It Should Have Always Been, ‘Never Again to Anyone'

‘Never again to us’ gives Israel blanket permission to commit deliberate and systematic genocide, and to ignore anyone else’s right to live

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I started this essay a couple of days ago. As I came home from work this evening, I heard the latest news. As you watch the media and the US fawn over Israel following this evening’s Iranian missile attack, and the shooting in Yaffa, please try to understand these events from the perspective I am sharing in my essays. Israel loves to portray itself as a victim. I did not hear the Americans express any empathy for the tens of thousands of people Israel has murdered in Gaza, 70% of whom are children according to Al Jazeera. I do not see any concern let alone empathy from the US or UK, for Israel’s victims in the colonised West Bank, or for the Lebanese citizens Israel is displacing and murdering callously and indiscriminately. The US has made no effort to stop Israel. On the contrary, it has interfered with any attempt to stop Israel’s insane onslaughts, and it has continued to replenish Israel’s arms and coffers. It is a crazy world where a murderous, blatantly genocidal settler-colonial, criminal state is presented as a victim, while its victims are thrown under the bus. It is nauseating to hear the US glorifying the Israeli airforce, the same airforce that has been mercilessly destroying Gaza, and exterminating its people. We are in serious trouble in a world where human beings condemn violence against their friend, while enabling that very friend to rain hell on whomever they wish. The idea that there are worthy and unworthy victims is insane. It is also in many ways the topic of this essay.

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I am still deeply affected by the film Lee that my partner and I saw last Sunday at Eden Court, our local arts and cultural centre in Inverness. I cannot praise actress Kate Winslet enough for her performance in this film, which she also produced. Winslet is incredible. Over six years, she persisted in getting this film made, when none of the big Hollywood studios would fund it. When you see the film, which I hope you will, I think you will understand why big, wealthy Hollywood studios were not keen.

‘Lee’ is based on the biography of Lee Miller, the famous war photographer and surrealist photographer. It was written by her son, Anthony Penrose, who is the cousin of the famous scientist, Nobel Laureate in Physics, Roger Penrose.

Lee Miller was one of the first war photographers to record what was left behind in Buchenwald and Dachau. She worked for Vogue, and while British Vogue did not publish her photos from the camps, American Vogue did, under the title ‘Believe It’. The film recreates some of scenes directly from Lee’s original photographs, some of which are horrific. I grew up on similar, gruesome images of the holocaust, which were fed to us regularly starting in primary school. I will never forget these slide shows in the darkened, silent classrooms. As I have mentioned in other essays, the images we were shown were always personalised. The explicit message that went with the shocking images was, ‘Always remember that this could be you. If you were alive then, you would be one of those corpses, or children in the stripy pyjamas.’ When I say ‘explicit’ I mean that the teacher who happened to be in charge would say this to us. You never forget something like this, and that is because we were not meant to forget. If you want to hard-wire a message into children’s brains, to ensure it stays with them for life and shapes their identity and worldview, this is how you do it. The Israeli education system has always been masterful at indoctrination.

Needless to say, no one bothered with our emotional state after those slide shows. We never had any emotional/psychological debriefing afterwards. There would sometimes be a short discussion to ensure we absorbed the intended message. Psychological trauma is not caused by traumatic events alone. It is how people are treated after events that largely determines whether they develop trauma or not. If following a traumatic event, people are given an opportunity to speak about what they experienced and how it made them feel, in the presence of people who validate them, believe them, and empathise with them, they are likely to recover quicker, and not develop lingering trauma. When the response is clumsy, dismissive, belittling, or denies the person’s experience, or if there is no help at all, or if people are ignored or left on their own, they are more likely to develop post traumatic symptoms. If, as children, we received a caring, skilled debriefing after each screening, the desired impact of those images and their message would, of course, be mitigated.

However, the intent was to traumatise us, to ensure that we developed the kind of psychology that would bind us to the cult for life, so that when the time came for us to join the military, we would not only go willingly, but with enthusiasm. We would welcome the idea of playing a part in ‘defending’ the ‘only country that would protect Jews, when another holocaust comes along’. It worked. I, and everyone I knew, could not wait to serve our time in the Israeli military. We worshipped it.

As I mentioned in my previous essay, in Israel the group is more important than the individual, and this includes children. No one cares how unhappy, anxious, or traumatised individuals are, as long as everyone does their part for the cult. In Israel, social connections and relationships often revolve around shared misery, and group escapism. Life is anxious and miserable there, but not because of any enemy Israel imagines it has. Israel tries to blame others for its misery, but it only has itself to blame for it. Israel creates its own toxic psychology. It nurtures it and maintains it, and it does not know how to live without it. Israeli Jews do not know how to feel safe, or how to live without conflict or fear. One of the biggest lessons I learned growing up in Israel was how to escape, and avoid my emotions. It took a lot of work to unlearn it. Israeli society may be anxious and broken, people are miserable, but the Israeli behemoth presses on with its genocide in full view of the entire world.

