I think Japan killed even more people than Germany including members of my family in the Philippines. You don’t see Filipinos or Chinese or Koreans justifying a genocide because of it. Maybe because Japan was bombed by the US and everyone decided karma had taken care of things.
I think the main objection one can make is that because genocides are by definition selective of the targeted outgroups, the Germany/Israel comparison should be made not relative to the whole populations under the authority of each government, but relative to the population of the victimised minorities.
So Israel has killed 5% of the Gaza population by your assumptions (100k out of 2M), whereas Germany killed 50% of the Jews in the territories under its control (6M out of 12M).
Then again, that only 80 years after being on the other end Israeli Jews have already reached a tenth of what Hitler and acolytes did … is a confirmation that they've learned a lesson from History, indeed. Just not the lesson they supposedly wanted everyone else to learn.
Yes very good point. But then again if we double the murder rate to 200k then it's suddenly 10% of the population. Also if we stretch this out to two more years...it might get to 10-20% of the population. And it's not clear what the future of Gaza holds — definitely not a Marshal Plan overseen by Israel. So conditions continue to deteriorate, increasing the death rate more and more...
I fully realize the macabre pointlessness of playing with numbers like this. But people love their numbers.
I don't think that Germany's staunch support for Israel is motivated by Israeli mass murders making the German ones look more normal. Rather, the support for Israel serves as a sort of certificate of history's lessons learned and moral superiority, an entitlement to handle less enlightened nations accordingly ‒ in a similar way as their woke attitudes can make affluent liberals feel justified to cream the plebs considered as racist, sexist etc. This would apply to much of the Western European political class in general. Specifically in the German case, support for Israel is a fundamental part of the post-ww2 recipe for the international acceptance of Germany (w/o reparations that can be avoided), engrained in the standard issue German pol.
One may add that Nazis did not advertise the works of death camps, deportations, etc. - “Night and Fog” - while the genocide in Gaza is not hidden at all, every Israeli could watch it on tv.
Another useful metric might be the number of Palestinians killed since the state of Israel was established—though I must admit I'm wary of any such "body count" comparisons because the Holocaust WAS so grotesquely inhuman/psychopathic in its planning and execution.
I also don't see the two situations as comparable for another reason. It wasn't the Jews' fault that Europe and the U.S. demanded their mass deportation to Palestine. The imperialist West wanted a beachhead in the Mideast to protect its access to oil. This access (and control) was threatened when the Europeans liberated their colonies, a job they had to finish so as not look totally hypocritical (partly was OK, of course) as they were preparing to arrest Hitler's imperialist ambitions.
Anyway, do you happen to know if the total number of Palestinians who have died at the hands of the Israelis approaches or even exceeds 10 million?
From this perspective, too, Israel actually looks less "guilty" than the countries who put them in this precarious situation, which you could almost describe as cannon fodder. From the get-go they were threatened (and blamed) by their understandably incensed Arab neighbors.
Does that justify the genocide in Gaza? Of course not, but it would make the judgments of some in the now "appalled" West a lot easier to swallow if the West admitted whose idea this occupation of Palestine was to begin with. I mean, many Jews didn't want to move to this godforsaken place. Some were forced out of their real homelands, which in the case of many "deportees" was either Russia or Germany.
Pretty ironic, eh? And that Russia is now accused of being somehow in league with and even financing Hamas is. . . classic. Russia has its hands full in Ukraine, another crisis fomented (manufactured) by Western neocons.
Interesting breakdown. The thing is even if the rates fall short, it seems like if the Israeli's could do it, they would. Or it seems many of them would fully support it anyway. It seems even the pattern of outsourcing the work is happening too.
Infinite Jaz did a more qualitative comparison along similar lines using 'Zone of Interest' to paint the picture. His post includes a photo of a playground in Bethlehem that speaks volumes for laying the groundwork of the metaphor.
