If you dare to criticise Israel, you must be "anti-Semitic"

Last week, a blog post I wrote following a talk by a Holocaust survivor was described as “hate-mongering”.

In the piece, I dared to suggest that it was deeply saddening that the descendants of the people who suffered so much in 1930s and 1940s Europe had become oppressors themselves.

I wrote that some Israelis and Palestinians had “dehumanised” the other side in ways which were eerily similar to what went on in Germany back in the 1940s.

There is no doubt that the whole of Europe should have collective shame over the extermination of six million Jewish people by the Nazis during World War Two.

Jewish children in a Nazi concentration camp.
The world should never forget the horror of the Holocaust.

That shame extends to Ireland, where our Government – just a few years after independence – did next to nothing to help those who were trying to escape from persecution.

It was natural and understandable that revulsion over the Holocaust led to widespread public support across the globe for the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948.

The only problem was that nobody seemed to take the needs or rights of the native Palestinians on board when Israel came into being.

And so began a myth that here was a “land without a people for a people without a land”, as those who had earlier been colonised by Britain either did not exist or had no right to their own self-determination.

The relatively minor abuse last week got me to ponder how far Israel has shifted to the right since the days when enthusiastic young Europeans used to travel there to volunteer and live in cooperatives known as kibbutzim. Not any more.

My Twitter feed soon filled up with abusive attacks.

I am no expert on the Middle East, but I have been to that part of the world on about 15 occasions and love the hospitality and culture of the people.

I am no expert on Israel and Palestine, but I do recognise a gross injustice when people are colonised, forcibly ejected from their homes, or forced to live as second class citizens.

As an Irish person, whose land has a long history of oppression and colonisation; it’s natural to feel a tendency to side with the oppressed.

The abuse I received came just a month after the British Labour Party was torn apart by accusations of “anti-Semitism”.

Former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, of all people, was given this label after he made some ill-advised comments about Hitler and Zionism.

Nowadays, it seems, it is impossible to criticise Israel in any way without being smeared.

Palestinian loss of land since 1946

The on-line abuse got me to thinking …

If you think that villagers have a right to return to the land and homes they were forced to flee by colonising settlers in 1948 or 1967, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you find it appalling that more than 550 children were murdered in one of the most crowded places on earth in just a few weeks in 2014, you must be anti-Semitic. (After all, their parents voted for murderous Hamas terrorists).

If you cannot, in your wildest imagination, see any justification in the bomb which killed four young boys on a Gaza beach, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you think it’s a war crime to bomb a hospital, you must be anti-Semitic. (Don’t you know that the patients inside were being used as human shields by dangerous terrorists?)

If you oppose a wall which cuts through farms and villages on occupied land, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you think it’s racist or even a form of Apartheid when roads are reserved for one particular race or religious group, at the expense of another, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you think ‘peace’ is impossible now that 800,000 settlers have built houses on occupied land in the West Bank, you must be anti-Semitic. (Even the UN, hardly great supporters of Palestinian rights over the years, recognise the 1967 border as ‘legal’).

If you think it’s hypocritical to talk ‘peace’ while stealing land which is outside your country’s borders, in contravention of the Geneva conventions, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you oppose institutional discrimination because you think it’s just as bad as the South African regime in the 1980s was, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you question why the US gives $3 billion a year in military aid to one of the richest armies on earth, who then try out new arms in heavily populated areas, you must be anti-Semitic. (Israeli arms dealers actually boast that new weapons are “tried and tested” in Occupied Palestine).

If you understand why people who have been cut off by land, air, and sea by colonisers might want to smuggle essential goods through tunnels, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you think it’s not ok to murder 2,200 people, because some of them may have voted for appalling terrorists, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you feel the people of Gaza should be allowed lift the siege in order to rebuild their homes, you must be anti-Semitic. (They cannot even get concrete in, for God’s sake).

If you call for a boycott of companies who locate their factories on stolen land in the West Bank, you must be anti-Semitic. (They do employ Palestinians, but at a fraction of the cost of hiring Israelis inside the recognised 1967 borders).

If you see no hope for children who are tear gassed on their way to school in Hebron, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you think the villagers of Bili’in have a right to protest after the huge wall cut them off from their own olive fields, you must be anti-Semitic. (Almost every Friday for years now, they have been fired upon by occupying soldiers).

If you don’t think it’s right to appoint a racist (with widely-reported anti-Arab views) as Minister for Defence, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you think it’s hateful for a Prime Minister to spread fear about a minority’s voting habits on the eve of an election, in any country, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you think groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace are heroes for exposing and denouncing atrocities committed in their name, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you laud the bravery of the ex-soldiers in Breaking the Silence who fear the toll this cruel occupation is taking on both sides, you must be anti-Semitic.

