What follows is the opening swatch of David Aaronovitch’s latest Substack post, along with his December 6th piece—a “story about modern left antisemitism.”
My Gaza Demands
The hashtag era having replaced the age of conference resolutions and since wishes and the most earnest desires are to be expressed as demands, here are my #gazademands. I don’t expect them to be met but I want them to be. If they were realised then the appalling suffering of the people of Gaza would be ended, the minimum security needs of the people of Israel would be safeguarded and some hope for the future would be established (for currently there is none).
#HAMASOUT Hamas as a military organisation must leave Gaza, upon whose people it has deliberately brought such death and destruction.
#FREETHEHOSTAGES Hamas and the other armed groups must take immediate steps to free all hostages taken on October 7th.
#CEASEFIRENOW Israel must immediately cease offensive military operations in Gaza and any operations that put civilian lives at serious risk.
#MASSIVEAIDNOW An international aid effort is needed to help the people of Gaza with their health, housing and other basic needs.
#TALKSNOW Publicly acknowledged multilateral talks about the short term future of Gaza and its reconstruction must begin involving Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and such Arab states as might be usefully involved in the reconstruction of Gaza. As soon as possible a form must be found for Gazans to be directly involved in these discussions. They haven’t been consulted about their government for nearly 20 years.
#NETANYAHU OUT No confidence can be reposed by the international community, by any Palestinians or the majority of Israelis in the premiership of Binyamin Netanyahu, who is clearly a barrier to any progress. He is the past, and a horribly failed past at that. He should resign immediately.
#FASCISTSOUT No confidence can be reposed in a government in which extreme Jewish nationalists, including those who have supported past acts of terrorism, hold portfolios. The Knesset must kick them out of office.
#ENDSETTLERVIOLENCE A minority of Jews living on the West Bank are involved in egregious violence against Palestinians. They seem recently to have acted with impunity. They must be prevented from continuing by the Israeli security forces.
#NEWPEACEPROCESSNOW A new Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority must state their renewed commitment to a peace process with the objective of setting up a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
That’s a lot of placards, I grant you. And the ferocious partisans on either side, some of whose genuine desire to stop the killings and the suffering seems to me to be moot, will not want to wave half of them. Which is one small reason why this bloodletting and suffering continues.
A tug on the thread
The vandalised memorial to victims of the Holocaust, Thessaloniki, Greece
This is a piece that originated in fury.
A few days ago a veteran Australian journalist and former news anchor called Mary Kostakidis retweeted in full and approvingly this paragraph from a website she’d been reading. This is it:
If the Jews being shot and shoveled into ovens could just break through that wall, of course, they would kill anyone they found partying right on the other side of it! And, of course, they would take women and children hostage and drag them back into their hell inside if doing so would give them leverage to free their fellow Jews from torture and death! This thought, of course, set in motion an obvious but taboo moral question in my mind about one of the most pressing matters of our time: Is it understandable why people in Gaza, similarly trapped behind a wall in a concentration camp and experiencing genocide, would kill or take hostage people they found partying on the other side of the wall holding them in?
The question at the end there is a rhetorical device. If these actions by “people in Gaza” weren’t “understandable” in the opinion of the author, then he wouldn’t have asked it. His meaning is clear. If Jews were in the position Palestinians in Gaza were in – a position directly comparable to Jews during the Holocaust – then they’d have committed the same crimes on October 7th that Hamas and its allies did. Note the three “of courses”, “of course” these putative Holocaust Jews would kill anyone found “partying” nearby, “ of course” they’d take children hostage, and “of course” this thought had set in motion the “taboo moral question” which the brave author so very nearly answers. How could it not?
Put this way what took place in Southern Israel a month ago – horrible though it may have been but no longer realistically deniable – is not just explicable, it is actually excusable. The rapes, the close-up executions, the face-to-face murder of children, the mutilation of bodies and the glee with which some of it was done, are all to be understood as the inevitable, righteous and even strategic response (“if doing so would give them leverage”) to the situation of the Palestinians of Gaza as of October 6th.
Mary Kostakidis in her pomp
The paragraph above was written by an American man on a website famous – among those who study such things – for its dancing on and across the line between hating Israel and hating Jews. I don’t care what he thinks. I do care however that a very senior and once respected former journalist and anchor at a major Australian TV station with thousands of followers should repost it approvingly. I may not have heard of Kostakidis before but plenty of people in Australia will have. So much so that when in 2007 she quit her position on the SBS channel (roughly equivalent to Channel 4 in the UK), one major newspaper described her as “iconic”.
