Dernier avertissement d'un survivant de l'Holocauste à Israël.
Il s'agit de l'admirable Stephen Kapos, juif hongrois naturalisé britannique, enfant survivant de l'Holocauste, du génocide nazi. Un esprit humain et tempéré que nous avons déjà cité sur ce blog.
La première fois, dans un billet intitulé Elhanan Beck, Ilan Pappé, Daniel Levy, Avigail Abarbanel... Juifs israéliens antisionistes pour la Justice.
La dernière fois, il faisait partie des intervenants au Premier Congrès juif antisioniste, tenu à Vienne du 13 au juin 2025. Sous la modération de Stefan Kraft, il participait avec Tony Greenstein, Wieland Hoban et Wilhelm Langthaler sous la rubrique : Réaffirmer l'antifascisme et lutter contre l'instrumentalisation de l'antisémitisme. Réaffirmer les traditions antifascistes tout en s'attaquant aux accusations mensongères et manipulatrices d'antisémitisme visant à museler la dissidence.
[Justement, faisons acte de la parution d'un insigne ouvrage collectif en français en la matière : Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Maxime Benatouil, Houria Bouteldja, Sebastian Budgen, Judith Butler, Leandros Fischer, Naomi Klein, Frédéric Lordon, Françoise Vergès : Contre l'antisémitisme et ses instrumentalisations, La Fabrique, 18.10.2024.Sous tel titre, ils dénonçaient ce que notre vénérable Stephen Kapos dénonce fermement aujourd'hui hébergé par Double Down News, une plateforme britannique indépendante d'information :
La lutte contre l’antisémitisme serait le parent pauvre de la gauche. Reprise comme une évidence, cette affirmation est pourtant rarement étayée ni accompagnée d’une tentative d’explication sérieuse. Plus grave, elle est aujourd’hui devenue l’étendard d’une offensive réactionnaire qui instrumentalise l’antisémitisme contre les forces politiques anticapitalistes et anti-impérialistes en se faisant passer pour progressiste. Dans la séquence dramatique qui s’est ouverte le 7 octobre, toute expression de solidarité avec le peuple palestinien a été ainsi ciblée et criminalisée.
Ce livre réunit des voix juives et non juives qui s’alarment du procédé autant que de ses conséquences et produisent une réflexion riche sur les liens entre sionisme, antisémitisme et racisme colonial.]
TRANSCRIPTION [liens et crochets de mon cru] :
What's happening in Gaza is a Holocaust, and what is currently being designed by the Israeli government is the final solution to their Palestinian problem.
And as a Holocaust survivor, my reaction is, not in my name.
Extermination, dehumanization, starvation, blockade, lack of water and medication.
The destruction of the health service, the hunting down of doctors, the hunting down of journalists, safe places which turn out to be not safe at all but traps, concentration camps, all this together makes a clear Holocaust.
Clearly all these elements are not in any way different from similar actions by the Nazis during the second World War.
Gaza is an open-air concentration camp. In a sense it's an extermination camp, because there is no way out other than dying through bombing or disease or lack of food.
Only alternative is to agree to be replaced somewhere where you don't want to be.
I had not only experience of the Holocaust and the hiding, and the discrimination, et cetera, but the fighting went through our particular area where we were hiding. When we came out, when it was all over, I saw total devastation, just like when you see the pictures of Gaza; destroyed buildings, piles of rubble, dead horses, dead people. I see exactly the same in Gaza.
However, the great difference is that what I witnessed was a byproduct of two armies fighting, and what I see in Gaza is a deliberate destruction, and I think it's a degree evil, greater evil than what I've seen.
The license which has been employed against the Palestinians, it's all based on the Holocaust experience. But rather than making the conclusion that this is something that we have to learn for and make it impossible to be repeated to any other people, they are actually using it as a license to complete lack of accountability towards any other people.
I'm thinking now of when Netanyahu says, "Never again is now." This is a very clear reference to the Holocaust experience, justifying whatever they are doing.
