By Mose Apelblat
In his op-ed ”A ‘Free Palestine’ T-shirt at a Holocaust Memorial is no contradiction”) (9.8) in Haaretz, Gideon Levy uses the incident last week at the memorial site of the notorious Nazi concentration camp Mauthausen in Austria to defend the behavior of a group of Austrian pupils who entered the site with shirts showing a picture of a terrorist and the text ‘Free Palestine’.
For most people such a protest action would seem provocative because it glorified a terrorist who was responsible for the March 1978 coastal road massacre in Israel which claimed the lives of 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children. It would also seem provocative to text ‘Free Palestine’ which is used by Hamas and its supporters as a euphemism for the destruction of Israel.
Levy is of course free to defend their right to demonstrate although it is bizarre to do it when learning about the atrocities which took place in Mauthausen. But he goes a step further when he claims that their protest action was an example of the lessons which could be learned from Mauthausen and applied to the situation in Gaza and the Israeli – Palestinian conflict.
Is he not aware of that since its establishment in 1938 until the end of WWII, Mauthausen was the Nazi concentration camp with the harshest imprisonment conditions and the highest mortality? Of a total of around 190,000 people imprisoned there, at least 90,000 died from grueling slave work, deliberate hunger, and physical abuse.
Mauthausen concerns not only Jews. It is a testimony of how the Nazi regime treated all its ‘enemies’: Roma and Sinti, political opponents, Soviet prisoners of war, Spanish republicans, and Jehovah’s witnesses.
But out of the victims, at least 38,000 were Jewish prisoners who were treated much worse than other prisoner groups due to their placement at the bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy. Within the system of slave work, Jewish inmates faced a brutality that minimized their chances of survival.
The Austrian pupils were apparently not very interested in learning about how their grandparents welcomed Hitler, enrolled as guards in Mauthausen and served in the Nazi war machine. Levy agrees with them that the Hamas-Israel war amounted to genocide although intent cannot be proven and before the International Court of Justice has issued its ruling.
To Levy’s credit, it must be said that he was among the first to warn after Hamas’s murderous attack on October 7th that Israel’s response would lead to the disproportionate killing of Palestinian civilians and the total destruction of buildings and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. He predicted that Israel would lose international legitimacy for defending itself because the war would inevitably lead to war crimes. On this he was unfortunately right.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza can be compared to a ghetto in WWII but Levy ignores the historical and political background. The Jews were not locked up in ghettos because they threatened Germany or had committed any acts of terror but because of the Nazi ideology that deprived them of the right to live. Nazi-Germany planned to exterminate all Jews. That is the main lesson of the Holocaust.
In the ghettos, the Jews died due to starvation, epidemics and forced labor until they were liquidated and all surviving inhabitants were sent to the death camps. The outside world accepted the ghettos and no country sent them any humanitarian aid. In their desperation they managed in some cases to revolt and some fled to the partisans in the forests but the bitter end was always the same.
The few weapons that the Jews in the ghettos managed to smuggle in pale of course in comparison to the arsenal of weapons and the huge military tunnel network that Hamas had built up at the expense of civilian development and without the UN institutions in the Gaza Strip reacting.
Gaza is an area which de-facto has been ruled with an iron fist by a terrorist organization which ignored the suffering of its own civilian population and still opposes peace with Israel. Its terrorist attack, which took Israel by surprise, aimed at triggering a regional war where Iran and its proxies would join forces and exterminate Israel.
At this point in the conflict, there cannot be nothing more important than to implement Trump’s 15-points plan for disarming Hamas, ending Israel’s strikes, withdrawing its troops, increasing the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza, starting early recovery actions and facilitate the path to a political solution. Instead of focusing on the plan, Levy is busy manipulating the memory of the Holocaust.
Mose Apelblat is a journalist and co-author of “Letters in the shadow of death” (2019) on the second generation in Sweden and the memory of the Holocaust.