The Memory of the Holocaust and the Voids of Humanity

Something is very wrong with memory, specifically the memory of evil. After decades spent under the slogan “never again,” theorizing and agonizing over – as well as investing in – making the memory of the Holocaust help prevent similar crimes, the results are perverse beyond imagination: In the West, including Israel, the Holocaust is now invoked more often than not to shield the perpetrators of another genocide.

After the Palestinian Resistance attack of 7 October on Israeli military targets (which was legitimate under international law) and civilians (which was not, if deliberate or disproportionate), the memory of the Holocaust was widely abased – not for the first time, of course – into a despicable talking point. This, we heard from Israeli state criminals and their accomplices and apologists, was the largest attack on “Jews as Jews” since the German genocide. That was an Orwellian abuse of the language: The Palestinian Resistance fighters breaking out of Gaza – the “largest concentration camp ever,” according to Israeli Sociologist Baruch Kimmerling – did attack and kill Israeli Jews. But they attacked them not because they were Jewish – “as Jews” – but because they were part of a settler-colonial state that has systematically and heinously brutalized Palestinians for three quarters of a century.

That does not mean that they all deserved to die or that all killings were legitimate under international law. Soldiers, at any rate, are a clear-cut case: Bearing arms for a state that colonizes by ethnic cleansing and apartheid makes you a legitimate military target for the perfectly legitimate resistance – or organized self-defense – of that state’s victims. If you find that discomforting, quit that army.

After the revolt, the Israeli regime, which can only be characterized as a fascist variant of Zionism, chose to respond with a genocidal assault on its rebellious victims. (Of course, it could have responded differently. Nothing here was “inevitable.”) Pretending that their fundamentally justified uprising had no history, rhyme or reason, the Israeli supremacists categorized it as “terrorism” (what occupier/slave holder/invader doesn’t?) and openly classified the Palestinians of Gaza as “human animals” – that is, “sub-human,” to translate into another, older dialect of fascism.

On that conceptual basis, they set in motion a literally devastating campaign of one war crime and crime against humanity after another, beginning with an obviously criminal starvation siege and not ending with a bombing campaign that is deliberately targeting large numbers of civilians (no, it is not “merely” indiscriminate, it is worse: it is genocidal).

Add the systematic destruction of vital infrastructure, execution-style massacres (a genocide not “only” by bombs, but by bullets, too, face-to-face, in all intimacy, so to speak) and cruel master pieces of Israeli ingenuity, such as flooding Gaza’s subsoil with contaminating seawater. There you have it: an almost astonishingly dense mix and rushed sequence of crimes, including genocide and ethnic cleansing, crammed into a short span of two months. As if the perpetrators just cannot get enough of it. And no end in sight, at least if they keep having their will.

Against this background, the abuse of Holocaust memory has escalated. Take, for instance, the recent case of an Israeli local politician, David Azoulay, who has publicly stated that once Israel is done with Gaza, its (surviving) inhabitants will be (literally) shipped off to refugee camps in neighboring Lebanon, and their former home itself should be left “completely empty” to serve as a “museum” akin to the “Auschwitz concentration camp.”

Let’s just disregard the eerie echo with Daniel Libeskind’s – star architect of Berlin’s Jewish Museum – “voids,” purposely in-built architectural emptiness to mark the missing victims of the Holocaust. Azoulay probably is not sophisticated enough to know it, but he has just proposed a whole new idea of “void,” on a Wagnerian scale of large landscapes rather than a single building.  Or, to use another term from Berlin’s cityscape of memory, Azoulay is suggesting a vast “topography of terror,” but one that signals no shame, but is, instead, narcissistically in love with itself.

In historical reality, the Nazi horror of Auschwitz was a complex of camps combining slave labor with extermination, including in gas chambers. While not everyone tormented and murdered at Auschwitz was Jewish, the vast majority of the victims were, and the camp played a key role in the Holocaust. That is also how it is most often remembered now. If there is one central site of memory of the Holocaust, it is Auschwitz; and if there is one almost cliched visual symbol of this genocide and even of Nazi evil in general, then it is the grim gate building of the Auschwitz II Birkenau camp and the train tracks going through it. 

