Were tens of thousands of Jews, Soviets and Polish POW worked to death on one of Britain’s channel islands during World War II? Did the Holocaust extend to British territory? John Weigold.. is a figure shrouded in mystery—a self-proclaimed recluse at the center of what has been a coordinated, and often unruly, effort to rewrite the history of the place he calls home. When he first visited the English Channel island of Alderney as a child, on vacation with his parents from Essex, he sensed what he remembered as a “dark energy.”
The for-profit media overlords deliberately prevent serious journalism from happening. They want only regurgitated propaganda. Witness the struggle inside the New York Times this month over the incessant lies from Israel the paper has reproduced, even where the Israelis them selves have back away from it.
Here in Aotearoa/NZ one large media group has folded, sacking 200 people. The state owned broadcaster has sacked another 60. Increasingly they rely on authoritarian handouts from the global oligarchs. Increasingly readers walk away.
I'm a subscriber to ProPublica, they do great in-depth investigative reporting. Recently a report they did on how Mississippi puts mentally ill people in jail when the hospitals are full (and the hospitals are ALWAYS full) led the Mississippi state legislature to change the law so this won't happen any more.
Also, I couldn't read "difficulty of grasping the gigantism and networked complexity of modernity" without thinking of today's Republican party. In any modern, affluent country government is enormous, cost enormous sums and is involved in every aspect of the economy and society, and this simple fact is driving them mad.
It is fascinating to chart the structure of power, the ways in which millions of lives are shaped by complex structures of decision-making with stunning implications for the world.
I think though, that one can spend so much time analysing the "how" that you forget the "why". Germany became a nihilistic death-state for a reason. The drivers of this were a complex and multi-faceted series of factors. If we can understand this better we can stop it from happening again.
Understanding the "how" is often a more administrative task which is the delight of the historian who is motivated by the challenge of precisely recreating the past. Which is a different job.
While this piece of history writing is no doubt an important addition to the studies on the Holocaust, writing it at a time when acts of genocide are taking place in Gaza, seems to be either wilful blindness or deliberate diversion. I am sorely disappointed the Mr. Tooze does not have a single comment on the death and destruction of thousands in Gaza.
Every one of us can (and I believe: will) see this resemblance of advanced systemic inhumanity. Think and act for yourself, please - and don’t put this extra burden on Adam Tooze or any other historian. You rightly point to the Gazan people, but why not to Uigurs, Ukrainians, Eritreans, Afghans, Sudanese, ... ? Are we not all willfully blind or diverted in the sense you rightly call out?
I highly appreciate this article of Adam Tooze and take your blame on myself for not commenting enough on the many technocratically organised crimes against humanity in our present time.
I agree with you to the extent that it is not particularly Adam's or anyone else's responsibility to write on all systematic inhumanity as you call it. But when you say why not write about Uigurs, Ukrainians, Eritrians etc, it carries more than a whiff of whataboutism. Genocide in Gaza is happening now and every moment hundreds are being killed and starved to death while the world is watching. I think it is our responsibility to raise our voice.
Not every examination of an aspect of the Holocaust requires it be offset by some glib reference to an aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This rhetorical tic falls into the politics Prof. Tooze mentioned in regards to the Auschwitz-Hiroshima comparison.
And glib it is because not only is there no legitimate comparison to be made between what the Jews suffered during the Holocaust and what Gazans are going through now, but to claim that a genocide is ongoing in Gaza is to debase and diminish an important legal concept for some cheap PR advantage.
Not even the International Court of Justice agreed. After hearing the best case of “genocide” that South Africa could muster, it not only failed to find the crime to have been committed, but it entirely ignored South Africa’s demand for an immediate ceasefire based on that claim. It ordered Israel to file a report detailing its actions to ensure such a thing didn’t happen, and Israel recently submitted that report.
While there is no doubt Gazans are suffering (and your failure to mention the Israeli hostages, whose taking is indeed a war crime, has not passed without notice), the cause is Hamas which, on October 7, broke a “permanent” ceasefire in a manner of such calculated barbarity as to shock the conscience of the world.
