factual arguments put forward by Haviv Rettig Gur in one of his lectures ("The Great Misinterpretation: How Palestinians View Israel", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlK2mfYYm4U ), even though I don’t share the political positions of this journalist who works for The Times of Israel.
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According to Doorbraak, denouncing a “genocide” in Palestine is simply a pedagogical technique (admittedly a little shocking, but politically useful) to arouse the compassion of indifferent Europeans: “anti-colonial activists and people from the Islamic world sometimes7 feel obliged8 to refer to the Second World War and the Shoah to show how terrible the situation is in Palestine (...) in an almost desperate attempt to penetrate the Western psyche, some9 pro- Palestinian activists are trying to conjure up images, to demonstrate the similarities with all the photos and videos we receive every day from Gaza and the West Bank. They want to wake people up and encourage them to oppose the policy of the Dutch government, which wants to continue supporting genocide, among other things by supplying arms”.
The words “sometimes” and “some” conceal the fact that these systematic comparisons between Zionism and Nazism began as early as the 1920s and 1930s within the Communist International and inside the German Communist Party10, and were developed after 1949 within Soviet Stalinist propaganda agencies11 (see mass antisemitic persecutions and even executions of Jewish CP leaders in the USSR and the so-called People's Democracies). Countless articles, pamphlets and books published in the USSR and elsewhere equated Zionism with racism, apartheid, colonialism and imperialism12. Those comparisons were taken up by Arab nationalist and Islamist organizations, including those that celebrated and still celebrate Amin al-Husseini. He was the Great Mufti of Jerusalem, nominated with the blessing the British Empire and Hitler's collaborator, and is considered as a hero of the Palestinian liberation struggle13. Those Islamist and Arab- nationalist organizations mixed the old Stalinist accusations with the old European antisemitism, and their own pluri-secular anti-Jewish propaganda based on Muslim theology.
As for the use of the word “genocide” in relation to Gaza, I don't know what the situation is in the Netherlands, but on the influential “Mediapart” (a French online daily) and in “Le Média TV” of La France Insoumise (a “left”-nationalist split of the Socialist Party which has 75 MPs), this
7 Emphasis added.
8 Emphasis added.
9 Emphasis added.
10 See for examples the article written in English by Olaf Kistenmacher
(https://engageonline.wordpress.com/2015/11/04/from-jewish-capital-to-the... in-jerusalem-the-development-of-antizionism-in-the-german-communist-party-kpd-in-the-weimar- republic-1925-1933/ ) or, for those who read German, his book on the KPD. One should not forget that the Komintern supported the pogroms in 1936 that attacked religious Jews who had been living in Palestine for centuries. Let’s remember also, that important pogroms happened in Palestine in 1834, 1838, 1920, 1921 and 1929.
11 Stan Crooke's "
is one of many
texts on this subject.
12 From 1975 to 1991, 77 states supported and imposed the adoption of a UN resolution (n°
3359) stating that "that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, constitute a whole and have the same racist structure» ; that Zionism was “a threat to world peace and security” ; “called on all countries to oppose this racist and imperialist ideology” and considered that Zionism was “a form of racism and racial discrimination". “Decolonial” ideologues and Doorbraak are just copy-pasting what all the Stalinist and Arab nationalist dictatorships said publicly more than 50 years ago.
13 The same Muslim leader who declared on the Nazi radio program Zeesen for the Arab world, on the 7th June of 1942 when the Afrika Korps troops were only 100 km from Alexandria : “Kill the Jews before they kill you (...) Arabs of Syria, Iraq and Palestine, what are you still waiting for? The Jews are planning to rape your women, kill your children and destroy you. According to Islam, defending your lives is a duty that can only be fulfilled by destroying the Jews (...) Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their stores, annihilate these minions of English imperialism. Your only hope of salvation lies in annihilating the Jews before they destroy you.”
The Stalinist roots of left-wing anti-Semitism",
https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011-04-28/stalinist-roots-left-ant...
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concept has been used constantly since October 7, 2023, not only by most of the journalists but also by the specialists and academics invited to give their opinion on those “left”-wing media. In France, this is not at all a term reflecting the “desperation” of a few isolated “pro-Palestinian” activists. It’s part of a “negationist” campaign (similar, on many aspects, to previous Holocaust deniers’ campaigns) that has taken shape on an international scale and can be found in universities and streets all over the world, taken up by a whole series of states, starting with corrupt regimes like those of South Africa or Nicaragua.
The legitimate emotion aroused by the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli armed forces and by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, the understandable indignation at the absence of a mass movement in Israel against these crimes14 (but when did the international left mobilize public opinion in favor of the thousands of Palestinians killed by Jordan or Syria15 ?), cannot justify the total absence of empathy for the Israeli hostages, for the victims of the carnage of October 7th, the indifference towards the killing of 39 Thai workers by Hamas and its accomplices. This massacre cannot be defended as an “inevitable” act of resistance related to the inhuman blockade to which the population of Gaza was subjected, or even related to the long-term Israeli occupation of a territory which has to be divided between the Palestinians and the Israelis. This massacre has strong religious and ideological roots which must be criticized and not applauded demagogically. And it’s only in so doing that one can sincerely denounce Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Yves Coleman, Ni patrie ni frontières, 12 April 2024
14 Although Standing Together, among others, is doing a tremendous job: https://www.standing- together.org/en . And Doorbraak should support them instead of presenting the genocidal actions of Hamas as acts of “resistance”.
15 According to Palestinian sources in 1970-1971, the Jordanian monarchy killed 10,000 Palestinians and wounded 110,000 of them. In 2019, the Syrian regime killed 3,987 Palestinians, including 467 women and 200 children, according to UNWRA. And it also participated, in cooperation with the Christian militias, to the massacre of 1,000 Palestinians in the refugee camp of Tall al-Zaatar in 1976. But the Left does not really care about these dead Palestinians because itdoes not fit with their “decolonial” ideology...