My two genocides
Palestinians bury the bodies of 48 Palestinians, handed over by the Israeli army through the Kerem Shalom border crossing, in a mass grave in the city of Rafah, on 7 March 2024
Jacob Boas writes in Mondoweiss on 19 January 2025:
Enmeshed in two genocides I am: the first, the Holocaust, took place in Europe during World War II; the second, in occupied Gaza, set off by Hamas’ onslaught on Israel on October 7, 2023. I came into the world on November 1, 1943. Place of Birth: Camp Westerbork, a transit camp in the northeastern Holland. By then, some 100,000 Dutch Jews and several hundred Sinti and Roma had been deported to the death camps in Poland. I am a victim of that genocide, neither perpetrator nor bystander. As for Gaza, there I am complicit, if only because the slaughter of 6,000,000 European Jews, including 1.5 million children, serves as a cover for the ongoing genocide in West Asia. Put differently: “Gaza” is the first genocide carried out in my name.
George Santayana’s oft-quoted dictum that those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it assumes that we can learn from history, provided we make the effort. “History teaches but has no pupils,” Ingeborg Bachmann’s terse formulation is rather more apposite. And yet, “memory” made me a historian, a historian of the Holocaust, in duty bound to record and record and record. Between 1996 and 1998, I directed the Oregon Holocaust Research Center when it was located at Pacific University in Forest Grove. I had no illusions about the human capacity to do their worst, but nonetheless persevered in what I knew to be a quixotic enterprise in the belief that writings and teaching might do some good after all.
But now I feel used. The very scholarship that’s been my life has been appropriated by the genociders. I am appalled at the silence of Holocaust Centers and Holocaust museums everywhere, the weaponizing of antisemitism and other forms of brutalizing intimidation. Horrified by the moral bankruptcy of the US, Israel’s chief supplier of arms and genocidal co-sponsor, backed up by European vassals like Germany, Holland, and France, countries that like their feudal overlord have genocidal and colonial blood on their hands. Deep-rooted exterminatory propensities die hard.