If Hamas surrendered and released the hostages, the death and destruction it has inflicted on the people whose lives and wellbeing it should have been safeguarding would end immediately. That’s what any peace and justice loving person should be demanding … but do it in a forum where it would be relevant to the discussion. This substack is not such a place.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but the difference between us is that I'm not making excuses for Hamas. People on both sides are being betrayed by leaders who are bloodthirsty monsters, who want forever-war because that's how they maintain their grip on power. But you want the bloodthirsty monster on ONE side to go on killing, and to be provided with more and more weapons to do more killing, because you believe if the monster is allowed to do enough killing, there will be "victory" and then there will be peace. What a fool you are.
You really need to keep up. Israel left Gaza in 2005 and any attack or incursion since was always in response to a Hamas attack. On the West Bank, an IDF action either follows a terror attacker or is meant to preempt one identified by the security forces. They don’t randomly show up to shoot. If that’s what you think is going on, that’s on you.
You are not a serious interlocutor. If there was no ceasefire in place on October 7, then the only options are that there was a peace treaty or an active state of war - and neither was self-evidently the case. What may confuse you is the concept of a ceasefire being violated and then restored.
I have seen no one but you pretend that Hamas did not break an existing ceasefire. At best they disingenuously plead some “larger context” to “understand” why Hamas broke what was supposed to be an existing “permanent” ceasefire.
Do you really think the IDF is deliberately slaughtering civilians? If so, they must be pretty bad shots in what we are constantly if falsely reminded is the world’s most densely populated area. I suppose you’ll tell me that when the IDF calls or drops leaflets telling the civilians to move to a designated safe zone, its real purpose is to make their killing a more sporting operation?
If Israel wanted to do what your imagination would have them do, they would have flattened the place without warning. So please think about what you’re being told to believe by your colleagues, it just match up with what’s happening on the ground.
But if you’re so opposed to Hamas’ surrender, how about asking Egypt to give temporary refuge to Gaza’s women, children, elderly and infirm? Or are you happy to decide for them that their lives should be placed at risk to help Hamas survive? You needn’t answer, just think it over.
About Egypt giving refuge, every Palestinian knows that if they cross the border they will never be allowed back in. About a million Palestinians living in Lebanon could tell you that.
But thanks for letting us all see clearly what you real goal is: Starve and terrorize the Palestinians so they'll flee to Egypt, so you can lock the door behind them and steal their land. Genocide and ethnic cleansing, that's your program.
Assuming you’re not referring to Hamas, how is that “starvation strategy” supposed to help Israel free the remaining hostages? You can’t really have it both ways, so please think things through.
Since Hamas is engineering the whole thing, from commandeering the aid after it crosses, to dispensing it first to its fighters, then to its supporters with the rest sent to the black market, perhaps you should address your question to Sinwar & Co. I suspect they call it a “military strategy” but we will all wait back to hear what answer they come up with.
This is like arguing with an AI that has been programmed to just repeat, robotically, "Hamas started it."
But in conflicts like this, both sides can always "justify" their latest atrocity with some prior atrocity committed by the other side. If Israelis and Palestinians are still killing each other a hundred years from now, I'm sure your great-great-grandchildren will be able to point to some act of mass-murder by the Palestinians to as the reason for their own acts of mass-murder. What a legacy to pass on to your children.
The contrast between your first and second paragraphs is like watching a Tucker Carlson bit. Yes it's obvious that not every discussion of the Holocaust must glibly refer to the Israel-Hamas conflict, and Tooze cannot be faulted for failing to do so. It's equally obvious that the Israeli state is pursuing a deliberate policy of total destruction of Gaza and the mass killings of Palestinians, and that this policy is legitimated by ultraconservative ethnic ideology that mirrors the same in Germany of the 1930s-40s.
I guess this is what passes as “intelligent” commentary and more’s the shame. At least you don’t misapply the concept of genocide, so that’s good.
But the facts undermine your argument. If there were an Israeli policy of mass killings of Palestinians, the IDF is proving singularly inept. Even if the Hamas generated casualty numbers are close to accurate, over half the dead are Hamas and PIJ members, Gazans killed by their misfired rockets, IEDs and boobytraps meant for IDF soldiers or simply shot by Hamas “police” as they try to escape or take their share of humanitarian rations.