If you pay attention to the human rights abuses exposed by Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, you must be anti-Semitic.

(Even though all three of these organisations are predominantly made up of Jewish members.)

It doesn't matter if you agree that Holocaust-denial is a crime. It is simply ludicrous to deny that six million Jewish people were murdered by the Nazis, in what was the darkest period in the entire history of humanity.

It doesn’t matter if you think Hamas are murderous thugs or that the Palestinian Authority are guilty of corruption.

It doesn’t matter if you think public executions, which are sometimes authorised by Hamas and seen on the streets of Gaza, are crimes against humanity.

It doesn’t matter if you recognise that “radical Islam” is a scourge which threatens the entire world.

It doesn’t matter if you think ‘Sharia Law’ is an abomination and that women deserve equal rights in every country on earth.

It doesn’t matter if you completely oppose the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel, rockets which have killed innocent civilians.

It doesn’t matter if you think that ‘suicide bombers’ are deplorable and that attacks on Israeli civilians are terrible.

A graphic which examines the similarities between South Africa
under Apartheid and modern-day Israel. 

It doesn’t matter if you think all human life is sacred, that the shooting of four innocent people sitting at a cafe in Tel Aviv last week is as much of a tragedy as the killing of the young boys playing on the beach in Gaza in 2014.

Yes, all human life, without distinguishing between Muslims, Christians, Jews, and non-believers.

It doesn’t matter if you think Egypt, by closing the Rafah border, is just as complicit as Israel in the terrible siege of Gaza.

It also doesn’t matter if you recognise that the Governments of Egypt, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, etc, are controlled by tyrants and that Israel does have a right to defend itself.

Because, if you dare to criticise Israel in any way, you run the risk of being labelled as “anti-Semitic” or a “hate-mongerer”. Even if you know, deep in your heart, that there will never be peace in the Middle East, not while one side chokes the life out of the other and brutalises a whole new generation of hopeless children.

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Learning compassion from absolute horror

One of the things which dismays me most about the seemingly never-ending “conflict” between Israel and Palestine is the way in which a people who suffered so much (or their descendants) have been able and willing to inflict such suffering on others.

It forces you to question human nature when you see how Zionists have occupied, colonised, and demonised the people of Palestine over the past seven decades; even though we should never forget the absolute horrors which prompted so many Jewish people to seek a new homeland in the 1940s.

It’s appalling to think that there were 11 million Jewish people living across Europe at the start of World War Two and that the Nazis’ insane “Final Solution” resulted in the loss of six million of them in just a few years.

Europe should, rightly, feel shame. That shame extends to the island of Ireland, where a closed society in its second decade of independence effectively shut its doors on the persecuted Jewish people who tried to flee the Nazis in the 1930s. 

Tomi Reichental wore a yellow star during his talk in Galway

Our own shameful history was alluded to during a talk in a crowded lecture hall in Galway yesterday, when a survivor of the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp said that lessons from the Holocaust should be applied to the current refugee crisis facing Europe.

Over 300 people crammed into the lecture hall at NUI Galway to hear Tomi Reichental speak, and everyone of us was overwhelmed by his generosity of spirit as he recalled a childhood which was unthinkable to every Irish person in the room.

Tomi has written an absorbing book about his experiences as a Jewish child in war-time Slovakia and his subsequent transfer to the concentration camp where so many people lost their lives.

Just nine years old when he was captured by the Gestapo, Tomi urged Irish people to embrace diversity and to learn to live with different traditions when he referred to the thousands of refugees who are currently fleeing the Middle East for new lives in Europe.

“People tend to blame other people for their problems,” said Mr Reichental. “We have a lot of foreign people in Ireland now. If you hear somebody blaming somebody else because they are a foreigner or have a different skin colour, speak out. Don’t become a bystander. Get involved. It’s wrong.

“In the 1930s, Ireland closed the door to the Jewish people. We have a refugee crisis across Europe now. We have to learn to live with different traditions and embrace them, not to exclude them. The Holocaust must not be compared to anything that has happened since, but we must learn from it.”

Mr Reichental, who lost 35 extended family members in the Holocaust, said that he did not speak about his experiences at Bergen-Belsen for over 55 years.

He never discussed his experiences with his late wife, although she knew he was a Holocaust survivor. It was only when he retired, and after she passed away, that he began to write down his experiences 12 years ago.

