Brendan Hoban: Israel is losing the sympathy of the world
Western People 14.1.2025
Some years ago on a bracing sunny day I visited Auschwitz concentration camp on the outskirts of Krakow in Poland, where more than a million Jewish men, women and children were murdered as part of Nazi Germany’s ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question.
A guide brought us through the remains of the camp. He explained in gruesome detail the process by which Jews were rounded up all over Europe, promised a new and better life, loaded into railway carriages used to transport cattle, given no food and no water and brought often hundreds of miles across Europe to the ‘terminal’ at Auschwitz where German doctors including the infamous Dr Mengele, separated them on the platform into two groups: those strong enough to carry out the necessary work of the camp; and the rest, who were brought to the gas chambers.
Those destined for a quick death had their hair shorn, any gold in their teeth pulled forcibly out, their clothes taken from them and they were ushered naked into a chamber, expecting a communal shower and discovering to their horror, that they were in a gas chamber and would be dead within minutes. Their bodies were then removed and piled into incinerators.
The guide brought us to rooms filled with thousands of shoes, thousands of spectacles and a mound of human hair, stark reminders of what remained of the lives of over a million Jews.
My visit coincided with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. At the end of a moving presentation on BBC television the Chief Rabbi prayed the Kaddish, the Jewish Prayer for the dead. (It is usually recited in the eleven months following the death of a loved one.) It brought back memories of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Elie Wiesel, speaking so movingly of those going to the death-chambers in Auschwitz asking: ‘Who will say the Kaddish for me?’
The temptation with the Auschwitz experience is to file it away undisturbed in the recesses of our minds. Yet the reality is that versions of Auschwitz recur again and again in human history, as in recent years when the extermination of Muslims and Croats was deployed by Milosevic and Karadzic in Yugoslavia. So, allowing time to diminish the significance of Auschwitz is not an option. Remembering is both a human and historical imperative.
There are two temptations when we try to manage the Auschwitz experience. One is to spread the responsibility, to dissipate the German ownership of the horror by arguing that humankind in general should shoulder the blame – that, somehow, it’s everyone’s fault, when it isn’t.
The other is to imagine that no possible combination of circumstances could conspire to bring you or me down that road, to find us participating in something that was so clearly immoral or unacceptable. That doesn’t wash either.
Better to recognise that wherever enormous atrocities take place we need to own that reality. To accept too that the ground of places like Auschwitz is hallowed by suffering and death. And that such places, stained with the blood of the innocent, become pilgrimage sites to which we travel to remember what happened because we can’t afford to forget.
Trying to come to terms with the reality of places like Auschwitz is about recognizing the limitations of a world and a humanity where, in William Butler Yeats’ words, the best ‘lack all conviction’ while the worst are ‘full of passionate intensity’.
In the history of humankind, atrocities come and go and those at the receiving end of such horror (as Auschwitz represents) are naturally most intent on commemorating unacceptable outrages and the unspeakable litany of pain and suffering that attended them.
Which, on reflection, makes it even more extraordinary that, in the present war in the Middle East, Israel has inflicted so much suffering on so many innocent people, not least in Gaza.
Yes, Israel has a right to defend itself, even to retaliate when it is being bullied as with the recent outrage when the country was invaded and over 250 citizens taken as hostages by Hamas in October 2023 – with an estimated 96 still being held.
Yes, Israel with its long history of persecution is notoriously conscious of that history – including the Holocaust – and the price it then paid as well as the lingering legacy of pain and suffering that it has inherited.
But does all that – important as it is – justify the killing of more than 45,000 people in the present war of attrition in Gaza? Can it possibly be held to justify the killing of so many children? Does it justify the bombing of hospitals and schools? Does it give Israel the right to propose its own rules of combat that fly in the face of the UN protocols of war? Does it justify what sometimes seemed an Israeli effort to use hunger as a weapon of war in its reluctance to cooperate with the UN effort to feed the hungry?
We imagine that those who have endured terrible suffering are more conscious of the sufferings of others, more aware of the terrible cost involved and, because of their direct experience of suffering, less inclined to inflict it on others.
Yet, the International Court of Justice ruled in 2024 that Israel’s presence in Gaza (since 1967) is illegal, a violation of Palestinians’ right to self-determination and that its crimes may amount to genocide.
What a pity if Israel’s present war was to diminish in any way the terrible experience of the Holocaust and what it represents – not just for Israel but for the world. In the war in Gaza Israel is losing the sympathy of the wider world.