The property damage inflicted on Gaza is a reflection of how deeply imbedded is Hamas’ terror infrastructure, beyond its vast tunnel system its systematic abuse of otherwise protected spaces such as hospitals, mosques, schools and private residences.
It’s principally because Israel has been adhering to the Laws of Armed Conflict, as actual military scholars have concluded, that the rhetoric has shifted to new rules of “no casualties” and an increase in hysterical, fact-free claims such as you make.
You might do well to read the Hamas Charter and related comments coming from the PA as your final phrase actually defines them to a T.
But, given the well documented Nazi influence on the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as their close wartime collaboration, the parallel you draw (even if you have deliberately misdirected it) should surprise no one.
You’re regurgitating the official line that Israeli representatives articulate to English-speaking observers… Right before they pivot to their domestic audience and call in Hebrew for the annihilation of the vermin in Gaza. This kind of thing used to work, but fewer and fewer people are falling for it. Everyone can see the destruction of Gaza, the mass starvation and death, and none of your bullshit can cover it up.
Some obvious points:
1. The Israeli government is incredibly adept at slaughtering and terrorizing the civilian population of Palestine, which is of course the real goal of the policy. Not sure why you’re pretending that the IDF is “bad at killing Gazans”.
2. The property damage reflects a deliberate campaign to render Gaza uninhabitable. That’s why well over 50% of all structures had already been damaged as of late 2023, and all critical infrastructure had been totally destroyed. For every building they destroy they simply claim without evidence that they were targeting Hamas. No transparency, no accountability; literally some of the most obvious bullshit on the planet.
3. Your point about the ultraconservative chauvinism of Hamas and the Brotherhood is well taken. The problem is that the Israeli state and its apologists are the same. the country is obviously in the grip of a perverted carnivalesque fantasy of genocidal mania.
I understand your need to imagine an equivalence, any equivalence, between Hamas and Israel to keep the Palestinian narrative palatable to its Western supporters, but as there is no equivalence between the two your attempt only reveals its desperation.
As I’ve already mentioned, if Israel was really intent on “slaughtering” Palestinians, don’t you think it would have done so and we would be speaking of death tolls rivaling Syria - as to which, as an aside, there were no protests in the West remotely similar to what we now see even though Assad actually did murder and starve Palestinians there.
So please put your false equivalences and projection to one side, it will help your analysis. If you carry no brief for Hamas, as you say, and as it’s quite evident that they are not interested in negotiating their surrender and care not a whit for Gaza, what’s your strategy to free all those Hamas holds hostage, both Israeli and Palestinian?
Actually, if we take your example of Syria we see that the Israeli regime is killing Palestinians at a MUCH higher rate than the Syrian Civil War killed Syrians on all sides combined. At 25-30 weeks the Israeli campaign has killed roughly 30k Gazans, which is of course an underestimate. By contrast the Syrian civil war tallied 30k deaths only after 75-80 weeks. That means that in absolute terms the Israelis are killing at a rate 3x faster than all belligerents in Syria combined. The picture gets unimaginably worse when you remember that the population of Syria is 10x that of Gaza, so as a percentage of population we really are talking about a most extreme ethnic mass killing event. What the IDF has "accomplished" is genuine orders of magnitude beyond anything the Syrian death machine could ever hope to pull off.
So when you talk of "false equivalence" you actually have the directionality backward. When one equates the Israel of today with its neighbors they give the former, not the latter, the benefit of the doubt. In your own Syria/Israel comparison, the empirical data points to an Israeli barbarism that dwarfs its neighbor. Personally I find that conclusion utterly devastating. It's too terrible to contemplate so I will stick with equivalence, thank you very much.
Btw, there were no serious protests in the US against Syria because our government was already trying to overthrow them.
Savage Continent, Keith Lowe's history of Europe in the immediate post-war period (roughly 1945-1949) does a good job of chronicling not only the horror, but the complexity and scope of the Nazi machine. In the early days of the liberation of Germany, the scale of the crimes committed against the Jews were not clear to many Allied military officials, simply because all of Germany was a slave-labor camp with hundreds of facilities where the death rates were staggering. With the discovery of the first extermination camps what we now know as the Holocaust became clearer, but even then Jews were not singled out by the Allied authorities for any special treatment or protection or recompense, they were just seen as part of a mass of millions of Displaced Persons, or DP's, all victims of the Nazis.
