On the persistence of memory. And “memory.”

A lot of people seem really caught up in the language being used about the situation Gaza (and the rest of Occupied Palestine) right now. There is a great deal of pushback on the “G word,” in particular. A lot of the people who don’t like it claim to be centrists or moderates.

And I would like to know:

If sitting this one out is a moderate position, what is extreme?

The “G word” is “genocide.”

This is a genocide.

It is an ethnonationalist and theocratic fundamentalist ethnic cleansing currently being carried out via mass murder and total annihilation of the infrastructure needed to sustain future life.

What else could you even call it?

"Don't compare what's happening right now to the Holocaust."

Mark my words.

As a Jew and as a student of the Holocaust¹, I will stop making the comparison when it stops being comparable.

Only then, and not a moment before.

And on that day, when the atrocities end and Palestine is free, all that will change is that I will no longer refer to it in the present tense.

As of that day, I reserve the right to name it as what it was—a genocide, a replication of historic harms onto others—in perpetuity.

I wrote these words² in response to a portion of an article that was shared on Twitter tonight. This is the the screenshot that was shared.

[CN death of a child / death by fire]

Screenshot from an article in Electronic Intefada. Text reads: "While holding villagers in the bakery hostage, Zionist soldiers ordered the baker, Hussein al- Shareef from the town of Lydd, to throw his son Abdul Rauf into the burning oven. After refusing, the soldiers knocked Hussein to the ground and proceeded to throw Abdul Rauf into the oven while his father watched. "Follow your son. He needs you there," said one of the soldiers before throwing Hussein in next." Original tweet:
https://twitter.com/Aldanmarki/status/1718790202129256580

Here is the full article that this screenshot came from, “Deir Yassin makes a mockery of Israel’s ‘never again’ pledge,” written by Dina Elmuti in April of 2022:

https://electronicintifada.net/content/deir-yassin-makes-mockery-israels-never-again-pledge/35176

The massacre this article describes occurred in 1948. Yet somehow, Zionists claim to work in service of the Jewish collective memory.

Zionism has no memory. It never has.

I do.

My heart weeps and my mind rages to be associable—however indirectly, however much on the basis of propaganda³—with people who would name that same historic harm and, in its name, annihilate everyone and everything in the way of achieving the supremacy that they call "safety."

The rest of me weeps, too. Everything is as if it were ashes.

We cannot allow Gaza and all the rest of Occupied Palestine to fall into ashes. We cannot. I will not.

Weep for Gaza, for Gazans, and for all Palestinians. Weep while you work to save them.

You may not valorize the Holocaust as a genocide above other genocides or the atrocity to end all atrocities⁴ while simultaneously perpetrating another.

You may not soil our history or our names in that way.

I do not grant you permission.

We do not.

1. I do not recommend that people who are not Jewish, Roma, or similarly impacted in-community and/or who have not closely studied the Holocaust casually make this comparison. It is hard to do well. It is very easy to inadvertently slip into antisemitic, ableist, or other tropes, especially as a result of the ongoing Zionist propaganda campaign that conflates Judaism with Zionism and the “state of Israel” (see link in note 3). Even when avoided, it is very easy to be misunderstood. All of this risks accidentally detracting from the argument being made and damaging the credibility of that argument. As with many topics relating to the lived or historical experience of marginalized persons, I tend to think that this one is best left to those who are members of directly affected communities or engaged in scholarship in a way that offers similar expertise.
2. https://twitter.com/sleepyknave/status/1718820848591569188?t=9rFcaWgxJ7yucwvEYB4zPQ&s=19
3. https://medium.com/@sharynblum/my-people-are-not-your-propaganda-9600aab5d23b
4. Do not do this regardless. Do not pretend that the Holocaust of the 1940s stands alone in the arc of history. While this piece was originally slammed out as an emotional thread in response to the atrocities described in that screenshot and the rest of the article, it is important to remember—at all times—two things: (1) Jews were not the sole victims of the Holocaust. A roughly equivalent number of disabled, LGBTQIA+, and Roma people, among others, were also murdered in that historic atrocity (and many who were not murdered continued to be caged or persecuted elsewhere following “liberation”) and (2) European deaths are not the only deaths that matter, European genocides are not the only genocides that matter, and there have been many, many genocides and ethnic cleansings perpetrated worldwide since the official end of the Holocaust in May of 1945.