Was Israel Premeditated?

“You get punished for Holocaust denial, even if you are just revising; yet if you are a Nakba denier, your Israeli organization gets rewarded with German and American tax money. In fact, the Nakba was far more of a deliberate genocide than the Holocaust, in how carefully and openly it was premeditated.”

I posted this on Facebook the other day and as expected, I was rewarded with heaps of abuse from the under-informed. Note that I neither denied the Holocaust nor tried to quantify who has suffered more.

My post was related to a recent article in Haaretz on the proposed ‘Nakba Bill,’ which aims to withhold state funding from academic institutions that commemorate the Palestinian Nakba. Commemorating the Palestinian Catastrophe or celebrating the Israeli Independence Day as a Day of Mourning is viewed as an activity that “opposes the existence of Israel as Jewish-democratic state.” This is interesting, since in the US, Thanksgiving has been commemorated as a Day of Mourning for decades by many Native Americans and others, but nobody even blinks.

The point I was making however is that it is curious how competing historical narratives are legislated. “The victor writes the history.”

If a competing historian happens to be German or Austrian, they can expect to die in prison simply for writing a book.

From what I can gather from my now un-friends, it is taboo to compare or relate the Holocaust with any other human tragedy. Even many of those who claim sympathy for the Palestinians feel a need to reserve a special place for the Holocaust, despite the political use of the concept of “unique suffering” to give Jews special rights, including the right to commit genocide during our lifetime without comment. An Israeli Facebook friend and alleged peace activist posted:

“Palestinian people suffering does not amount to the whole sale industrial attempt to physically kill an entire people which was close to being totally successful in Europe.”

While nobody denies that millions of Jews perished in World War II, along with tens of millions of Christians and others, the number of 6 million has been reduced to 3 million in recent times by mainstream historians. Death inside German concentration camps was widespread, but in most cases, prisoners died of disease and malnutrition.

However, people tend to fixate on the belief that 6 million Jews were gassed to death in a systematic method by the German government with the same amount of passion that Christians hold for the Crucifixion.

In truth, there is no evidence that Hitler ever ordered all Jews to be killed. These beliefs are based on the Hollywood movie, the Holocaust.

The historical Hitler actually worked hand in hand with the Zionists, helping Jews emigrate to Palestine. There was even a Zionist (Jewish) faction of the Nazi party. Edwin Black’s book, The Transfer Agreement, the standard text on Nazi-Zionist collaboration, makes clear that the transfer of funds from Nazi Germany under this agreement made the Jewish State possible.

As WWII progressed, the German government had to deal with the problem of Jewish sympathy for the USSR, and with traitors giving away government secrets to Stalin with the same shamelessness with which US government secrets are leaked to Israel today, and Jewish organizations rallying to the cause of the traitor. Most people agree that this problematic situation in Germany was handled poorly.

What is almost never discussed is the context. The USSR, whose party leaders were largely Jewish or else influenced by secular Jewish philosophers such as Karl Marx, was an imperialist government that started annexing land in the 1920s, mass murdering tens of millions of Christians and burning churches. Millions of people were brutally tortured and died in Soviet prisons. It is safe to say that during the 20th century, Russia killed more people than Germany did. The US was also guilty of incinerating entire German cities as well as torturing prisoners. All in all, war is an ugly and cruel enterprise. World War II reduced the European population by 25 to 30%.

The idea that Nazi Germany is uniquely evil and that Jews in particular have suffered uniquely is a cornerstone of the creation of the State of Israel. For this reason, the State of Israel and several other countries actually mandate by law that no one can ever question the Holocaust, even if just to reduce the number to 5 million. If popularly accepted Jewish history were to be revised in the way that all other people’s histories have been revised in the light of researched evidence, the entire basis of Israel’s existence would come into question.

Yet even if we were to accept that 6 million Jews were gassed to death by Germany, it still doesn’t make any sense why Palestine should be wiped out order to create Israel. In 1934 Arab leaders offered asylum to European Jews fleeing the Nazis and presented a plan for legal Jewish immigration to Arab countries. Israeli Founding Father David Ben-Gurion refused the offer. “One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Poland,” stated Zionist leader Izaak Greenbaum.

While the imprisonment of Jews and political dissidents in Germany can be attributed to wartime hysteria, Hitler did not run his election on an anti-Jew platform (unlike today’s politicians running on anti-Muslim platforms). By contrast, Zionist genocidal goals were openly discussed as early as 1897, at the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, where they discussed how to physically remove Palestinians from Palestine in order to create a Jewish State. Today in 2012, we are still experiencing debates on whether the existence of Palestinians can even be mentioned in public.