Founding Israel: hatred, hypocrisy, dishonesty, hubris, all round

Eighty years ago last Sunday, Soviet troops “liberated” what remained of Auschwitz. In one sense, the state of Israel was also born that day: for where else were European Jews now to go? But equally, so too were born an accompanying quartet of vices: hatred, hypocrisy, dishonesty and hubris. Analysis of the first is unnecessary. The second was amply displayed by the USA when it shamelessly limited admittance of desperate Jewish refugees from Europe. The third came from Stalin’s USSR, which for years maintained the fiction that the victims of Auschwitz were not primarily Jewish, whereas that was exactly what they were. The fourth was Britain’s, for the deluded imperialist arrogance with which it had undertaken the League of Nations’ Mandate to create a Jewish home in Palestine without compromising the rights of the people already there.

Speaking the truth about the past is not necessarily to align oneself with ideological activists who today weaponize history for their own ends.  But quite simply, accusations that the British had put down the Arab uprising against Jewish immigration in the 1930s with outright murderousness are largely accurate. Two officers stand out for their criminal psychopathy: Colonel Orde Wingate, and the commander of the Royal Ulster Rifles, Lt Colonel Bala Bredin. Both men could have effortlessly adorned the ranks of the SS. Wingate’s orders authorised the random murders of Arabs, and Bredin enthusiastically implemented them. Their atrocities were many, both using soldiers and joint civilian/police/ army “Night Squads”. After a popular young Irish officer had been killed by an Arab-planted landmine, the Ulster Rifles attacked the nearest Arab village, murdering the men and raping some of the women.

This is not some malevolent Arabist myth: I was told this by a former (and deeply ashamed) former officer of the battalion, while the regimental history admits that “reprisals were severe”. One of the soldiers was nicknamed “The Murderer McGlatchey” because of his homicidal habits: two of his victims were British army officers working undercover in Arab dress whom he mistakenly shot and killed. McGlatchey was later awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, while Bredin was festooned with gallantry decorations, including the DSO and Bar, MC and Bar, and went with honour to his grave twenty years ago. God forgive me, in my ignorance, I even attended his memorial service. Wingate became the celebrated founder of the Chindits, the military prowess of which was as fictional as his own, while the poisonous legacy of the Night Squads continued to curse the region.

So, the story of much of the Arab population of the area is genuinely tragic, especially during the later creation of the state of Israel, as thousands died in the fighting and around three-quarters of a million fled. Everywhere, these were dreadful times. Perhaps fifteen million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus lost their homes in India-Pakistan, with an unknown death-toll: two million probably. Likewise in Eastern Europe, millions of people of remote German ancestry were evicted from their ancient homelands, and hundreds of thousands were killed. In all these calamities, violently penetrative sexual assaults on helpless women were common and repeated. They were too in Germany and Austria just four months after Auschwitz was “liberated”, as Soviet troops went on a rape-orgy lasting weeks, in which tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of women, were systematically and repeatedly violated.  (Why is this war-crime, a monstrous and unparalleled bacchanal-of-hatred, not commemorated annually? Is it because the culprits were communist?)

One relic of that evil epoch remains today as a living issue: Israel/Palestine. The millions of displaced Germans from the east are now settled indistinguishably in Germany. Likewise, the survivors of hecatomb that consumed millions of lives in the former Indian Raj, have since made new homes elsewhere. But Israel’s “Palestinian” problem remains because it has been not so much conserved as both preserved, perpetuated and enlarged by easily the most depraved UN body of them all, the United Nations Work and Relief Agency, whose primary function is apparently to ensure that the “Palestinian” problem remains permanently unresolved. In all other countries, refugees are rehoused and rehomed by the UN High Commission for Refugees, usually in the land to which they have fled. The Palestinians alone have their UNWRA, which still calls its hundreds of thousands of charges “refugees”, even though 98 per cent of them are living today where they were born, either in an Arab state or in some other land to which their families emigrated. Little wonder that a half-Syrian, half-Palestinian refugee whose ancestors fled Palestine nearly eighty years ago will forget his Syrian component when applying for refugee status. Wherever he lives, even if he was born in a villa overlooking Lake Como, he is entitled to retain his “refugee” status, as too are his children and grandchildren, with an irrefutable right of “return” to a land none of them has ever seen, as the hundreds of thousands of “refugees” of 1948 now number some two million.

Though millions of people were killed – murdered – in the 1930s and 1940s, the Jews were genuinely the subject of a root-and-branch genocide. Contrary to mythology, the gas chamber was probably not the primary tool of genocide: bullets were. Some 2.4 million Soviet Jews alone were shot by Axis forces, and not just by the SS but also by Wehrmacht soldiers and police units, who gallantly set to their task of making their victims strip before shooting them, in endless thousands, without qualms or reluctance. Killing naked children is a task few people could manage, but the plucky German soldiers met that challenge, perhaps inspired by their leader Field Marshal von Manstein, who was later adviser to the Federal Germany Army. So much for the widespread German “regret” over The Final Solution. Regrets are apparently for courtrooms, tearfully, in front of judges, not for real life murderers who managed to get away with their crimes, as did Manstein, and who. like Bredin, went with honour to his grave.

“Never Again” is the mantra intoned solemnly on Holocaust Day, and of course, it has changed nothing.  The Khmer Rouge murdered some two million people who might possibly have been – or possibly not – anti-communist. On the other hand, anti-communist forces in Indonesia (with the kindly support of the CIA) killed over half a million “leftists”, a generous category indeed. Rwanda’s holocaust that took over a million lives, though not with gas or flame or bullet but with cold panga blade, which apparently was more fun. It is impossible to quantify the Congo’s many bloodlettings in which millions of humans have vanished. What precisely is China doing with its millions of Uyghurs? What happened to Vietnam’s Chinese minority? What has befallen the Muslims of what used to be Burma and is now Myanmar?

Never again….

A Holocaust Memorial Day in Dublin on Sunday was marked by a walk-out and protests after the Irish President Michael Higgins referred to Gaza. This was precisely what he was asked not to do by the Jewish Representative Council in Ireland, where the hostility to Israel is so ferocious that the word “hatred” really does apply. In that context, any reference to Gaza and Auschwitz simultaneously without a connecting negative could only serve as a coded equivalence. Higgins did it anyway, though there is no equivalence. Civilians were escorted out of Gaza. They were escorted into Auschwitz, departing only through the chimneys. 

So what now is the purpose of Holocaust Memorial Day? In Poland, Latvia and other Baltic lands, there is rightly profound grief, stark remembrance and no doubt some justifiable shame over local involvement. Everywhere, everywhere, the SS found local allies. Yet today, over much of the world, loathing of Israel is now legitimised, as millions of dead Jews are outwardly commemorated while millions of living ones are vilified. Giving gentiles yet another opportunity for yet more Jew-hatred was hardly the reason for having a Holocaust Memorial Day in the first place. Eighty years on, it could just as easily be called Hypocrisy Memorial Day.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.