Please spare me from your insincere anti-Semitism rhetoric or trivial and false statement of “weaponization of anti-Semitism.” The Holocaust ("Shoah" in Hebrew) did not happen overnight; it had centuries-old European hatred of Muslims and Jews behind it. Had the Ottoman Emperor Bayezid II not sent out the Ottoman Navy to Spain in 1492 to evacuate Jews safely to Ottoman lands, Adolf Hitler’s genocide would have happened 500 years ago.
But neither the people who built a museum in Auschwitz concentration camp nor the survivors of German concentration and extermination camps or their heirs who donated their shoes and other personal items to the museum understood what it means to say, “Never Again!”
“Never Again!” should mean that Jews, Romani or any other people would not be treated as what the German scientists used to call "untermenschen" ("subhuman"). “What other people have an equivalent of that term?” I was going to ask; but I remembered: In Israel, they call Palestinians “animals”!
Israel, of all the nations in the world, is using a “dehumanization” strategy to justify its attacks on civilian areas in Gaza, according to an Israeli professor of international law and human rights. Neve Gordon, a member of the Faculty of Law at Queen Mary University in London, who is of Israeli descent, said that Israel is working hard to legitimize the war crimes it has been committing. “Never Again!” should mean, especially to the people who had been subjected to the Holocaust, that nobody should call any human being “subhuman” or “animal.” But no! Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, saying, “We are fighting against animals,” has shown us that dehumanization is as common in Israel as it was in Germany from 1933 to 1945.
If you follow movies released in your area regularly, you probably know that there is a 2023 historical drama film "The Zone of Interest," written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis who passed recently. I am not going to try my hand in the movie review field, but I should praise this film for straightening out many issues I had about the parallelism between the German Jewish genocide and the Israeli Muslim genocide. Actually, the similarities between the two genocides are so vast and deep that one might see that the Zionist founders of Israel had learned from their tormentors and transferred it to the next generations.
"The Zone of Interest" premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival last May to acclaim, winning both the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize. It was named Best Film by the Los Angeles Film Critics, selected as one of the top-five international films of 2023 by the National Board of Review and chosen as the British entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards. It was also nominated for three Golden Globes Awards (including Best Motion Picture – Drama), nine BAFTAs (including Outstanding British Film) and five Academy Awards (including Best Picture and Best International Feature Film). On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 92% of 234 reviews are positive for the film, with an average rating of 8.6 out of 10. However, several film critics were less positive about the film in their reviews. Some found it monotonous, and the performances of the cast did not bring anything to the concept presented in the film.
Well, yes, it was monotonous. It lacked variety and remained stagnant for two hours, as some criticized it. How could a movie about the home-making abilities of a German concentration camp commander whose inventiveness in making the “furnaces continue processing loads without break” progress? The furnaces mentioned here belong to the crematorium section of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex and the “loads” denote Jews, Romani, communists and “other socially undesirable” people, such as those with clubfoot because they would negatively impact the productivity of the forced labor brigades.
Yes, the film has a disturbing atmosphere especially when you see it after reading the news from the Gaza and West Bank atrocities of Israel. It sure lacks variety, but it successfully makes you sense the stench of the continually burned human flesh without even showing a scene depicting the gassing or burning. But, still, you see the drama of the Lagerkommandant’s family in Auschwitz.
In the movie, we see a brief period of SS officer Rudolf Höss who built the Auschwitz concentration camp on behalf of Heinrich Himmler and later organized mass murders in the gas chambers there. In 1947 he was executed as a war criminal. But his kids, his wife, his mother-in-law, ordinary Germans and Polish people who see him on the streets of Auschwitz and Berlin and salute him respectfully, where did they go after the Holocaust that the Himmlers, Hitlers and Hösses realized?
Mrs. Höss keeps growing beautiful roses because her gardener keeps pilfering “ashes” from the other side of the garden wall, which is the most terrible, most abhorrent example of humanity. The Lagerkommandant Höss was not alone in this; after all, he was a noncommissioned officer in the army with no training in anything. The real facilitators of the Holocaust were the “Topf & Sons” who built the incinerators for Nazi concentration camps. They were not ashamed of it; on the contrary, they saw themselves as victims, with only one family member standing up to take responsibility.
As the reviewers say, the movie, “dispassionately examining the ordinary existence of people complicit in horrific crimes,” shows the social requirements of such horrible things as war crimes, crimes against humanity and war with genocidal intent. Raphael Abraham of the Financial Times wrote, “Glazer has achieved something much greater than just making the monstrous mundane – by rendering such extreme inhumanity ordinary he reawakens us to its true horror.”
That “horror” is named “Shoah” in Hebrew; English-speaking countries more commonly use the word "Holocaust," which is Greek for “sacrifice by fire.” To achieve such a horrendous level of killing 6 million people in a relatively short period of time, you needed a social milieu.
The Lagerkommandant Höss’ mother-in-law tacitly approves what is going on behind the walls, reminiscing about the Jewish woman for whom she used to do home cleaning: “Oh, yes. God knows what they were up to. Bolshevik stuff ... Jewish stuff.” Like that mother-in-law, now a respectful columnist for The New York Times explains that Hamas’ Oct. 7 raid explains (exonerates) everything: “I cannot stop writing about Oct. 7.”
To kill an average of 250 Palestinians per day in Gaza, a contributive social setting is not enough; you need Topf & Sons or their U.S. equivalent to provide warplanes, rockets and fuel for Israeli massacres, like Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, the General Dynamics Corporation, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems and Pratt & Whitney.
The Holocaust meant for the perpetrators the “final solution” as a euphemism for their genocide of Jews. Once, the solution in Palestine was known as a “two-state solution.” Then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was its champion. Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received bountiful funding from Americans to run against Rabin; Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin, who was murdered soon after.
From that day on, the name of the solution changed to the “final solution” as in “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” (“Endlösung der Judenfrage”). Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, outlining his plans for the next stage of Israel's war in Gaza and his vision of a future arrangement, even used the “F” word and said his forces were on the verge of “final dismantling of the Hamas forces,” after which the “enclave” would be run under overall Israeli security control. Gallant and his fanatics dropped more than 45,000 bombs on Gaza weighing more than 65,000 tons.
Now, there is another Hitlerian plan in effect: “the hunger plan.” The genocidal intent of the Israeli government and their U.S. and EU accomplices is to deny food and medicine to the Palestinian people.
If you raise a family next to a concentration camp, you raise a family of mad men and women. They tried it in Germany but ended up losing their marbles. Even as of today, neither the ideas nor behaviors of the German elites might be totally healthy, to say the least. In Israel, the Zionists have been forcing the Jewish people to live in what they call “settlements,” which are actually rose gardens created next to their concentration camps where millions of Palestinians have been held as prisoners and force-laborers at best, or killed at will.
Palestinians did not revolt against that. Until now. After Oct. 7, it is not going to work.
Never again.