They are permanent victims, no matter how aggressive they are towards others.
And another example, when the Israeli ambassador to United Nations [Gilad Erdan], before making his contribution at the Security Council meeting, very theatrically put on a yellow star.
I found that particularly upsetting and disgusting, because I had to wear the yellow star even at age seven in 1944.
But they continually making this connection and using this cover to acquire impunity, total impunity.
And that is deliberate policy of the Zionists and the Israeli state.
They create an increase of antisemitism the world over because they conflate Judaism with Zionism and their current policies. And as we know, a very large number of Jews who have a sense of justice are against it all, and yet they pretend to be speaking and acting on behalf of all Jews. It's amazingly damaging to Jewish people the world over.
So, not only has it become obvious that the Israeli state and Zionism are producing a genocide in Gaza, but it is actually the very worst thing that could have happened to the Jewish people who are associated with these dreadful acts.
For Jewish people, and particularly anyone who survived the Holocaust or their descendants, to dissociate ourselves from the actions of the Zionist state is extremely important. And how important it is is proven by the reaction we get from the general public, who are grateful for our stand, making it clear that the Jewish people are not a solid block on the side of the apartheid and genocidal Israel.
Because due to the Holocaust, Israel and the Zionists claim total impunity, and we see it in practice that this is accepted all around, they should not be in any way free of being called out as fascists, like we call out fascists elsewhere where we see them.
And sadly, Israeli policies are now driven by clearly fascist characters, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich amongst others.
The comparison between the extreme actions of the Zionists and the Nazi regime has a long history.
Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt in their open letter in 1948 in the New York Times, signed by many others as well, had already pointed out that the policies and beliefs of the Zionist organization Herut, which later morphed into the Likud party, had similarities in their ideology to the Nazis ["Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties."].
If a comparison with the Nazi philosophies and practices was acceptable then, so soon after the Holocaust, it surely must be acceptable now and we must protest against the taboo of not making any comparisons between the genocidal actions of Israel and the Nazi regime.
This latest initiative of theirs of setting up a so-called humanitarian camp is just another concentration camp. [Cf. The Guardian : "'Humanitarian city' would be concentration camp for Palestinians, says former Israeli PM" Ehud Olmert]
Once entering it, and you are forced to enter it, because there are no other places going to be left where you are free from being bombed. So, once in that camp, you are not allowed to leave except, apparently the plan is, except for a foreign country.
Supposing you don't want to leave, the conditions inevitably were so awful in these camps, because they're overcrowded, there will never be adequate medical services available, so, there will be slow diminishing of numbers by wastage and death through deprivation. It's a clear case of genocide. And the parallel is obvious with Nazi camps.
Some Nazi leaders, well known for being kind to animals, and because the Jews regarded by them as human animals, they're going to be like they would be to animals, humanitarian in executing the complete extermination.
For example, by trying to avoid them knowing about their fate early enough so that they don't suffer anxiety.
This was their kind of humanitarian approach to camps.
So, it's not a new concept, this kind of humanitarian camp idea.
Once you are set upon an ethnic cleansing and a destruction of a people, it's inevitable that you have to prepare it with dehumanization of your subjects, whom you're going to perpetrate all this on.
Otherwise, you wouldn't get cooperation from anybody in executing this plan.
I think the drip, drip effect of being brought up in these conditions distorts people's views, both intellectually and emotionally.
— How many civilians have been killed in Gaza, from what you know?And I found that, sadly, even a part of my family which suffered the Holocaust and ended up in Israel, had been completely reformed by this propaganda.
— Who gives a shit?
— Okay. But don't you feel like, for example, children?
— Children grow up to be Arabs.
This even affected the cousin, who was a teenager during her deportation to Auschwitz, and was put to work in warehouses where they were sorting the clothes of those who were killed in the gas chambers.
And then one day, she had to sort her own parents' clothes, which must have been an enormous trauma.
Eventually, she came back. She survived, and when I met her in Haifa, I found her racist, completely racist, just like all the others.