How can we even begin to unpack the bizarre fact that an Israeli politician uses this reference to pitch his own favorite post-Palestinian-genocide-completion fantasy? How can an Israeli mayor want to make and, as it were own, an “Auschwitz”? Let’s try to enter Azoulay’s unsound mind: He also told his listeners that the Auschwitz-like “museum” he wants to make of Gaza would be “showcasing the capabilities of the state of Israel.” So, for Azoulay what the UNESCO-recognized site of Auschwitz now stands for is, so he clearly implies, “the capabilities” of the state of Germany, to be precise, Nazi Germany’s capability to commit genocide. How much intellectual and moral perversion can a single mind deranged by late-Zionism hold?

Of course, you may object, Azoulay may just be very, very stupid. So stupid that he does not even understand the analogy he has created. His brain may have been rotted so badly in what seems to be a society-wide Israeli echo chamber of supremacist Zionist nationalism that he can’t even hear himself equating Israel and its awe-inspiring “capabilities” with Nazi Germany and its crimes. But what difference would that fine distinction between obscene insanity and staggering stupidity make? None. Because to be that stupid, one must first have lost – or willfully abandoned – all sane frames of reference. In times of genocide, the insanity defense makes no sense; a stupidity defense even less.

Then again, perhaps Azoulay is not representative? Yet he is, after all, a politician in a country where Jewish Israeli citizens, unlike the vast majority of Palestinians can vote. Of course, Israel is not a democracy. That simple lie does not get any truer by its frequent repetition. But, for the dominant, settler-colonial part of those its government rules, Israel is democratic enough for all of them to share responsibility for its policies, including, obviously, the criminal ones, such as apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Moreover, Azoulay’s “Auschwitz” plans do resonate with much of recent Israeli discourse, which is marked by widespread and popular gleeful sadism and open calls for mass murder from below and very much from above, from the very top of politics, too.

Hence, a “mere” local council head as he may be, Azoulay cannot be dismissed as a marginal crackpot. He is a very nasty version of crackpot all right. Marginal? Not so much.

Azoulay himself has no awareness of just how fascist his mind is. In the same interview in which he shared his dreams of expulsion and a post-genocidal, state-potency-strutting void, he also assessed himself as not a “far-right person.” Perish the thought!

Yet beyond the farcical, there is a very serious question here: What kind of environment makes an Azoulay? To be more precise, what kind of world makes an Azoulay and, on top of that, makes him feel that he is not even that radical? Where does an Azoulay feel he’s normal? The answer is simple but also very complicated.

The simple part is that Azoulay types feel normal in a world that is intellectually and morally insane, because they fit in that world and that world fits them. The complications begin when we ask what sort of world that is and how it works. And it gets outright disturbing when we realize that it is the same world we live in as well.

So, what about that world we share with an Israeli who thinks (and says out loud) that an “Auschwitz” built on an ethnically cleansed Gaza, made Palestinian-free by genocide and expulsion, is something to aspire to have, so that the “capabilities” of Israel may shine forth? It would be all too easy to dismiss him as merely a product of provincial Israeli nationalism in all its brutish ugliness. He is that, of course. But, in reality, extreme as his statement is, it also links to things beyond Israel, things that concern the manner in which the West has come to use the memory of the Holocaust.

The real Auschwitz Museum in Poland took its distance from Azoulay’s comments, posting on X that “David Azoulai appears to wish to use the symbol of the largest cemetery in the world as some sort of a sick, hateful, pseudo-artistic, symbolic expression.” True enough.

But, then, that is the same Auschwitz Museum which helped spread the lie – because that’s what it is, ethically and legally – that Israel was acting in self-defense in its attack on Gaza. In other words, the same Museum that publicly lent its substantial authority, also on X, to one of the key Israeli talking points used to “justify” the slaughter of the Palestinians. Azoulay went too far, Azoulay was too crude. But the Auschwitz Museum itself, now shocked by his frank brutality, has participated, mightily, in using the memory of the Holocaust to provide cover for the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza.

When we, the West, rebuke and disown the Azoulays, the plain-spoken genocide enjoyers, what are we really doing? Condemning something we have nothing to do with? Hardly. In reality, we condemn what is too revealing of a “logic” of insanity and cruelty that we have made. The “logic” of using one genocide to enable the total impunity of the perpetrators of another. And by that we abandon the victims of both, some posthumously and the others while they are being murdered.