Sorry, but that’s not accurate. The Allies knew not later than 1943 of what we now know as the Holocaust. Initial reports were dismissed as unbelievable and reminiscent of phony WWI propaganda stories of German butchery in Belgium. But soon after the Wansee Conference, the Allies had a much clearer idea about the scope and magnitude of what was befalling the Jews in Nazi controlled lands.
Nazi propaganda from the very first blamed Jews for the war and, as there existed a not inconsiderable number of people harboring antisemitic views throughout the West (through and even after WWII), the last thing the Allies wanted was to save Jews and risk confirming the propaganda that this was a war for the Jews.
So the mantra became no special operations were to be undertaken (for instance, to bomb the tracks to Auschwitz) and that the only way to save the Jews was by winning the war speedily. During this same period, special military operations were run to help Poles and others, but somehow that was seen as ok.
The most horrifying aspect of the book was the stories of Jews who had survived the death camps and were then murdered openly in the town square by their neighbors because: 1) The whole continent had been marinating in antisemitic Nazi propaganda for years, and 2) People had taken the opportunity to steal the Jews' property and possessions when they were taken off to the death camps, and they didn't want to give anything back.
It was massacres like this, which took place after the defeat of the Nazis, that convinced most European Jews that Europe would never be safe for them, and that their only choice was emigration, either to the US or to Palestine. And because the US had disgracefully low quotas for the admission of European Jews, even after the Holocaust became widely known, for most that meant Palestine.
It's beyond tragic that the state of Israel, founded by refugees fleeing for their lives, has turned into a machine for genocide and ethnic cleansing and makes refugees by the millions.
Hello Professor Tooze, I read your article with amusement, I am the man you seek to discredit, John Weigold. I am not an amateur historian, I am a former Army Officer with 17 years military experience, my conclusions derive from my military knowledge not an o level in history. The Harpers article you quote is demonstrably based on a false narrative and is libellous. Your arguments although impressive are somewhat irrelevant as they are based on the SS concentration camp system not the extermination by labour program run by the OT during the 3 year OT construction project. As you say, the SS didn’t arrive on the island until early 1943 by which time the project was almost complete. During the 3 year project the OT employed a workforce of at least 6000 slave labourers. Most were subjected to the E by L program by which they were forced to work 12/7 at hard labour on a diet of 2 litres of watery soup a day. Under the program the slave workers were deliberately worked to death, a process expected to take no more than 3 months. This means that a majority of the workforce would have died and been replaced every 3 months for 3 years. You can do the maths yourself or you can disprove the E by L program and its consequences happened. I challenge you to do that. You dispute the total number of forced and slave labourers who died throughout Europe which I said was 5 to 7 million. This estimate is based on named historical references, a list of which I gave to Panovka and which she passed on to you. Are you saying all those references are wrong? Did you do your own research to disprove them in order to reach your stated figure of 2 to 2.5 million? As you have discredited me I would like to take this discussion further, directly if you would care to contact me otherwise you will hear from me indirectly in the coming months. Many thanks. Regards, JW.
I think this a fascinating article. The only thing I want to comment on , is the mentioning of Germans and Eastern Europeans collaborators but not the Western European collaborators, mainly the French Vichy government.. Of course this collaboration was generally not on the same level that happened in Eastern Europe but it must not be forgotten.
Applause for Adam Tooze’s call for serious history of horrifying events.
great to read careful history vs sloppy journalism
The for-profit media overlords deliberately prevent serious journalism from happening. They want only regurgitated propaganda. Witness the struggle inside the New York Times this month over the incessant lies from Israel the paper has reproduced, even where the Israelis them selves have back away from it.
Here in Aotearoa/NZ one large media group has folded, sacking 200 people. The state owned broadcaster has sacked another 60. Increasingly they rely on authoritarian handouts from the global oligarchs. Increasingly readers walk away.
