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Today Israel remembers the Holocaust. My grandparents barely survived it in hiding in the Polish woods for 4 years. I promised my late grandma I won’t let the world forget. But every year I feel less comfortable about how Israel appropriates this memory >> https://tinyurl.com/ybro43ny
This came clear to me when I visited Poland in 2001. Our tour guide talked about the Warsaw uprising. “You mean the Jewish Ghetto uprising?” I asked. No, she meant the uprising that killed 200000 and destroyed Warsaw. Why did I know nothing about it? >>
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising
I was a product of the Israeli education system, and the Warsaw uprising did not fit the narrative in which Poles were only murderers aiding the Nazis. They surely were (my grandma interviewed for this book) but they were also victims. It’s complicated >> https://www.amazon.com/Hunt-Jews-Betrayal-Murder-German-Occupied/dp/0253010748
Israel has always exploited the Holocaust memory to serve its political goals, mostly to portray itself as a victim and to deny Arabs basic rights. No one has prostituted this memory more effectively than Netanyahu >> https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-how-netanyahu-became-a-holocaust-revisionist-1.6744462
This was especially so in recent elections campaigns in which he spewed racist vitriol against Israeli Arab citizens under the cloak of “never again”. Today his archenemies agreed to form a govt with him because they too hate Arabs more than they value democracy or rule of law >>
The more I study how culture operates, the more I realize that the interpretation and memory of tragedies of this sort is always used for political gains, as groups claim or deny others privileges. We see this happening now with COVID 19 >> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/us/politics/trump-immigration.html
How do we subvert this process? I don’t think we can. As long as different groups have differential access to resources, tragedies will be weaponized as tools of inequality and oppression. Perhaps the only way is forgetting, but I promised my grandma that will never happen. \\end
