A ceremony that almost didn’t happen
NPR chatted with Masha Gessen about comparing Gaza to Nazi ghettoes back in December.
Prominent Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen received a prestigious award for political thought over the weekend, in a ceremony that almost didn’t happen due to backlash over their recent writings on Israel-Gaza.
Israel’s air-and-ground assault on Gaza has killed more than 20,000 people in the 10 weeks since the Hamas-led attack on Israel killed some 1,200 people and took more than 240 others hostage.
Why did Israel commit this air-and-ground assault on Gaza? Because that’s where Hamas is. It didn’t do it as part of a broader campaign to kill all Muslims or all Arabs. It can still be a war crime, but comparable to Hitler’s genocide it is not.
Gessen, who is Jewish and whose family lost loved ones in the Holocaust, has been criticized for a New Yorker essay published earlier this month in which they likened the Gaza Strip to the WWII-era ghettos that Nazis developed to segregate and control Jewish people in occupied Europe.
Gessen of course is also the damn fool who blew up her own reputation for serious journalism by “coming out” as a they/them.
Gessen notes there are key differences between the two: The Nazi claim that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from disease “had no basis in reality,” while Israel’s stance that the isolation of Gaza is necessary to protect against Palestinian terrorist attacks “stems from actual and repeated acts of violence.”
“Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate — and now, mortally endanger — an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own,” they contend.
Well, that’s misleading, because “entire population” refers to very different things there. The entire population of Gaza is a tiny fraction of the entire population of European Jews circa 1940. Also, “in the name of protecting its own” has very different meanings in Gaza today versus all of Europe circa 1940.
LF: And you also make a comparison that caused backlash, saying Gaza right now is like a Nazi era Jewish ghetto and that right now the ghetto is being liquidated. But you must have known writing it would get this type of backlash. Why did you make that comparison?
MG: Well, the comparison is very much the centerpiece of the article. And I think that we have a moral and one could also argue, legal obligation to compare the Holocaust and the atrocities committed during the Second World War to the present. If we take the promise of never again, seriously, we once again have to constantly be asking ourselves, are we laying the foundations for the mass murder of millions of people? Are we employing or is part of the world employing the same kinds of tactics that were employed by the Nazis? I think there’s every reason to say that that is exactly what’s happening.
You know, the Nazis weren’t the last occasion of mass murder of large numbers of people. Remember the Balkans? Remember Rwanda? The Rohingya? Uighurs? Cambodia? Partition? We keep doing this. Bad analogies don’t help anything.
It’s a generation that lacks imagination and only has WW2 as a standard of comparison for anything (while probably being unable to articulate why the Battle of Midway was significant or how well Operation Market Garden went).
War crimes are sufficiently bad without reaching for Nazi analogies.
Agreed.
In my experience very few people much younger than 50 have any appreciation for even WW2, other than watching war movies and a general feeling that it was bad. Certainly the children of my generation have not had the opportunity to talk to people who fought in the war, who lost family, livelihoods or homes. Who were bought up in fear or deprivation. It’s not real or visceral to them. They compare it to war movies because their only other experience is Friday night down at the pub.
What’s happening in Gaza is probably a war crime (or at least elements of it are). It’s horrific, but not a holocaust. And, if protection of innocent children is the biggest concern, at what point should Hamas consider surrender? They embed themselves in the civilian population. They make use of hospitals and ambulances. They have fighters who are also teachers and relief workers. At what point do they decide to put the battle aside for preservation of those they claim to be fighting for?
Well first and foremost they’re fighting to get in good with their evil god, unlike the PLO, liberation isn’t their primary motivation. There really isn’t any good way to convince people like that of anything. They know they’re going to be perpetually on the losing end too so something as flashy as the October 7th massacre was very appealing to them.
I really don’t know what a good resolution to this particular iteration of the ancient spat would be… Maybe as one commenter here said it’ll play out as the Troubles did.
For the Gaza/ghetto analogy to even come close to working Israel would at least have to take all the Arabs or Muslims from all the territory over which it has control and concentrate them in Gaza.
Gessen seems to think she can satisfy requirements with the words “laying the foundations.”
The Nazis laid the foundations by swiftly removing from a population that was well-integrated and had fought patriotically for their country in WWI progressively more civil rights and forcefully indoctrinating the rest of the population that it was a necessary course of action. Not comparable to the Mid-East situation.