Holocaust Denied: The lying silence of those who know

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Holocaust Denied

The lying silence of those who know
by John Pilger

"When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny
Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear the silence is
broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green,
together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries
of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be
viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But
Russia's incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call
news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so
denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially
striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of
knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with
Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel's right to exist." They know the opposite
to be true: that Palestine's right to exist was canceled 61 years ago
and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous
people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know,
for example, that the infamous "Plan D" resulted in the murderous
depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah
(Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians
in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and
Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing."
Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first
prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do
with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny
Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said,
‘Expel them'. The order to expel an entire population "without
attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister
promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The
terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the
Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders
spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children
and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the
imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our
people during the [Second World] war … we are appalled."

Every subsequent "war" Israel has waged has had the same objective:
the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more
land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its
apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that
claimed the Arab states had struck first. Since then, mostly Jewish
truth-tellers such as Avi Schlaim, Noam Chomsky, the late Tanya
Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Yuri Avnery, Ilan Pappe and Norman
Finklestein have dispatched this and other myths and revealed a state
shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting
militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology
called zionism. "It seems," wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on
2 January, "that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide
in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that
happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system …
Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies
of the South African government, this ideology – in its most
consensual and simplistic variety – has allowed all the Israeli
governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians
wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from
period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative
covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of
genocide]."

In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the
piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of
medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure
and the killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of
whom are children, meet the international standard of the Genocide
Convention. "Is it an irresponsible overstatement," asked Richard
Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the
Occupied Palestinian Territory and international law authority at
Princeton University, "to associate the treatment of Palestinians with
this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not."

In describing a "holocaust-in-the making," Falk was alluding to the
Nazis' establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland. For one month in
1943, the captive Polish Jews led by Mordechaj Anielewiz fought off
the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed
and the Nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew. Today's
holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben-Gurion's Plan D, is in
its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-
Israeli project. The F-16 jet fighters, the 250-pound "smart" GBU-39
bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza, having been approved
by a Congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4
billion in war-making "aid," give Washington de facto control. It
beggars belief that President-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken
on Russia's war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama's
silence on Palestine marks his approval, which is to be expected,
given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists
during the presidential campaign and his appointment of Zionists as
his secretary of state, chief of staff and principal Middle East
advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings "Think," her wonderful 1960s
anthem to freedom, at Obama's inauguration on 21 January, I trust
someone with the brave heart of Muntadar al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower,
will shout: "Gaza!"

The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now
"Operation Cast Lead," which is the unfinished "Operation Justified
Vengeance." The latter was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in
2001 when, with Bush's approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian
towns and villages for the first time. In the same year, the
authoritative Jane's Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair
government had given Israel the "green light" to attack the West Bank
after it was shown Israel's secret designs for a bloodbath. It was
typical of New Labor Party's enduring, cringing complicity in
Palestine's agony. However, the 2001 Israeli plan, reported Jane's,
needed the "trigger" of a suicide bombing which would cause "numerous
deaths and injuries [because] the 'revenge' factor is crucial." This
would "motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians." What
alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, the
Israeli Chief of Staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat
and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On 23 November, 2001, Israeli agents
assassinated the Hamas leader, Mahmud Abu Hunud, and got their
"trigger"; the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.

Something uncannily similar happened on 5 November last, when Israeli
special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got
their propaganda "trigger." A ceasefire initiated and sustained by the
Hamas government – which had imprisoned its violators – was shattered
by the Israeli attack and homemade rockets were fired into what used
to be Palestine before its Arab occupants were "cleansed." The On 23
December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel's charade
was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months
earlier, according to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz.

Behind this sordid game is the "Dagan Plan," named after General Meir
Dagan, who served with Sharon in his bloody invasion of Lebanon in
1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organization, Dagan
is the author of a "solution" that has seen the imprisonment of
Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in
Gaza, effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a
quisling government in Ramallah under Mohammed Abbas is Dagan's
achievement, together with ahasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed
through a mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in
America, that says Hamas is a terrorist organization devoted to
Israel's destruction and to "blame" for the massacres and siege of its
own people over two generations, long before its creation. "We have
never had it so good," said the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman
Gideon Meir in 2006. "The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine." In
fact, Hamas's real threat is its example as the Arab world's only
democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its
resistance to the Palestinians' oppressor and tormentor. This was
demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained
in the western media as "Hamas's seizure of power." Likewise, Hamas is
never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its
proposal of a ten-year truce as a historic recognition of the
"reality" of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one
condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their
illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in
the UN General Assembly demonstrates, 99 per cent of humanity concurs.
On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto,
described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a "monstrosity."

When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more
stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a "1948-style
solution" – the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and
authority followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller
"cantonments" and perhaps finally into Jordan. This demolition of
institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce,
wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, "a Hobbesian
vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless,
destroyed, cowed … Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon]
had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it."

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Palestine. She has a Jewish
mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. "Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic,"
she wrote on 31 December. "But I'm not talking about World War Two,
Mahmoud Ahmedinijad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What
I'm referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and
responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years
… Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy doesn't get more anti-
Semitic than this." She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young American who
went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli
bulldozer. "I am in the midst of a genocide," wrote Corrie, "which I
am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely
responsible."

Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of "responsibility."
Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an
urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a
platform. With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely
allowing vigorous debate within unmovable invisible boundaries, ever
fearful of the smear of anti-Semitism. The unreported news, meanwhile,
is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in
Britain. Imagine, if you can.

Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers.
Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the
Association of University Teachers in Gaza plea for help? Are British
universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than
"intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates
rather than greengroceries"?

Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third
Writers' Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes
of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to
ensure the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 3,500 jammed the
auditorium and a thousand were turned away. Today, this mighty voice
of realism and morality is said to be obsolete; the literary review
pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance; false symbolism is all.
As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be
pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well
in Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: "The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it
is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are."

If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilized society.
For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which
either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our
silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us
the power to speak out. For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza:
of the people's courage and resistance and their "luminous humanity,"
as Karma Nabulsi put it. On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a
spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was
dusk and children had done this. No one told them to do it. They made
flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and a few of them climbed on to
a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying
out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving,
believing the world will not forget them.



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