On staring in your face – Omer Bartov in NYRB:

‘That remote genocide at the dawn of the twentieth century shares some remarkable similarities with the campaign of ethnic cleansing and annihilation prosecuted by Israel in Gaza. Israel saw the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, in much the same way that the Germans saw the Herero attack 119 years earlier: as confirmation that the militant group was utterly savage and barbaric, that resistance to Israeli occupation would always incline toward murder, and that Gaza’s Palestinian population as a whole should be removed from the moral universe of civilization. “Human animals must be treated as such,” the Israeli major general Ghassan Alian (who is Druze) said shortly after the attack, echoing several other Israeli officials, including former defense minister Yoav Gallant. “There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell,” Alian said in an Arabic-language video message directed to Hamas as well as the residents of Gaza. Over the next seventeen months Israeli forces killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, over 70 percent of whom are estimated to have been civilians, maimed well over 100,000, and imposed on the remaining population conditions of inhuman deprivation, suffering, and pain. A cease-fire that went into effect on January 19 ended abruptly on March 18, when Israel refused to move on to the second phase of its agreement with Hamas and launched a series of unilateral attacks that have already killed hundreds more Palestinian civilians.’

(…)

‘In a poll conducted in Israel in May 2024, more than half the respondents said that the Hamas attack could be compared to the Holocaust.
The genocide of the Herero was part of the murderous violence to which European colonizers subjected indigenous populations the world over. As Aimé Césaire wrote in 1950, white Europeans paid notice only when Hitler “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for” colonized populations elsewhere. They had “tolerated that Nazism…absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it”—until it came to them as a choc en retour under Nazi rule.
It is a different matter whether Césaire’s disciple Frantz Fanon was correct when he suggested that, though surely “the Jews are harassed…hunted down, exterminated, cremated,” their genocide could nonetheless be summed up as nothing more than “little family quarrels,” a case of whites murdering whites. Quite apart from the millions of Jews with non-European backgrounds, even Jews of European descent were, and to some extent still are, not as white as other whites, and their whiteness, for whatever it’s worth, may be tenuous and conditional, as Rachel Shabi notes in Off-White. Even as many “European-Jewish communities…have been folded into white majorities across the West,” she argues, “there is a lingering ambivalence.” The very fact of having been “separate at first and subsequently soaked up into the defining majority” makes Jewish whiteness feel “contingent and attenuated.”’

(…)

‘And when “never again” becomes not just a slogan but part of a state ideology, when it becomes the prism transforming every threat, every security issue, every challenge to the state’s legitimacy or righteousness into an existential peril, then no holds must be barred to defend those who have already faced annihilation. It is a worldview, Beinart writes, that “offers infinite license to fallible human beings.” Once Hamas militants are seen as modern-day Nazis, Israel can be imagined as an avenging angel, uprooting its enemies with fire and sword. During my childhood and youth in Israel, the Holocaust was a symbol of shame and denial, an event in which Jews went like sheep to the slaughter. Over the years, as I have grown older, it has become something else entirely: a story of solidarity, pride, and Jewish heroism. It is this sense of “never again” that permits most Jewish Israeli citizens to see themselves as occupying the moral high ground even as they, their army, their sons and daughters, and their grandchildren pulverize every inch of the Gaza Strip. The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met.’

(…)

‘What, then, was the difference between creating a state for the Jews and creating a Jewish state? In his provocative study To Be a Jewish State, Yaacov Yadgar argues that in certain respects these are “two distinct, contesting, and even contradictory political projects.” A Jewish state is one whose character is defined through Judaism, whereas a state for the Jews is simply one with a majority-Jewish population, defined ethnically rather than by its relationship to the Jewish religion. The state envisioned by the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, would be liberal and could be secular. A Jewish state, on the other hand, would profess the Jewish religion as the very essence of its identity.’

(…)

‘One afternoon in early December 2024 I was sitting with a friend of many decades at a popular café facing the Habima Theatre in Tel Aviv. I looked around the busy café and asked, “What does a society engaged in genocide look like?” “Like this,” we agreed. Some of the younger men and women sipping espressos may have just come back from service in Gaza or Lebanon. Some may have lost friends or family on October 7 or in the subsequent fighting. They had all been subjected to air-raid sirens in the middle of the day or while fast asleep. On the surface, however, everything looked excruciatingly normal, even though Gaza was only forty-five miles south.’

(…)

‘Another person told me, “If the IDF were to kill a thousand dogs in Gaza, it would cause greater public uproar than the mass slaughter of human beings.”’

(…)

‘The long-term consequence of this travesty may, however, be that the genocide in Gaza will finally liberate Israel of its status as a unique state rooted in a unique Holocaust. This will hardly help the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims or the victims of the Hamas massacre, the dead and dying hostages or their broken families. But the license that Israel, the land of the victims, has long enjoyed and abused may be expiring. The sons and daughters of the next generation will be free to rethink their own lives and future, beyond the memory of the Holocaust; they will also have to pay for the sins of their parents and bear the burden of the genocide perpetrated in their name. They will have to reckon with what the great, often forgotten Israeli poet Avot Yeshurun wrote in the aftermath of the Nakba, of which we are witnessing a repetition, or continuation: “The Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust of the Arabs of Eretz Israel are one Holocaust of the Jewish people. The two of them stare each other directly in the face. It is of this that I speak.”’

Read the article here.

Yes, the killing of mass killing of dogs in Gaza would cause more uproar.

Avot Yeshurun died in 1992.
Today, I’m even less sure than I was in 1992, that the Jewish people and the Israeli people are the same, I do think that Zionism i.e. the state of Israel will create a schism in Judaism.
But perhaps, out of the ashes of the Shoah came the new Germany into existence, perhaps out of the dead bodies of the Palestinians the new Israel will come into existence.

Perhaps.
But it’s also possible that those Israelis who are interested in a new Israel have since moved to Berlin.

Next year in Berlin? A new Israel in Berlin, or east of Berlin?