Monday, April 20, 2015

Why was Palestinian suffering forgotten on Holocaust Remembrance Day?

An Israeli army delegation marches into Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 2007. (“Israel Defense Forces”/Flickr)
What, exactly, was remembered during Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day this week?
Not the victims of Israel’s latest slaughter in Gaza, where more than 2,200 civilians were killed less than a year ago. In the propagandistic world of “Holocaust memory” only Jews can be victims, so mainstream media marginalize the hundreds of Jewish Holocaust survivors and their descendants who publicly condemned “the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza” (their words). Instead, a leading Israeli newspaper informed us this week that “adult children of Holocaust survivors in Israel tend to be more anxious than their peers … about the Iranian nuclear threat” — even though Iran has no nuclear weapons and has never attacked Israel.