He has since become a hugely popular figure with schoolchildren all over Ireland, as he regularly tours the country to talk about the Holocaust and what it was like to be a nine year old boy playing among piles of decomposing corpses.

“It is very important that I can speak to as many people as I can, because I feel that I owe it to the victims. I lost 35 people from my family. By speaking to young people, I hope that the memory of the Holocaust will be carried for generations to come,” he said.

“For over 55 years, trauma stopped me from speaking about it. But there are not many of us left, especially here in Ireland, who can talk about our experiences in the concentration camps.”

Tomi recalled an idyllic early childhood in rural Slovakia, where his family had been a part of the community for generations. All that changed when he was six years old, when the Government introduced harsh anti-Jewish laws.

“In 1939, the propaganda against the Jews began. Hatred was building up against Jewish people. I remember my aunt sewing a yellow star onto my coat. I was kicked out of the village school because I was Jewish and had to attend a separate school in the town.”

Yesterday, he wore a yellow star on his jacket with pride, to remind everyone in the room of the indignity faced by people living under the Nazi regime.

He said that deportations began in 1942 and 58,000 Jewish people were transferred from Slovakia to Germany. His father, a farmer, had a special document which allowed him to stay because he was contributing to the Slovak economy.

But his parents eventually had to flee their home village. They changed their names and he was with his mother, grandmother, brother, aunt and cousin when they were picked up by the Gestapo in Bratislava in 1944.

He recalled the crowded ‘cattle car’ which transferred them to Germany and the fear in the eyes of the adults, who had heard about the gas chambers and extermination camps from people who had managed to escape and return to Slovakia.

“The moment the door closed behind us, our civilised life ended. I will never forget it. There was no privacy, no hygiene. I remember the smell and that people were crying. The people in the camp were like skeletons in their striped pyjamas. Their heads were shaved and we could not tell if they were men or women.”

He said Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp, but people could not live on the amount of food they were allocated each day. The calories allocated to the prisoners were insufficient for many of them to survive.

“There were 1,000 people living in huts which were designed for 200 people. We used to play ‘hide and seek’ among the decomposing corpses. That’s how dehumanised we were. We were living in this open graveyard for months, with bodies all around us,” he told the audience.

“Typhoid and diphtheria were the biggest killers, but people were dying of starvation and cold in their hundreds. The soldiers who liberated the camp in April 1945 said they could smell the stench for two miles before they reached the camp.”

Mr Reichental moved to Ireland in 1959, but said he never wanted to talk about his experiences until he retired in 2004. Since then, he has spoken to thousands of students in schools all around Ireland and featured in an RTE television documentary. 

“My wife never knew what happened to me,” he said. “She just knew I was a Holocaust survivor. I lost her to cancer 13 years ago. Then I retired 12 years ago. I thought I would enjoy my retirement, but then I realised I needed to tell my story. I realise now that I am one of the last witnesses of this horror and I feel that I owe it to the victims.”

During a question and answers session after his talk, I was the only person in the audience to raise the issue of the occupation of Palestine with him.

I asked him whether or not it upset him that Palestinians were now being “dehumanised” by the Israeli media, and Jewish people “dehumanised” by the Palestinians, in ways which were eerily similar to how Jewish people were portrayed, horribly, in the German and Slovak media in the 1930s and 1940s.

Clearly uncomfortable with the subject, he said that the Middle East should not be judged by the same standards as European countries.

He said that he had served in the Israeli Army for a while in the 1950s and had never, ever been trained or taught to hate the Palestinians.

His message was one of peace and he encouraged the Irish to embrace refugees, to offer them meaningful and viable lives, as a response to the current crisis.

Children in a Nazi concentration camp

Mr Reichental received a standing ovation at the packed NUI Galway lecture theatre, before staying on to sign copies of his book, ‘I Was a Boy in Belsen’.

His powerful story was a timely reminder of the absolute horror which led to the foundation of the state of Israel, even though I firmly believe that the Holocaust no longer provides an excuse for how badly the Palestinian people have been treated under the occupation for decades.

Those of us who care about Palestine and the Palestinians sometimes tend to forget the trauma suffered by the entire Jewish population of Europe just seven decades ago.

Not that the Holocaust provides any excuse for the barbarism inflicted on the people of the West Bank and Gaza in recent years.

Like Tomi, we all have to learn from the horrors of the past, to ensure that people are never discriminated against because of the colour of their skin or their religion. If we were all a bit more like Tomi in respecting diversity, there might be some hope for the people of Israel and Palestine.