I think Japan killed even more people than Germany including members of my family in the Philippines. You don’t see Filipinos or Chinese or Koreans justifying a genocide because of it. Maybe because Japan was bombed by the US and everyone decided karma had taken care of things.
I think the main objection one can make is that because genocides are by definition selective of the targeted outgroups, the Germany/Israel comparison should be made not relative to the whole populations under the authority of each government, but relative to the population of the victimised minorities.
So Israel has killed 5% of the Gaza population by your assumptions (100k out of 2M), whereas Germany killed 50% of the Jews in the territories under its control (6M out of 12M).
Then again, that only 80 years after being on the other end Israeli Jews have already reached a tenth of what Hitler and acolytes did … is a confirmation that they've learned a lesson from History, indeed. Just not the lesson they supposedly wanted everyone else to learn.
Yes very good point. But then again if we double the murder rate to 200k then it's suddenly 10% of the population. Also if we stretch this out to two more years...it might get to 10-20% of the population. And it's not clear what the future of Gaza holds — definitely not a Marshal Plan overseen by Israel. So conditions continue to deteriorate, increasing the death rate more and more...
I fully realize the macabre pointlessness of playing with numbers like this. But people love their numbers.
I don't think that Germany's staunch support for Israel is motivated by Israeli mass murders making the German ones look more normal. Rather, the support for Israel serves as a sort of certificate of history's lessons learned and moral superiority, an entitlement to handle less enlightened nations accordingly ‒ in a similar way as their woke attitudes can make affluent liberals feel justified to cream the plebs considered as racist, sexist etc. This would apply to much of the Western European political class in general. Specifically in the German case, support for Israel is a fundamental part of the post-ww2 recipe for the international acceptance of Germany (w/o reparations that can be avoided), engrained in the standard issue German pol.
One may add that Nazis did not advertise the works of death camps, deportations, etc. - “Night and Fog” - while the genocide in Gaza is not hidden at all, every Israeli could watch it on tv.
Another useful metric might be the number of Palestinians killed since the state of Israel was established—though I must admit I'm wary of any such "body count" comparisons because the Holocaust WAS so grotesquely inhuman/psychopathic in its planning and execution.
I also don't see the two situations as comparable for another reason. It wasn't the Jews' fault that Europe and the U.S. demanded their mass deportation to Palestine. The imperialist West wanted a beachhead in the Mideast to protect its access to oil. This access (and control) was threatened when the Europeans liberated their colonies, a job they had to finish so as not look totally hypocritical (partly was OK, of course) as they were preparing to arrest Hitler's imperialist ambitions.
Anyway, do you happen to know if the total number of Palestinians who have died at the hands of the Israelis approaches or even exceeds 10 million?
From this perspective, too, Israel actually looks less "guilty" than the countries who put them in this precarious situation, which you could almost describe as cannon fodder. From the get-go they were threatened (and blamed) by their understandably incensed Arab neighbors.
Does that justify the genocide in Gaza? Of course not, but it would make the judgments of some in the now "appalled" West a lot easier to swallow if the West admitted whose idea this occupation of Palestine was to begin with. I mean, many Jews didn't want to move to this godforsaken place. Some were forced out of their real homelands, which in the case of many "deportees" was either Russia or Germany.
Pretty ironic, eh? And that Russia is now accused of being somehow in league with and even financing Hamas is. . . classic. Russia has its hands full in Ukraine, another crisis fomented (manufactured) by Western neocons.
Interesting breakdown. The thing is even if the rates fall short, it seems like if the Israeli's could do it, they would. Or it seems many of them would fully support it anyway. It seems even the pattern of outsourcing the work is happening too.
Infinite Jaz did a more qualitative comparison along similar lines using 'Zone of Interest' to paint the picture. His post includes a photo of a playground in Bethlehem that speaks volumes for laying the groundwork of the metaphor.
https://infinitejaz.substack.com/p/aliens-psychopaths-and-idf-soldiers