I'm a subscriber to ProPublica, they do great in-depth investigative reporting. Recently a report they did on how Mississippi puts mentally ill people in jail when the hospitals are full (and the hospitals are ALWAYS full) led the Mississippi state legislature to change the law so this won't happen any more.
https://www.propublica.org/
Seriously off point. Take your soapbox and protest sign and go elsewhere.
Also, I couldn't read "difficulty of grasping the gigantism and networked complexity of modernity" without thinking of today's Republican party. In any modern, affluent country government is enormous, cost enormous sums and is involved in every aspect of the economy and society, and this simple fact is driving them mad.
It is fascinating to chart the structure of power, the ways in which millions of lives are shaped by complex structures of decision-making with stunning implications for the world.
I think though, that one can spend so much time analysing the "how" that you forget the "why". Germany became a nihilistic death-state for a reason. The drivers of this were a complex and multi-faceted series of factors. If we can understand this better we can stop it from happening again.
Understanding the "how" is often a more administrative task which is the delight of the historian who is motivated by the challenge of precisely recreating the past. Which is a different job.
While this piece of history writing is no doubt an important addition to the studies on the Holocaust, writing it at a time when acts of genocide are taking place in Gaza, seems to be either wilful blindness or deliberate diversion. I am sorely disappointed the Mr. Tooze does not have a single comment on the death and destruction of thousands in Gaza.
Every one of us can (and I believe: will) see this resemblance of advanced systemic inhumanity. Think and act for yourself, please - and don’t put this extra burden on Adam Tooze or any other historian. You rightly point to the Gazan people, but why not to Uigurs, Ukrainians, Eritreans, Afghans, Sudanese, ... ? Are we not all willfully blind or diverted in the sense you rightly call out?
I highly appreciate this article of Adam Tooze and take your blame on myself for not commenting enough on the many technocratically organised crimes against humanity in our present time.
I agree with you to the extent that it is not particularly Adam's or anyone else's responsibility to write on all systematic inhumanity as you call it. But when you say why not write about Uigurs, Ukrainians, Eritrians etc, it carries more than a whiff of whataboutism. Genocide in Gaza is happening now and every moment hundreds are being killed and starved to death while the world is watching. I think it is our responsibility to raise our voice.
Not every examination of an aspect of the Holocaust requires it be offset by some glib reference to an aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This rhetorical tic falls into the politics Prof. Tooze mentioned in regards to the Auschwitz-Hiroshima comparison.
And glib it is because not only is there no legitimate comparison to be made between what the Jews suffered during the Holocaust and what Gazans are going through now, but to claim that a genocide is ongoing in Gaza is to debase and diminish an important legal concept for some cheap PR advantage.
Not even the International Court of Justice agreed. After hearing the best case of “genocide” that South Africa could muster, it not only failed to find the crime to have been committed, but it entirely ignored South Africa’s demand for an immediate ceasefire based on that claim. It ordered Israel to file a report detailing its actions to ensure such a thing didn’t happen, and Israel recently submitted that report.
While there is no doubt Gazans are suffering (and your failure to mention the Israeli hostages, whose taking is indeed a war crime, has not passed without notice), the cause is Hamas which, on October 7, broke a “permanent” ceasefire in a manner of such calculated barbarity as to shock the conscience of the world.
If Hamas surrendered and released the hostages, the death and destruction it has inflicted on the people whose lives and wellbeing it should have been safeguarding would end immediately. That’s what any peace and justice loving person should be demanding … but do it in a forum where it would be relevant to the discussion. This substack is not such a place.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but the difference between us is that I'm not making excuses for Hamas. People on both sides are being betrayed by leaders who are bloodthirsty monsters, who want forever-war because that's how they maintain their grip on power. But you want the bloodthirsty monster on ONE side to go on killing, and to be provided with more and more weapons to do more killing, because you believe if the monster is allowed to do enough killing, there will be "victory" and then there will be peace. What a fool you are.
