Mick Hartley

Susie Linfield wrote about The return of the progressive atrocity last November, in response to the left's embrace of Hamas after the Oct 7th pogrom, which she characterised as "a kind of moral rot". She's now interviewed by Robert Boyers in Salgamundi, again on the left's persistent determination to misread the situation in Gaza. On the grotesque attempts, for instance, to compare Israel to Nazis, and Gaza to the Warsaw ghetto:

Do I really have to delineate the differences between the Warsaw, Lodz, and other ghettos under Nazis supervision and the situation in Gaza before the war? Good lord. Well, for a start: Jews—who, of course, had never attacked Germany, Poland, or any other country—were herded into those Eastern European ghettos to be beaten, starved, tortured, terrorized, and murdered in large numbers in preparation for the remnants being deported to the death camps. Gaza is a mini-state run by Hamas, a well-armed, well-financed terror group that has built an enormous underground city for the express, and only, purpose of storing enormous quantities of military equipment with which to attack Israel. Before this war, the streets of Gaza were patrolled by Hamas, not Israel. Gazans are the recipients of massive amounts in international aid—and Hamas receives enormous sums from Qatar and Iran. So far as I know, no one was aiding the Jews in the ghettos. Gazan women have traditionally had a relatively high fertility rate. None of this sounds too much like Jewish life under the Nazis. Most of all: The Nazis aimed to kill every Jew in the world. That has nothing to do with the Zionist project, even in its most brutal and reactionary iterations.   

Should I go on?…

Gaza, even before the war, was a very bad place. And more important: It was a politically hopeless place. That is what is so devastating, and so dangerous. But it has attained an almost mythological status in much of the world’s imagination—the ninth circle of hell, so to speak. It was not “like a Jewish ghetto” in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, as Gessen charges, and it was not a “concentration camp,” as some have even more egregiously charged. In a recent report in the New Yorker, David Remnick quotes Mustafa Barghouti, a West Bank politician, castigating the destruction that Israel is causing to Gaza’s “cities, mosques and universities, schools and courts and hospitals.” Does this sound like the Warsaw Ghetto, or Treblinka? Far from being completely isolated from the world, Gazans have an entire United Nations agency, consisting of 13,000 workers for a population of two million, devoted to their health and education—which Syrian, and South Sudanese, and Rohingyan, and millions of other refugees definitely do not. Numerous humanitarian organizations worked there. It had apartment buildings, restaurants, shops, pharmacies. The charge of “liquidation” is also hyperbole. Palestinian casualties in the current war are staggeringly high. But there will eventually be a ceasefire, and Gaza will still be one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Virtually all the Jews in the Nazi ghettos were murdered; that’s liquidation. I feel angry, and somehow degraded, at having to address these specious, grotesque comparisons. Again: The Israelis aren’t Nazis, and the Hamas aren’t Nazis. There’s a kind of repetition compulsion at work here. Can we please put the Nazi metaphors to rest?

Worth reading in full.