Thread by @therubykid

Seen this go viral. I’m sure the person with placard had good intentions, and obviously I don’t know what their grandfather’s beliefs are/were, but I think formulations like this are problematic and sail close to the sentiment I referred to here:

https://twitter.com/therubykid/status/1393883757199904769?s=21

(1/8)

It’s likely some of the people dropping bombs on Gaza *are* descendants of Holocaust survivors. And? Should Allied armies have made survivors sign a waiver on the way out of camps? “You can leave as long as you promise your descendants will never do anything oppressive”? (2/8)

There’s an implication that having been a victim of attempted genocide should imbue you with a kind of heightened morality. Why? In fact, the conclusion many Jews drew from the Holocaust was that they would never be safe until they had their own, armed, state. (3/8)

That’s not a conclusion I support but it’s pretty easy to understand how people arrived at it. I’m not going to berate the survivors of genocide for not “learning the right lessons” from the experience. Oppression is not a moral instruction. (4/8)

The experiences of the Holocaust, and earlier European antisemitism, *are* an absolutely integral part of the Israeli Jewish story, without question. Israeli nationhood was a “life boat... a raft” for post-Holocaust refugees, as Isaac Deutscher put it. (5/8)

Deutscher’s parable likening Jewish immigration to Palestine to someone jumping out of a burning building, landing on someone below, and then continually kicking them to the ground for fear of reprisals for having landed on them is also apposite. (6/8)

That encapsulates the historical tragedy of the desperate Jewish escape to what they hoped would be a safe national home involving the dispossession and oppression of another people. It’s a better framing than one which implies Jews should have “learnt” from the Holocaust. (7/8)

The Israeli state’s oppression of the Palestinians is wrong because it’s wrong - because it violates what should be universal rights, such as the right to self-determination. It’s not somehow *more* wrong because those carrying it out are the descendants of survivors. (8/8)