This icon is the same age as me. Kostakidis is one of the great and the good of liberal Australia and has served on the boards of the Sydney Theatre, the National Library of Australia, the Sydney Peace Foundation (which she chaired) and something called The Privacy Foundation. At the Australian National University she continues to be part of something called the Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry. I hope someone on the project is now studying her.
That comparison
There are three elements to the comparison above, two spoken and one mute but present.
Element one concerns what was happening to Jews during the Holocaust. There were essentially four ways it could go if you were a Jew in occupied Europe once you were arrested. The first way was to be taken under guard to a forest clearing or a sand dune or a ravine, lined up in batches and shot and then buried. The second was to be transported directly to a death camp and, minutes after arrival gassed to death. The third was to be considered fit for work and then, from the prison or camp, to be marched to the place of labour and worked till you died, usually of illness (though shooting or hanging was always an option for the guards). A fourth was to be forced into a ghetto in which illness and starvation were rife, and which in any case were only holding pens – a prelude – to the other three fates. The description of Jews being shot and shovelled behind a wall fits none of these routes to destruction. In other words the author does not know that much about the Holocaust and doesn’t much seem to care that he doesn’t.
Element two is the comparison with Gaza pre-October 7th. Was there a genocide going on there which was in some way analogous to the Holocaust? Of course not. There was no attempt to physically eliminate all the people of Gaza, indeed the numbers of people living there grew steadily. There were (and still are) schools, colleges, hospitals, clinics, significant amounts of foreign and international aid, and though movement was restricted and there were security zones around the strip (both on the Israeli and the Egyptian borders) Gazans went to work in Israel for money and not because they were slave labour to be worked to death. Two weeks ago I met a senior eye surgeon who in addition to working at Moorfields also works in Jerusalem and Gaza. Not many eye surgeons were operating on Jews in Auschwitz-Birkenau – unless perhaps they were working for Dr Mengele. It is certainly difficult and often humiliating to be a Gazan Palestinian, with a substantial chance you know someone killed in an Israeli retaliation. Treblinka it ain’t.
And this is where the mute and to me most repellent aspect of the above paragraph comes in. Because though Jews were in these camps and ghettoes or being transported, there weren’t any October 7th massacres committed by break-out Jews. A few people escaped from cattle trucks. Rather fewer found themselves at the bottom of a pile of bodies and climbed through their dead friends and relatives to survive the war. There were a couple of camp revolts in which guards’ weapons were seized and a very few of those involved made it out to the forests, where they joined partisans or – far more likely – hid. Not much time for massacring. None for raping. It was just about surviving.
So the mute suggestion here – which even the author couldn’t acknowledge – is that the Holocaust Jews lacked the bravery and gumption of the Gazans. Otherwise they would have done what Hamas did and broken through the walls and murdered everyone on the other side – maybe raping and mutilating a few along the way.
The rest of us – those maybe who are not associated with a Project for the Study of Bigotry – could reflect on another critical difference. The Jews of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other work-camps were not self-governed by a heavily armed and trained militia several thousand strong. The Nazis didn’t allow that kind of thing. There was no Hamas in Sobibor.
Macedonian Jews forced onto cattle trucks
So where does this s**t come from?
I hope it’s evident, without me having to spell it out too much, just how disgusting I find both the original sentiment and then its dissemination on social media. So much so that I couldn’t help wondering about Kostakidis herself. What did she know about the Holocaust? Wikipedia tells us that she was taken to Australia when she was two, but had originally been born in the northern Greek town of Veria, not far from Thessaloniki. A place which for Jews has a very special history.
Was Mary curious about her home town? More particularly did she ever wonder what had happened there during the war and the German occupation which her parents and their friends would surely have experienced?
Just a little digging tells us that the Germans arrived in Verya on April 11th 1941. Two years later (April 1943) a German Sonderkommando of the security police bussed in to oversee the deportation of the town’s Jews. A contemporary report tells how:
Miriam Mordechai, a Jewish woman from Veroia who went into hiding, recalls that prior to the deportation, the Germans and their collaborators made an attempt to uncover and confiscate as many valuables as they could; one of the methods of doing so was by torturing the wealthier Jewish inhabitants of Veroia. She describes in her memoirs the brutal roundup of the Jews: “The day they started assembling the Jews at the Jewish ghetto for their transport I peeked through a crack and I saw a pregnant woman giving birth in the street, the Germans pushed and beat her and she was crying. […] [My son] Asher peeked from another crack towards the synagogue, and saw two men jumping from the balcony to the chasm below. […] After all the torture inflicted by the Nazi beasts on the Jews of our town, including my family, my dear mother who was taken from her sickbed, my four sisters, one of them married and mother of five, my elder brother, his wife and their five children, I sat in the closed hiding place together with my children, hearing the screams and unable to do anything. I became hysterical, and started shouting “save my mother!” But there was nothing to be done.”…
The full link is here: https://deportation.yadvashem.org/index.html?language=en&itemId=11057418
Verya (Veroia) was following what had already happened in Thessaloniki, which had been the centre of Jewish life in Greece, with the majority of Greece’s 80,00 Jews living there. A report from December 1943 tells its recipients that:
Of the 55,000 Jews formerly living in Salonica, there are now three left. These three have married Orthodox Greeks and embraced that faith.