Israel bombing Gaza in September 2023, so tell me more about this "permanent ceasefire" that Hamas supposedly broke:
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/24/1201381201/an-israeli-military-raid-has-killed-two-palestinians-in-the-west-bank#:~:text=Israel%20strikes%20Gaza%20for%20the%20third%20straight%20day%20as%20West%20Bank%20violence%20escalates,-Updated%20September%2024&text=Majdi%20Mohammed%2FAP-,Palestinians%20inspect%20a%20damaged%20building%20following%20an%20Israeli%20army%20raid,24%2C%202023.
You really need to keep up. Israel left Gaza in 2005 and any attack or incursion since was always in response to a Hamas attack. On the West Bank, an IDF action either follows a terror attacker or is meant to preempt one identified by the security forces. They don’t randomly show up to shoot. If that’s what you think is going on, that’s on you.
Yes, this is what the belligerents in EVERY war say. Our attack was only a response to their attack.
And please address your false claim that there was a cease fire in place. There was not. Your claim is a lie.
You are not a serious interlocutor. If there was no ceasefire in place on October 7, then the only options are that there was a peace treaty or an active state of war - and neither was self-evidently the case. What may confuse you is the concept of a ceasefire being violated and then restored.
I have seen no one but you pretend that Hamas did not break an existing ceasefire. At best they disingenuously plead some “larger context” to “understand” why Hamas broke what was supposed to be an existing “permanent” ceasefire.
If you haven't seen anyone else expose this lie as a lie, maybe you're not so widely read, that's hardly my fault, is it?
Israel was bombing Gaza, there was no ceasefire. Please stop lying, thanks.
And "If our enemy surrenders immediately, we will stop killing people", isn't that what EVERY country at war says?
Do you really think the IDF is deliberately slaughtering civilians? If so, they must be pretty bad shots in what we are constantly if falsely reminded is the world’s most densely populated area. I suppose you’ll tell me that when the IDF calls or drops leaflets telling the civilians to move to a designated safe zone, its real purpose is to make their killing a more sporting operation?
If Israel wanted to do what your imagination would have them do, they would have flattened the place without warning. So please think about what you’re being told to believe by your colleagues, it just match up with what’s happening on the ground.
But if you’re so opposed to Hamas’ surrender, how about asking Egypt to give temporary refuge to Gaza’s women, children, elderly and infirm? Or are you happy to decide for them that their lives should be placed at risk to help Hamas survive? You needn’t answer, just think it over.
About Egypt giving refuge, every Palestinian knows that if they cross the border they will never be allowed back in. About a million Palestinians living in Lebanon could tell you that.
But thanks for letting us all see clearly what you real goal is: Starve and terrorize the Palestinians so they'll flee to Egypt, so you can lock the door behind them and steal their land. Genocide and ethnic cleansing, that's your program.
Seems like they're mostly relying on their deliberate starvation strategy.
Assuming you’re not referring to Hamas, how is that “starvation strategy” supposed to help Israel free the remaining hostages? You can’t really have it both ways, so please think things through.
Netanyahu doesn't care whether the hostages live or die. There are hostage families saying that.
The engineered starvation of an entire population (a population of a specific ethnic identity) would be best described by what word, if not genocide?
Since Hamas is engineering the whole thing, from commandeering the aid after it crosses, to dispensing it first to its fighters, then to its supporters with the rest sent to the black market, perhaps you should address your question to Sinwar & Co. I suspect they call it a “military strategy” but we will all wait back to hear what answer they come up with.
This is like arguing with an AI that has been programmed to just repeat, robotically, "Hamas started it."
But in conflicts like this, both sides can always "justify" their latest atrocity with some prior atrocity committed by the other side. If Israelis and Palestinians are still killing each other a hundred years from now, I'm sure your great-great-grandchildren will be able to point to some act of mass-murder by the Palestinians to as the reason for their own acts of mass-murder. What a legacy to pass on to your children.
The contrast between your first and second paragraphs is like watching a Tucker Carlson bit. Yes it's obvious that not every discussion of the Holocaust must glibly refer to the Israel-Hamas conflict, and Tooze cannot be faulted for failing to do so. It's equally obvious that the Israeli state is pursuing a deliberate policy of total destruction of Gaza and the mass killings of Palestinians, and that this policy is legitimated by ultraconservative ethnic ideology that mirrors the same in Germany of the 1930s-40s.
