As a child, I spent a great deal of time with my great-aunt, a wonderful woman who was love personified and cared for me when my parents were working. She’d left what was the Soviet Union after the Second World War, knew hardly any English, and would speak to me in Yiddish and Russian.
She was elegant and proper, had wonderful manners, and always wore long-sleeved dresses no matter the weather. On one hot day, however, she rolled up her sleeves a little, and I noticed a mark on her arm. Very young and innocent, I asked her what it was, and for the one and only time I can remember, she seemed angry. She turned away, pulled down her sleeve, and walked into another room. Assuming I’d hurt her in some way, I began to cry, at which point she came back to where I was, hugged me tight, and told me she was sorry. That was the last of it.
It was only after she’d died that I found out that what I’d seen was a death-camp tattoo and that my kind, gentle, darling auntie had been a Holocaust survivor. Almost all of her direct family members were murdered.
I write this to explain the significance of the Shoah in my life. Three of my grandparents were Jewish, and while I’m a Christian and a priest, I’m far too aware of the reality of antisemitism (and whom it regards as Jewish and not) to ever deny — or want to deny —my origins. To a Jew-hater, a clerical collar means nothing at all. In other words, I would have shared my great-aunt’s fate.
Which is why I’m appalled by the manipulation of this unique obscenity in the name of the Gaza tragedy — and by both extremes. One is obvious. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators chanting “No Second Holocaust,” holding signs proclaiming that the Star of David equals the Nazi swastika. One man screamed at me in Toronto recently, “Go back to Poland!” The implications of that spew are obvious.
I don’t suggest for a moment that all supporters of Palestine behave thus — but such behaviour isn’t isolated. Social media is drenched in Holocaust minimization and even denial. Good God, there were demonstrators outside Auschwitz this week, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, chanting “Free Palestine.”
But I also can’t accept the frequent use of the Holocaust to justify Israeli policies. This isn’t the place to explore the political, practical, and emotional reasons for Zionism. But wherever we stand on the issue, we surely need to acknowledge — just as countless Israelis do — that Israel’s hands are far from clean with regard to the grotesque suffering of the people of Gaza.
Yet on October 31, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, wore a yellow star when he spoke to the Security Council. He did this, he explained, because the world was silent over the Hamas massacre earlier in the month. But the world wasn’t silent. This is not 1940, the Palestinians aren’t Nazis, and Israel isn’t the isolated, neglected, powerless Jewish diaspora of Europe, of which my great-aunt was a part.
This approach is not new or unusual. Back in 1982, then-Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler in his Berlin bunker in 1945. In 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu even went so far as to blame the Mufti of Jerusalem, a Palestinian leader before the Second World War, for initiating the Final Solution. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel the Jews,” he said in a speech. “And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they'll all come here.’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. He said, ‘Burn them.’”
Haj Amin al-Husseini deserves criticism for many things, but the idea that he had such significance — or that the Palestinians are in any way responsible for the Holocaust — is staggeringly wrong. Jewish and Israeli historians and politicians condemned Netanyahu for his remarks. Having interviewed the man, I’m far from convinced that he’s changed.
I’ve heard pro-Israel activists in Ontario shouting “never again” and read article after article and post after post using the sacred memory of the Shoah to explain what is happening in Gaza. It’s sometimes understandable but ultimately wrong and dangerous. The former because, in spite of a deeply worrying growth in antisemitism, the situation today is dramatically different from the past. The latter because, in a grimly ironic way, this, too, reduces the profundity of the Holocaust.
Anger, historical illiteracy, religious fundamentalism, and political narcissism are dominating the debate at the moment. That won’t change in the near future. But something better and more balanced has to emerge, and humanity will, I’m sure, triumph in some form. It always does. It’ll be difficult for people to forgive. Those who are exploiting the Holocaust are certainly some of those who’ll need to ask for forgiveness.
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