No, Gaza is Not Auschwitz. Stop the Perpetrator-Victim Reversal!

Die Presse, January 11, 2024

Guest Commentary by Ariel Muzikant and Yonathan Arfi

By declaring the war in Gaza to be "genocide", the state of Israel is being labeled the ultimate crime. This accusation is materially and legally unfounded.

Among the accusations leveled against Israel, the comparison between the fate of the Palestinians today and that of the Jews during the Shoah, as well as the false accusation of "genocide", are a reprehensible highlight.

The formula is well known: "To call things by the wrong name is to increase the misfortunes of this world", wrote Albert Camus in 1944. While Israel's hearing against South Africa is due to take place at the International Criminal Court this week, there are many actors in the public debate who are resorting to these false accusations, from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was voted out of office for anti-Semitism, to Turkish President Erdogan, who compares Netanyahu to Hitler, from the many Hamas supporters who shout "From the River (Jordan) to the (Mediterranean) Sea" at demonstrations, to certain international bodies.

Without diminishing the justified sympathy for the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population, the Israeli victims and hostages of this war started by Hamas, these accusations by South Africa must be firmly rejected.

What does this accusation mean?

What does this accusation of genocide mean? What does this Nazification of Israel mean? By casting the war in Gaza in the image of genocide, the state of Israel is being labeled the ultimate crime. This accusation is materially and legally unfounded, a perversion of events and actually aims at other, political goals.

Firstly, this reversal transforms Israel, the state of refuge for the victims of the Shoah and all those who are still fleeing anti-Semitism today, into a state of perpetrators and aims to change the public's moral compass. The symbolic designation of Israel as a Nazi and apartheid state exonerates the accusation of the European conscience of guilt for the Shoah. Finally, by maximizing the narrative of Israel's moral culpability, the accusation minimizes the gravity of Hamas' massacres, mass rape, arson and hostage-taking on October 7. Accusing Israel of genocide is essentially the most effective strategy for ignoring the Hamas pogroms of October 7 and the extermination impulse that motivated Hamas terrorists to massacre, rape and torture Israeli civilians ...

This accusatory reversal is not new. Palestinians have often used the mirror of Jewish history to formulate their own narrative. Thus, the choice of the word Nakba ("catastrophe" in Arabic) to describe the historical date of the independence of the State of Israel and the expulsion of part of the Jewish and Arab population present at the time corresponds to the meaning of the word "Shoah" in Hebrew.

But above all, this accusatory reversal disinhibits all violence against Jews worldwide. Accusing Israel of committing genocide and being the new Nazi state justifies the most radical speech and even goes so far as to justify the call for the dismantling of Israel. What violence would not be legitimate in the face of an allegedly genocidal state?

Let us not be naïve: those who use this terminology do so only to attack Israel. Their selective outrage spares the abuses of the world's worst authoritarian criminal regimes and ignores the victims of the Uyghurs in China, the Rohingyas in Burma or the Christians in Nigeria, etc. and of course they have never criticized Western military operations against ISIS against Daesh in Mosul and Raqqa, or against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, although unfortunately there have been numerous civilian casualties there too.

We Jews have the responsibility

This accusatory reversal of the facts is therefore in fact a deliberate and calculated stigmatization of the Jewish state alone. And unfortunately we know that the resulting accusation is automatically extended to all Jews, wherever they live.

We, the Jews in Austria and Europe, have a responsibility to denounce these dangerous developments while there is still time.

Those who do not fight this scandal should not hypocritically commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, because no, Gaza is not Auschwitz.

Ariel Muzicant, President of the European Jewish Congress. Yonathan Arfi, President of the Crif (umbrella organization of French Jews)