I guess this is what passes as “intelligent” commentary and more’s the shame. At least you don’t misapply the concept of genocide, so that’s good.
But the facts undermine your argument. If there were an Israeli policy of mass killings of Palestinians, the IDF is proving singularly inept. Even if the Hamas generated casualty numbers are close to accurate, over half the dead are Hamas and PIJ members, Gazans killed by their misfired rockets, IEDs and boobytraps meant for IDF soldiers or simply shot by Hamas “police” as they try to escape or take their share of humanitarian rations.
The property damage inflicted on Gaza is a reflection of how deeply imbedded is Hamas’ terror infrastructure, beyond its vast tunnel system its systematic abuse of otherwise protected spaces such as hospitals, mosques, schools and private residences.
It’s principally because Israel has been adhering to the Laws of Armed Conflict, as actual military scholars have concluded, that the rhetoric has shifted to new rules of “no casualties” and an increase in hysterical, fact-free claims such as you make.
You might do well to read the Hamas Charter and related comments coming from the PA as your final phrase actually defines them to a T.
But, given the well documented Nazi influence on the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as their close wartime collaboration, the parallel you draw (even if you have deliberately misdirected it) should surprise no one.
You’re regurgitating the official line that Israeli representatives articulate to English-speaking observers… Right before they pivot to their domestic audience and call in Hebrew for the annihilation of the vermin in Gaza. This kind of thing used to work, but fewer and fewer people are falling for it. Everyone can see the destruction of Gaza, the mass starvation and death, and none of your bullshit can cover it up.
Some obvious points:
1. The Israeli government is incredibly adept at slaughtering and terrorizing the civilian population of Palestine, which is of course the real goal of the policy. Not sure why you’re pretending that the IDF is “bad at killing Gazans”.
2. The property damage reflects a deliberate campaign to render Gaza uninhabitable. That’s why well over 50% of all structures had already been damaged as of late 2023, and all critical infrastructure had been totally destroyed. For every building they destroy they simply claim without evidence that they were targeting Hamas. No transparency, no accountability; literally some of the most obvious bullshit on the planet.
3. Your point about the ultraconservative chauvinism of Hamas and the Brotherhood is well taken. The problem is that the Israeli state and its apologists are the same. the country is obviously in the grip of a perverted carnivalesque fantasy of genocidal mania.
I understand your need to imagine an equivalence, any equivalence, between Hamas and Israel to keep the Palestinian narrative palatable to its Western supporters, but as there is no equivalence between the two your attempt only reveals its desperation.
As I’ve already mentioned, if Israel was really intent on “slaughtering” Palestinians, don’t you think it would have done so and we would be speaking of death tolls rivaling Syria - as to which, as an aside, there were no protests in the West remotely similar to what we now see even though Assad actually did murder and starve Palestinians there.
So please put your false equivalences and projection to one side, it will help your analysis. If you carry no brief for Hamas, as you say, and as it’s quite evident that they are not interested in negotiating their surrender and care not a whit for Gaza, what’s your strategy to free all those Hamas holds hostage, both Israeli and Palestinian?
Actually, if we take your example of Syria we see that the Israeli regime is killing Palestinians at a MUCH higher rate than the Syrian Civil War killed Syrians on all sides combined. At 25-30 weeks the Israeli campaign has killed roughly 30k Gazans, which is of course an underestimate. By contrast the Syrian civil war tallied 30k deaths only after 75-80 weeks. That means that in absolute terms the Israelis are killing at a rate 3x faster than all belligerents in Syria combined. The picture gets unimaginably worse when you remember that the population of Syria is 10x that of Gaza, so as a percentage of population we really are talking about a most extreme ethnic mass killing event. What the IDF has "accomplished" is genuine orders of magnitude beyond anything the Syrian death machine could ever hope to pull off.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Total_deaths_over_time_as_a_result_of_the_Syrian_civil_war.PNG
So when you talk of "false equivalence" you actually have the directionality backward. When one equates the Israel of today with its neighbors they give the former, not the latter, the benefit of the doubt. In your own Syria/Israel comparison, the empirical data points to an Israeli barbarism that dwarfs its neighbor. Personally I find that conclusion utterly devastating. It's too terrible to contemplate so I will stick with equivalence, thank you very much.
