When the Allies came across the Nazi death camps in 1945, it had a massive emotional impact. In my own country of origin (the UK) in particular, the reporting by the BBC from the newly-liberated Bergen-Belsen camp horrified the British public. [A personal connection: a friend of my father was one of the Liverpool University medical students sent to help care for the survivors. A microscope from the medical block at Belsen was in our family for some time; it’s now in the RAMC museum in Aldershot.] The Holocaust remains a reference point for evil and depravity, and a dark presence in the Western imagination. The industrialisation of murder on a vast scale, perpetrated by a nation renowned for its contribution to science and culture, has undermined everything that we believed about civilisation.
In the decades since then however, there have been attempts, coming mainly from the far right, to “relativise” the Holocaust, setting Hitler’s six million Jewish victims against Stalin’s supposed twenty million victims. On the other hand there has grown the idea that the Nazi genocide of European Jews is unique and sui generis, incomparable to any other genocide. This is alongside the growing association between the Holocaust and the Jewish state as the guardian of its memory (I’m uncomfortable with the term Holocaust, familiar with its original Ancient Greek meaning as a burnt offering, but it’s what we have). Such is the Israeli government’s influence over Holocaust memorialisation that the Israeli scholar Omri Boehm‘s invitation to speak at the commemoration of the liberation of Buchenwald this year was cancelled, at the insistence of the Israeli embassy, because of his belief that the slogan “Never Again” shouldn’t only apply to genocide against Jews (link to haaretz.com, registration required). This is a significant step in the nationalist appropriation of the Holocaust, in a country (Germany) where it is seen as a moral debt from one nation to another, rather than a warning to us all. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an interstate body in which Israel plays a leading role, includes in its definition of antisemitism “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”.
Now we are assailed by new horrors, pictures of children starving to death in Gaza due to the Israeli government’s blockade of aid supplies. Whether or not a policy of genocide lies behind this (there is circumstantial evidence), the emotional impact of these images takes its toll. Given Israel’s character as a self-proclaimed Jewish state, they invite inevitable comparisons with the Holocaust. I will not be sorry if the moral authority of Israel over the Holocaust is weakened by these events. What I am worried about is that they will create cynicism about the Holocaust, especially in the minds of the young, and that does not bode well for the future.