Opinion editor's note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes a mix of national and local commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.
•••
In a speech last week for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial's Annual Days of Remembrance Ceremony, President Joe Biden compared what happened in Israel on Oct. 7 to that broad event of the 20th century. This is the man who has supplied thousands of bombs and the most destructive weapons for the Israelis to kill almost 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and destroy a city of 2 million people, most of whom are refugees because of the establishing of the Jewish state in 1948, the truth that the Palestinians never forget — the Nakba. (Start at www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba if the term is unfamiliar to you.)
Biden also warned Americans about a growth of antisemitism on campuses. But this is not just a matter of student protest, it's an antiwar movement, not just in the U.S. but in Germany, the U.K., France, Australia, Canada, Ireland, India, Turkey, Mexico, Latin America, Morocco and Pakistan. All over the globe.
" 'Never again,' simply translated for me," said Biden, speaking at the U.S. Capitol's Emancipation Hall, "means: 'Never forget.' Never forgetting means we must keep telling the story. We must keep teaching the truth."
The truth that Biden forgot, when he confused the students opposing war and American complicities in what is a "plausible" genocide in Gaza (according to the International Court of Justice) is that the students are not going to give a whit about what he's saying. The truth that Biden forgot is that antiwar is not antisemitic, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, and "from the river to the sea" is not antisemitic — it is about the freedom of the Palestinians and the equality of everyone.
Yet as a Palestinian activist explained, Israel is democratic for the Jews and Jewish for the Palestinians. Zionism is a racist ideology, like all white European racist colonial projects before it, the ones in which millions were killed in Africa by the Belgians, and in Africa and Asia by the British, the French, the Italians, the Germans and the Dutch. Like the ones in which Natives were exterminated and Black people held in slavery here in North America.
The Holocaust industry made the Holocaust all about the Jews and Hitler, and not a human tragedy. But Hitler was not as the West wanted people to believe — the only evil, or the only one who did an evil thing. He learned from his masters that he could get away with it. And he killed more than just Jews.
In his book "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering," Norman Finkelstein argues that the American Jewish establishment exploits the memory of the Nazi Holocaust for political and financial gain and to further Israeli interests. Now in Western democratic countries, if you are antiwar or anti-genocide, or ask for a cease-fire, you may lose your job, get arrested, or be accused of helping terrorists or of being antisemitic.
As David Hearst of Middle East Eye wrote: "Israel's sense of victimhood and historical destiny blinds it to the suffering it causes. In its eyes, there can only be one victim of history — a Jewish one."
Today that sense of victimhood asks us to believe, amid tens of thousands of civilian deaths in what I fully consider to be a genocide in Gaza, that a few thousand Palestinians who acted on Oct. 7, fed up of grave injustice done to Palestinians for almost 80 years, were going to wipe out the Jewish state.
So the students protest in America, where the descendants of settlers are finally rejecting the modern settlers in Palestine.
Ahmed Tharwat is host and producer of the Arab American TV show "BelAhdan." He lives in Minnetonka.
