The Jewish journalist Masha Gessen was “in trouble”, in Gessen’s own rather gauche phrasing, for comparing Gaza to the Jewish ghettos of eastern Europe in a New Yorker piece published this month. For a while it seemed that the Hannah Arendt Prize, awarded in Germany, would be withdrawn from Gessen, though it wasn’t, and it was said that Arendt, who was also critical of Zionism, might also have been ruled out of the running for the prize, had she been alive and still writing. Critics of Israel thrilled to the irony.
The offending paragraph was this: “But as in the Jewish ghettos of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards — Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term ‘ghetto’ would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.”
This is raging language, and striking, but Gessen defended it. “Why do we compare? We compare to learn. This is how we understand the world.” Or, perhaps, how we misunderstand it? “And yet there is a rule — and it is certainly not unique to Germany — that you don’t compare things to the Holocaust.” But we must, Gessen goes on. “And this is why we compare. To prevent what we know can happen from happening.”
Gessen can write this, being a Jew. Writers can write what they want. But is it true? It sounds noble theoretically: nothing is off limits when discussing the human will to violence. But it feels disingenuous to me: as if Gessen, who lost family in the Holocaust, is expiating something. Because the real result of this polemic — I doubt it is its purpose, I cannot say — is to embolden non-Jewish people to call Jews Nazis liquidating their Palestinian ghetto in Gaza, and I cannot see how this makes the world a more hopeful, or more honest place. Here, the judgment precedes the crime, and from such a cold and careful writer: there has been no Holocaust in Palestine, though it is a bitter and sometimes murderous occupation. Rather, the population has increased seven-fold since 1948. This fact matters. It should matter to Gessen. I would take a genocide of European Jews in which our numbers increased seven-fold. So would Gessen, I suspect.
But if Jews are Nazis — and Nazis, therefore, are Jews? — who are the victims of the Holocaust that I suspect Gessen truly mourns? Do they even exist or, is the event, as Gessen charges Germany, out of time and behind glass? People who call Jews Nazis do not live in the paradise of equality and anti-racism that Gessen seeks to summon: I have met them. They just like calling Jews Nazis because it absolves them of Jew-hatred, and because it is cruel. It suggests that Jews, alone of all people, are incapable of love because we butchered our own. We outdid ourselves in this instance: we butchered ourselves. This is demonisation with footnotes and I’m not surprised that the German government baulks at it. I don’t really care what the German government does. Perhaps I should.
I hate Gessen comparing Gaza to the Holocaust. But I’ll add this: I hate it when anyone does it. I hate it when Zionists compare Israel’s wars to the Holocaust. Calling Hamas Nazis is as foolish, and ahistorical: it is helpful only if you don’t want to understand Hamas, or Nazis. It doesn’t start a conversation, but the opposite, which I suspect is the intention: it ends one. These comparisons compound a dialogue — I euphemise — in which few people listen, and many people lie.
I can hear the trauma in Gessen’s writing, and my own. I can hear it everywhere, in these quarrels over ownership of the dead, and their meaning: what they can offer us as we falter in the dark? I ask nothing from them: the murdered Jews of Europe do not owe us a metaphor, or teachable moment, or starting point for a doughty round table on genocide: not when there is so much bad faith. Let all abominations have their own language, and specificity: in that at least I would hear a hunger to understand. For now, it’s all a Holocaust memorial, though an oblivious one, and so bad: a kind of universal derangement and carnival of shouting.
I think of another New Yorker writer: Malcolm Gladwell, who spoke at a Jewish space in New York City that other non-Jewish writers boycotted after it cancelled a speech by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a novelist critical of Israel, after October 7. “This wasn’t about free speech,” Gladwell said of the cancellation. “It was a question of manners”. There aren’t enough of them around.
