OPINION: Thanksgiving turns tense over modern-day Holocaust comparisons
Old friendships tested over heated discussions on Gaza, the Warsaw ghetto and the legacy of the Shoah at holiday gathering
Alex Brummer is a Jewish News columnist and the City Editor, Daily Mail
Every year for the last quarter of a century we have celebrated America’s Thanksgiving festival with a group of colleagues from my decade in Washington as the Guardian’s bureau chief.
On the drive to this year’s hosts, who live in south-east London, I suggested to my wife Tricia that we don’t mention the war. Previous experience tells me that discussion of the Mid-East, even in our own Jewish community, is not good for even firm friendships.
All was going swimmingly well over the extended lunch as there was a catch-up on families, which had grown up together on the other side of the Atlantic, the trials and tribulations of going older, Netflix, the Labour budget and passing references to Trump.
Then, as the pecan pie was passed around, came the moment I had been hoping wouldn’t happen. One of those present mentioned he had recently seen photographs of the Warsaw ghetto and it had occurred to him that what was happening to the Jews there was similar to the siege of the Palestinians in Gaza.
The blue touch paper had been lit. As the son of a refugee from the Shoah who lost his grandparents and countless relatives at Auschwitz and still has living aunts survived the death camps, it wasn’t possible to let this rotten analogy go past without a riposte.
Of all the aspect of the reporting of events since October 7 last year, what I abhor most is the appropriation of the language of the Holocaust and Jewish suffering by our critics. Indeed, I think it is careless when our own community refers to events of October 7 as the worst day in Jewish history since the Shoah.
The industrial killing of six million Jews including those in the Warsaw ghetto was an unforgivable comparison
The mass killing, the rape, pillage and ghastly assaults and hostage taken on that day were horrendous. And it is right that always those responsible for those grotesque events pay the price. But they have to be seen for what they are – a most terrible contemporary event which leaves and indelible open scar on Jewish history – without the need for the Shoah comparison.
My response to my Thanksgiving dinner colleague was to say there should never be any comparison between Israel’s campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon. These are military actions against terrorist anti-west forces in both territories. The industrial killing of six million Jews including those in the Warsaw ghetto was an unforgivable comparison.
In my answer I mentioned the global rise of antisemitism and the awful events seen earlier this month on the streets of Amsterdam after when Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters were beaten to a pulp by marauding gangs. Another person at the table responded that the Israeli supporters had brought the violence on themselves by tearing down Palestinian flags. It was nothing more than football hooliganism among fans spoiling for a fight. For Israel’s president Isaac Herzog to describe what had happened as a ‘pogrom’ was, the speaker claimed, ridiculous.
My response that this went far beyond football violence and had little to do with Ajax fans was disregarded. The dinner guest, a former TV news producer, insisted that she had looked at the footage and it was a response to the disgraceful behaviour of Israel fans. ‘How dare they tear down flags in a foreign country.’
I mentioned that what happened in Amsterdam could have been something from Kristallnacht, breaking my own rule about Nazi comparisons. There followed a discussion of Dutch complicity in the war and I cited Daniel Finkelstein’s brilliant, documented account of his family’s experiences in Amsterdam – following their escape from Germany – as evidence of a not much discussed history.
That silenced the critics for the moment. Then one of the colleagues pronounced that he couldn’t be bothered to read Finkelstein because all the events around the Holocaust and the World War Two were all known to him and far too heavily discussed. Fortunately, at this point, another colleague noted that Finkelstein had cast new light on Stalin’s complicity in attacks on Jews and in particular the inhuman treatment in the Gulag.
Old friends are very important. Next year, 80-years after the end of the war, it will be our turn to host. But it is deeply disturbing that smart, well-educated people felt the need to offload their clear frustrations with Israel and matters Jewish on us.
A joyful encounter became joyless.
Alex Brummer is City Editor of the Daily Mail
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