Of all these Jews, (our) informant (47 members of whose family were deported) knows of only one family that has been heard from. He believes the Germans were attempting a systematic extermination and therefore that some of the stories current about mass killings are undoubtedly true. As reason for believing that extermination was behind the deportation of the Jews from Salonica, he says that among those included were war victims, blind and maimed, some even legless, 150 from the insane asylum, 70 persons over 90, all the orphans and all criminals from the jails.
In all 460 Jews from Verya were deported and one must presume that they were all murdered. Whether or not Kostakidis’s family tried to help them (which would have been incredibly dangerous), stood by and watched or actively collaborated, we can have no idea. Did she ever ask them?
What we do know is that in April 1941 and again in 1943 the British authorities specifically refused to allow Jews from Greece to enter Palestine. What their particular fate eventually was, I don’t know.
Unveiling the memorial in Kostakidis’ birthplace, 2019
In September 2019 the civic authorities and others in Verya held a commemoration for the lost Jews of their town. They made a Thread of Memory – a procession uphill to the town centre, with students holding up placards with the names of the victims. A Greek newspaper reported that the march was “crowded by hundreds of citizens who followed the thread with tears in their eyes”.
In 2021 in Thessaloniki, beside the main railway station, the city unveiled a mural dedicated to the memory of the tens of thousands of Jewish residents who had been deported and murdered. The mural was vandalised by neo-Nazis shortly after it was revealed. But a few weeks ago it was vandalised again. This time it was smeared with paint and the legend “Free Palestine Jews = Nazi” daubed on it. It’s the illustration at the top of the page.
So what else?
None of this tells you what to think about ceasefires, humanitarian pauses, Binyamin Netanyahu, how best to defeat Hamas (the organisation which quite knowingly brought this recent catastrophe about) or how best to alleviate the terrible suffering of the innocents of Gaza. But it does tell you about a toxic mix of ignorance, prejudice and self-righteousness which manifests itself among the educated of the West.
And here I should tell you what happens if you pull on Kostakidis’s thread. In 2013, for example, you can find her writing for the Guardian on the subject of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks Party of Australia and his prison-based bid for a seat in the Australian senate. Welcoming Assange’s intervention Kostakidis wrote that “despite unresolved sexual allegations against him, polling suggests his party has a real chance of winning Senate seats in NSW and Victoria.”
Assange got 1.18% and 0.8% of the vote in those contests. The Wikileaks Party tried to do electoral deals with far right parties, cuddled up to (pre-covid) anti-vax groups and in December 2013 sent a delegation to Syria to meet with the Butcher of Damascus, Bashar-al-Assad. This was shortly after having described claims that Assad had used chemical weapons at Ghota as “unsubstantiated”.
This was a view that a radicalising Kostakidis herself took a step further claiming (alongside people like Peter Hitchens) that there was an attempt to “cover up” an OPCW investigation into chemical weapons in Syria which might absolve Assad. This (in fact non-existent) cover-up, she tweeted, was “used to demonise Assad to justify continued bombing and oil theft”.
Before the pandemic, when China was being accused of a policy of genocide against its Uighur minority (through enforced cultural assimilation and reduced birth strategies) Kostakidis wrote that “the whole Uighur genocide narrative has been a fabrication” and then added the hashtag #CIA.
Four days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022 she was one of the signatories of an open letter demanding that the US “de-escalate” over Ukraine. The letter read that:
For more than a month now we have been subjected to cries of ‘an imminent invasion of …… Ukraine by Russian forces’ by the western press. We have been told that Putin has an invasion plan but no evidence of that has been given. Putin has consistently said that no invasion by Russia is planned or intended.
When the appalling western press was indeed vindicated by the Russian attack an utterly unabashed Kostakidis began retweeting Russian propaganda claims about a “genocide” committed by Ukraine in the Donbas.
You get the picture. I’ve already written here about that strange process of self-radicalisation which has turned previously milquetoast conservatives into frothing Trumpites and Orban lovers. And here is its equivalent on the Left: previously decent liberals who have managed to become excusers of Russian invasions, Chinese persecutions, Syrian poisoners and now of Jew-killers. I despair…
And now I need to wash.