Btw, there were no serious protests in the US against Syria because our government was already trying to overthrow them.
Savage Continent, Keith Lowe's history of Europe in the immediate post-war period (roughly 1945-1949) does a good job of chronicling not only the horror, but the complexity and scope of the Nazi machine. In the early days of the liberation of Germany, the scale of the crimes committed against the Jews were not clear to many Allied military officials, simply because all of Germany was a slave-labor camp with hundreds of facilities where the death rates were staggering. With the discovery of the first extermination camps what we now know as the Holocaust became clearer, but even then Jews were not singled out by the Allied authorities for any special treatment or protection or recompense, they were just seen as part of a mass of millions of Displaced Persons, or DP's, all victims of the Nazis.
Sorry, but that’s not accurate. The Allies knew not later than 1943 of what we now know as the Holocaust. Initial reports were dismissed as unbelievable and reminiscent of phony WWI propaganda stories of German butchery in Belgium. But soon after the Wansee Conference, the Allies had a much clearer idea about the scope and magnitude of what was befalling the Jews in Nazi controlled lands.
Nazi propaganda from the very first blamed Jews for the war and, as there existed a not inconsiderable number of people harboring antisemitic views throughout the West (through and even after WWII), the last thing the Allies wanted was to save Jews and risk confirming the propaganda that this was a war for the Jews.
So the mantra became no special operations were to be undertaken (for instance, to bomb the tracks to Auschwitz) and that the only way to save the Jews was by winning the war speedily. During this same period, special military operations were run to help Poles and others, but somehow that was seen as ok.
The most horrifying aspect of the book was the stories of Jews who had survived the death camps and were then murdered openly in the town square by their neighbors because: 1) The whole continent had been marinating in antisemitic Nazi propaganda for years, and 2) People had taken the opportunity to steal the Jews' property and possessions when they were taken off to the death camps, and they didn't want to give anything back.
It was massacres like this, which took place after the defeat of the Nazis, that convinced most European Jews that Europe would never be safe for them, and that their only choice was emigration, either to the US or to Palestine. And because the US had disgracefully low quotas for the admission of European Jews, even after the Holocaust became widely known, for most that meant Palestine.
It's beyond tragic that the state of Israel, founded by refugees fleeing for their lives, has turned into a machine for genocide and ethnic cleansing and makes refugees by the millions.
Touche'.
Hello Professor Tooze, I read your article with amusement, I am the man you seek to discredit, John Weigold. I am not an amateur historian, I am a former Army Officer with 17 years military experience, my conclusions derive from my military knowledge not an o level in history. The Harpers article you quote is demonstrably based on a false narrative and is libellous. Your arguments although impressive are somewhat irrelevant as they are based on the SS concentration camp system not the extermination by labour program run by the OT during the 3 year OT construction project. As you say, the SS didn’t arrive on the island until early 1943 by which time the project was almost complete. During the 3 year project the OT employed a workforce of at least 6000 slave labourers. Most were subjected to the E by L program by which they were forced to work 12/7 at hard labour on a diet of 2 litres of watery soup a day. Under the program the slave workers were deliberately worked to death, a process expected to take no more than 3 months. This means that a majority of the workforce would have died and been replaced every 3 months for 3 years. You can do the maths yourself or you can disprove the E by L program and its consequences happened. I challenge you to do that. You dispute the total number of forced and slave labourers who died throughout Europe which I said was 5 to 7 million. This estimate is based on named historical references, a list of which I gave to Panovka and which she passed on to you. Are you saying all those references are wrong? Did you do your own research to disprove them in order to reach your stated figure of 2 to 2.5 million? As you have discredited me I would like to take this discussion further, directly if you would care to contact me otherwise you will hear from me indirectly in the coming months. Many thanks. Regards, JW.
I think this a fascinating article. The only thing I want to comment on , is the mentioning of Germans and Eastern Europeans collaborators but not the Western European collaborators, mainly the French Vichy government.. Of course this collaboration was generally not on the same level that happened in Eastern Europe but it must not be forgotten.