And frankly, I found it almost incomprehensible, that somebody with that experience is still... was prey to this propaganda.
Any comparison between what's happening in Gaza and the genocide there and the Holocaust, World War II, and any denial or prohibition of a comparison is a taboo which must be broken. Because it's quite clear and it's declared by the leadership of the Israeli government that the aim is ethnic cleansing and extermination.
Bezalel Smotrich : We will annihilate everything that still remains of the strip, and leave nothing standing. Just look at the videos of what's happening in the Gaza Strip. For two and a half months we didn't allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip. Would I want to avoid the need to bring a single grain into the Gaza Strip, not even for the civilians? Could be. We're breaking Gaza apart leaving it as a pile of rubble with total unprecedented destruction. And the world still hasn't stopped us.If we witness what is going on daily, the continuous murdering of the Palestinian civilian innocent population, witnessing all that and not protesting or looking the other way, is making us accepting a virtual rebirth of a fascist regime.
And we have to resist it in order to be on the right side of history.
And with regard to Netanyahu, he kind of impersonates all that, he's obviously a war criminal, as it has been established, but we mustn't make the mistake of thinking that it is simply to do with Netanyahu because the leadership all around him, and unfortunately a majority of the country, are of the same mind.
— If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow, I would press it in a second. I would press it right now!! Give me that button and press it right now!A recent Hebrew University poll has shown that 82% of the Jewish Israeli population agrees that there are no innocents in Gaza. [Mondoweiss, Overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis share genocidal belief there are 'no innocent people' in Gaza, 3.07.2025]
— There you go.
— Hahahaha!! And I think most Israelis would!
[Two Nice Jewish Boys]
And what is needed is a complete dismantling of the Zionist state and the Zionist movement, and we have to resist the tendency towards the travel in the direction of fascism at every stage.
Fascism, which happens in stages incrementally.
We can see this tendency, this direction of travel already clearly in, say, Germany and the United States, particularly on university campuses. And more and more, we find this incremental increase of limiting free speech and the freedom of protest here in this country [the United Kingdom... and almost the whole Europe].
I was eyewitness to how the leader of Stop the War Coalition was treated. [Chris Nineham]
Suddenly, the police converged on him as if by an order and, very violently, knocked him down and piled on top of him.
Because it was a totally unnecessary and shocking piece of violence, I thought it was intended as a message to movements supporting the Palestinian people, that they are after us.
Subsequently, people that were standing right next to me, Jeremy Corbyn and John MacDonald, were called in for questioning under caution.
Others were also called in for questioning under caution, including myself.
It's a very difficult problem, because at times, to resist the official line and tendencies goes with great risks.
Nonetheless, if you don't do it, you acquire guilt by association, by indifference. It's one kind of guilt.
And there had been, in my experience of the Holocaust, very brave people who went against. It is possible, at great risk.
Well, I just want to mention an actual example of how brave people can resist, at risk, certainly, to themselves, but able to resist the evils of the day. There was a friend of our extended family called Emil Wiesmeyer.
[He helped Jews flee Holocaust: his printing company made fake passports as part of efforts by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg to save Jews from Nazi death camps.]
He was an owner of a printing works. He was not Jewish, but was against what was going on, and at night, at his risk, he was printing false documents to save Jewish people. He took enormous risks. Obviously, if he was discovered, he would have been executed without any doubt. You've got to take risks. This is the conclusion.
If you want to be on the right side of history, you can't avoid but have to take risks.
You don't have to be a hero, but you have to be able to take a degree of risk, a risk with your career maybe, or your qualifications, if you are a student, which some very brave people are doing, but maybe this should be on a much larger scale.
As the mainstream media turns the other way and minimizes or doesn't represent the truth about what's going on in Gaza and the West Bank, I think it's extraordinarily important to have platforms like Double Down News, which does tell the true story, and I think it should be supported.
So, if you can, support Double Down News on Patreon.
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