Trigger warning: this post will discuss the horrors of the Holocaust in great detail. Reader discretion advised.
There are also references to calories and bodyweight.
HOLOCAUST INVERSION
Holocaust denial is an antisemitic and anti-Romani conspiracy theory that asserts that the Holocaust is either a myth, an exaggeration, or a fabrication. Holocaust denial it is an attempt to exonerate or partially exonerate the perpetrators of the genocide.
Holocaust denial takes many forms. Sometimes it’s outright denial that the Holocaust happened. Usually, however, it’s a distortion of established facts about the Holocaust. This is also known as Holocaust revisionism or soft Holocaust denial.
Soft Holocaust denial is an insidious form of Holocaust denial. Instead of outright denying the existence of the Holocaust, soft Holocaust denial minimizes it.
Holocaust inversion is the act of depicting Jews and/or Israelis as Nazis, crypto-Nazis, or “worse than Nazis.” Holocaust inversion is a form of Holocaust revisionism, and, as such, is inherently a form of Holocaust denial. Why?
Because Holocaust inversion distorts basic, well-established facts about the Holocaust, including: (1) the Nazis persecuted all Jews, Zionist or not; (2) Holocaust inversion inherently minimizes the scale and scope of the Holocaust; (3) the vast majority of Holocaust survivors have been supportive of Jewish self-determination (i.e. Zionism), and equating Holocaust survivors with their oppressors is repugnant and antisemitic; (4) the Nazis were ardently anti-Zionist; and (5) the Arab leadership in Palestine actively collaborated with the Nazi regime during the Holocaust, which fundamentally shaped the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as it exists today.
Since the earliest instances of Holocaust inversion, antisemites have made the implication that Jews did not “learn our lesson” from the Holocaust. The Holocaust did not happen because of our behavior; it happened because of the behavior of others.
MASS MURDER
About 34,000 Palestinians have died at the hands of Israel since 1948, most of them combatants. The Nazis and their collaborators murdered 34,000 Jews over a span of 48 hours in the Babi Yar Massacre, all of them civilians.
In 1943 and 1944, an average of 6000-10,000 Jews were gassed to death every single day at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
About 66 percent of the Jewish population of Europe was murdered in the Holocaust, over the span of six years. To this day, the total Jewish population of the world has yet to recover.
The Palestinian population in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has grown nearly seven times since 1948. The worldwide Palestinian population has grown tenfold since 1948.
INDUSTRY OF DEATH
One of the main factors that makes the Holocaust unique is that it was an industrialized genocide. The Nazis quite literally used mass production and factory-like methods to exterminate as many Jews and Roma as possible in the shortest amount of time possible. They created killing factories. And they were constantly searching for ways to make mass murder more “efficient.”
In the beginnings of the Holocaust, Jews and Roma were murdered with bullets. However, the Nazis found that shooting Jews to death was an inefficient method of extermination. It took too long and involved too much manpower.
Frustrated with the “inefficiency” of shooting Jews, the Reich Security Main Office soon ordered the use of gas vans for murder on a mass scale. The first extermination camp to use gas vans was Chelmno; by June of 1942, there were 20 gas vans in operation, with many more being prepared. Some gas vans could hold up to 60 people, while others held around 30.
Soon the Nazis found that gas vans, too, were not efficient enough. A big problem was that gas van operators experienced high levels of mental distress due to their proximity to the victims. Sometimes gas vans broke down due to bad roads. Ultimately, they simply couldn’t exterminate Jews quickly enough, so the Nazis built permanent gas chambers.
Inside the gas chambers, prisoners shoved, pushed, and climbed over each other, but they were trapped. Depending on the weather, they would die within about 20 minutes.
The Nazis used Jewish remains to create new products, such as lampshades made out of human skin. Though Jews were treated like products, the cost of the Holocaust was human. Through an intricate web of over 44,000 concentration camps, death camps, and ghettos, the Nazis exterminated six million Jews and about 1-1.5 million Roma in the span of just a few years.
Nothing that has ever happened in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes even remotely close to this. At all. And I’m pretty sure you know that.
STARVATION
Despite the Israeli and Egyptian blockade of the Gaza Strip, a 2012 study found that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip eat an average of 2279 calories per day. The report found that even during the worst of the blockade, Israel ensured that Gazans would be able to meet the adequate caloric requirements determined by the World Health Organization.
The Nazi starvation of Jews was deliberate. The Germans noted the adverse psychological effects of starvation early on. They starved Jews for one reason only: to torture us before we died.
