By Mohammad El Sahily | Staff Writer
On April 17, the world commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is a special day to remember the horrors of the Holocaust. For those of you who don’t know, the Holocaust is the Nazi-perpetrated genocide which led to the deliberate mass murder of six million innocent Jews. You’d think that denouncing the Holocaust is a given, especially when there is no possible justification for bigotry-driven mass murder. But for Arabs, this is a polarizing and conflicting topic given the existence of Israel and the crimes it keeps perpetuating, and its image as a self-styled Jewish state which is a Jewish refuge.
Israel’s repeated crimes and violations, alongside its lack of expulsion and its failure to abide by even a superficial implication of the Oslo Accords, have created a very poor impression amongst the Arab populace. While Israel has managed to normalize with some previously implacable foes and new pragmatic actors in the region, this has failed to abate Israel’s poor public relations posture amongst Arabs. Since the beginning, this has fueled a negative reaction to anything Israeli or Jewish, including the viral spread of antisemitic propaganda and the prevalence of Holocaust denial, especially amongst the supporters of Iran’s axis of resistance.
Holocaust denial has become a fixture of early and reactionary Arab resistance, as part of a larger drive towards antisemitism that is displayed by our societies. For example, whenever worshippers at Al-Aqsa or the Church of Nativity are attacked by Israeli police, worships immediately react by condemning “Jewish soldiers” while using a number of slurs against them. Recently, a tweep went to Auschwitz Concentration camp, where at least a million Jews died in gas chambers, and tweeted a photo with the caption “Free Palestine”. Many Palestinian activists employ similar rhetoric or discourse when they want to condemn Israel’s unjustified actions.
Here’s the thing though: this is wrong, and needs to be stopped. Palestinians are humans, just as the Jews massacred by Hitler’s fascist ethnocentric agenda were humans. People on both sides are extremely adept at dehumanization, but where does that leave us? Is it fair to cheerfully chime along the tropes of Khamenei on the Holocaust and its historical veracity? This is more than bad optics: you must condemn the Holocaust out of hand and without hesitation, just as you condemn Israel’s expulsion of people from their homes, or its unhesitant murder of innocent civilians who have never done anything wrong.
Denouncing the Holocaust and antisemitism is not a shameful thing, nor does it make you less of an advocate for Palestinians’ right to self-determination. Our advocacy for Palestinian values is not and should not be rooted in chauvinistic nationalism or in religious dogma. The Palestinians were expelled from their homes, and this should be the argument for the discrimination and death they face from Israel on a daily basis. Resorting to the dehumanization of genocide is not validated when these victims are Jewish, and would in turn encourage Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians who are in harm’s way almost daily.