I know I have worked hard to ‘de-program’ myself from my cult-like Zionist indoctrination. I have spoken about it enough times here, and elsewhere. I know I feel human now, not ‘Jewish’. I do not accept the ‘racial’ Jewish identity that Israel has conferred on me from birth, without my choice or consent. I reject ‘racialism’, the idea that ‘blood’ or genetics determine your affiliation, and belonging. I reject the Hitlerite idea that people’s race gives them particular characteristics. It is complete nonsense, and Israeli scientists know it. But, as I mentioned in my previous essay, they say nothing. People are people. We see the same themes, and psychological and behavioural patterns, good, bad, noble or depraved, repeat everywhere on the planet, in all cultures, and throughout human history.

Am I really as ‘evolved’ as I think I am? Have I truly shed the old skin of the tribal identity I was given? Have I managed to evolve from being a member of a particular tribe into a human being, an ordinary member of our species? ‘Lee’ offered an unexpected test of my evolution as a person. When I saw the familiar gruesome images in the film, my immediate thoughts went to Gaza. All I could think of was, ‘This is exactly what Israel is doing to the Palestinians right now’. Israel trapped the people of Gaza, took everything away from them. It is hurting, humiliating, starving them, and turning them into piles of corpses. When I saw the piles of skeletal bodies in one of the scenes (the original photo is in the Lee Miller Archive) I did not see dead Jews, I saw dead human beings, people. Whether or not the majority were defined as Jews was irrelevant. They were all human beings just like you and me. My reaction was immediate, and spontaneous. I passed my own humanity test.

If Israel continues to be enabled, if it is given the war it wants, and is able to finish its own sinister plan for the Palestinians, we will see similar images. What Israel will leave behind would look much like what the Nazis left behind. Starving, traumatised people look the same, no matter who they are. Terrified, lost children look the same no matter what language they speak. Piles of corpses always look the same. We are already seeing a preview of some of these images, because these days, genocides are carried out in front of cameras.

Zionism, and later Israel have always resisted humanising the holocaust, or learning a universal lesson from it. When Hannah Arendt, who covered the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1960, called the Nazi genocide a ‘crime against humanity’, Israel was outraged. They saw the universal lesson that she chose to see in the holocaust as a betrayal of the idea of the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. The 2012 film Hannah Arendt, shows that her Jewish friends turned their backs on her, considering her a traitor to the people. She was even accused of defending Eichmann.

By over-personalising the holocaust, Zionism and Israel have effectively swallowed whole Hitler’s narrative that Jews are ‘other’, that they are not a part of the human species. Hitler by no means limited his crazy, fictitious ‘race’ theory to Jews, but Jews were a particular pet hatred of his.

The lesson from the holocaust should have always been ‘never again to anyone’, and not as I was taught, and as Jewish Israeli children are still taught today, ‘never again to us’. The two lessons are diametrically opposed. The former is a universal lesson, as Hannah Arendt, a holocaust survivor herself, clearly saw. She knew that humans were the same everywhere, and that in the right circumstances anyone can become a collaborator in the wholesale oppression, dispossession, and murder of scapegoated human beings who are singled out by those in power. The history of colonialism and settler-colonialism going right back to ancient history are a perfect example. Indigenous people everywhere have been ‘othered’, and dehumanised so that they can be murdered, expelled, robbed, and exploited.

As I argued in my previous essay, no evil person or regime can do anything without the help of millions of ordinary, people who are not inherently psychopathic. The Nazis were not special, and neither were the Jews, nor anyone else the Nazis targeted. They were all — we are all — human beings; members of the same mixed up, problematic species. When a perpetrator decides to persecute someone, they do it not because of any of the official justifications they give to themselves, or others (i.e. race theory, or in Israel’s case, ‘security’). They do it because they believe they need to prey on others to survive, and they feel more entitled to survive than anyone else. They always have someone who enables them. If victims are automatically protected, there would be no crime.

The lesson Zionism and Israel have adopted — ‘never again to us’ — continues to single out Jews, and demands that Jews are seen as a ’special case’, or a ’special people’, just as Hitler saw them. ‘Never again to us’ feeds Israel’s sense of entitlement, and allows it to do whatever it wants. If it is never again for ‘us’, then you do not worry about what you yourself might be inflicting on others, because your own victims’ suffering cannot possibly compare with your own. Only you and your suffering matter. Only your suffering exists. Never again to ‘us’ relies upon, and fosters a complete absence of human empathy.

The big tragedy of our time is that Israel has successfully managed to sell this to the rest of the world. Never mind that Israel does not speak for all Jews, that Israeliness/Zionism are not the same as Jewishness, and never mind that Jewishness is not a race. The world still buys ‘never again to us’, and does not require Israel to learn a universal lesson from the history of Jewish persecution. The world allows Israel to go on killing whomever it wishes in whatever numbers or ways it desires, and even drag the entire world into its perpetual war, and insane, destructive psychology.

I did not write this essay, because I think we should call on Israel to recover from its sick psychology. Israel is a lost cause. No section of Israeli society, no side of politics there, has so far shown any insight, aptitude for, or interest in any form of introspection, let alone recovery from Israel’s toxic, and destructive psychology.

It is important that people recognise how dangerous the message ‘never again to us’ is, and how much it drives Israel and its settler-colonial, genocidal aims. I am not calling for Israel to ‘heal’ itself, nor for anyone to wait patiently until it does. The Palestinians have run out of time. I am calling for severe sanctions, and a resolute and universal arms embargo against Israel. Israel must be stopped, because it is unwilling, and incapable of stopping itself.

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