The much criticized blockade of the Gaza Strip was established in response to rocket fire aimed at Israeli civilians. Jews during the Holocaust were starved simply because they were Jewish.
Food insecurity is a problem in the Gaza Strip, due to poverty, which critics blame on the blockade. However, to compare food insecurity — an issue in many places, including Israel and the United States — to the starvation diet of the Holocaust is completely disingenuous. Jews in the Holocaust were forced into slave labor on a diet consisting of boiled water with a grain-based coffee substitute for breakfast, potato and rutabaga soup that was mostly water for lunch, and 300 grams of black bread and 25 grams of sausage for dinner.
Toward the end of the war, the bread ration for concentration camp prisoners dwindled down to 50 grams. This is equivalent to about one slice of bread.
Nothing about this is comparable to the situation in the Palestinian Territories, however dire.
MEDICAL EXPERIMENTATION
The Nazis conducted non-consensual medical experiments on human beings. Some of these experiments included cutting off the limbs of prisoners in an attempt to transplant them onto other prisoners, submerging people in subzero temperatures and then attempting to resuscitate them by raping them, serving prisoners seawater instead of drinkable water, defleshing living Jewish prisoners, exposing fresh wounds to mustard gas, and more. The Nazis particularly enjoyed experimenting on twins.
Eva Mozes Kor, who, along with her twin sister Miriam, survived Nazi medical experimentation at Auschwitz.
There is no way anyone believes this is a legitimate comparison to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Palestinians are frequently treated in Israeli hospitals; in fact, at times it is the Palestinian Authority and/or Hamas who have stopped referring Palestinian patients to Israeli hospitals, as was the case in 2019.
There have been various libelous claims, generally in the Arab media, that Israelis experiment on Palestinian corpses or that Israeli pharmaceutical companies experiment on Palestinian prisoners, but all of those claims have been unsubstantiated.
SLAVE LABOR
The Nazis only allowed Jews to remain alive so long as they could use us as slaves. Those who were able to work were subject to eleven-hour workdays on a starvation diet and only a few hours of sleep. The working conditions were dreadful and unsafe by all standards, and slaves were subject to arbitrary killings.
Those unable to work — such as the elderly, children under the age of sixteen, and the sick — were gassed immediately upon arrival at the death camps, though some children as young as twelve were also forced into slave labor.
The working conditions were so inhumane that the average life span of Jewish slaves in concentration camps such as Auschwitz was only a few weeks. The life expectancy in the Palestinian Territories is 75, which is higher than the worldwide life expectancy (73).
A 2005 report found that the unpaid wages of Jewish slave labor during the Holocaust add up to some $11-52 billion.
Some of the companies that used Jewish slave labor during the Holocaust include Audi, BMW, Ford Motors, Hugo Boss, Mercedes Benz, Porsche, Shell, Volkswagen, and many more.
Unlike other countries in the Middle East, Israel does not have slaves. Like Jews, Arabs in Israel are entitled to the exact same minimum wage. Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank travel to Israel on work permits for better employment opportunities. Palestinians in the West Bank earn higher wages working for Israeli companies. In fact, it’s the Palestinian government(s) that has a history of withholding wages from workers.
LET'S CALL IT WHAT IT IS
No one is making the comparison between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Holocaust in good faith, unless they are unbelievably ignorant about what actually transpired during the Holocaust.
Out of all the conflicts and injustices in the world, you compare Israel to the Nazis because you know that equating us to our greatest historical oppressors is what will hurt us the most.
The implication here is that we did not “learn our lesson” from the Holocaust, as though our very own genocide was a lesson for us to learn. If we are as bad as the Nazis, then, you are implying that, for the greater good, the Nazis should’ve succeeded in murdering all of us.
Most wars worldwide are exponentially deadlier than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Chinese occupation of Tibet, which has gone on for roughly the same amount of time as the conflict, has been 29 times deadlier. The Syrian Civil War has been 110 times deadlier. The American invasion of Iraq was 113 times deadlier. But it’s the Jewish State that you compare to Nazi Germany. Why is that?
Suffering can’t be quantified, and playing the oppression Olympics is unnecessary. But no matter how objectionable you might find any given Israeli policies or even the State of Israel itself, a conflict over territory is in no way comparable or equivalent to the most industrial genocide in human history. The only reason to make such an utterly disingenuous comparison is to shock and to hurt. Get honest.
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