The end of the Holocaust

I realize that, unintentionally and against all logic, I feel far removed from everything I have read and learned about the Holocaust. Literature about past horrors does not serve to prevent the horror being broadcast live: the little girl crying for a piece of bread, the rickety arms of the little ones punished with famine for the mere fact of being as Palestinian as the Hamas terrorists. Or that is the story that Israel’s propaganda is telling us: that the crimes it is perpetrating against an unarmed population are nothing more than part of its self-defense strategy. But what do children and mothers have to do with violent organizations? The humiliating treatment is unworthy of a civilized country that should be ruled by the word and the law, and not by vengeful and sadistically organized barbarism.

When Elias Canetti visited his native Bulgaria in 1924, he met his cousin Bernhard Arditti, a passionate Zionist who, with his oratory skills in the Ladino language, was able to persuade those attending his talks “to turn their backs on a country in which they had been settled for several generations, where they were accepted and respected and where they were undoubtedly doing well for themselves, to emigrate to an unknown country that had been promised to them millennia ago but which at that time did not belong to them at all.” The root of the flagrant injustice is exactly that, that a new State was established in a territory where, we were told, there was no one, and on an idea, that of the promised land, of evident theocratic origin. Europe’s guilt over the Shoah led its leaders to allow this colonization process, but the Palestinians, who had lived on their lands for millennia, had nothing to do with the horrors of Nazism. In this sense, it is especially painful to observe that Germany is wrong again, that with its support for Israel it is once again siding with the executioners, even if now it is to prevent anti-Semitism. It is not hate to affirm that Netanyahu’s actions are criminal, among other things because neither he nor his government are the only Jews in this world. If after the Holocaust, philosophers declared the end of modernity (there are no longer words that serve to describe the horror) today, with the actions of the Israeli prime minister and the complicity of the West and the United States, what is ending is the Holocaust itself because it is now impossible to read about it and think about it without taking into account that some of the descendants of those who suffered it are inflicting unspeakable horror on other human beings.

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