A great interview with Howard Jacobson at Fathom. Yes there’s a video. And a transcript.
An extract:
There was a new way of attacking Jews I hadn’t come across before: inverting the Holocaust and turning the Jews into, if you like, the new Nazis. That’s melodramatic, but it’s what many of the people marching were effectively saying, and what Seven Jewish Children implied: whatever had been done to the Jews, the Jews would now visit on their enemies — who happened, in this instance, to be the Palestinians. That was when I saw that [classic] Holocaust denial, as such, was over. There would still be a few meshuggeners cranks clambering over rooftops with their set squares trying to prove it hadn’t happened, but the smarter operators had found a better way: admit the Holocaust, admit how terrible it was — if anything, make it even worse than it was — because if it was really so terrible, how had the Jews learned nothing from it? How had they simply absorbed that suffering only to visit a ‘holocaust’ of their own on the innocent?
You could see this even in those years, though of course now it’s not even hidden. A friend of mine who has become a well-known anti-Israel intellectual — said to me, once the UN began speculating about ‘genocide’ — note the definite article, ‘the genocide,’ which is doing important work, pushing aside any other genocide you might want to think about — that the genocide charge was the icing on the cake.
This was the one they’d been waiting for. If they could land the charge of genocide on the Jews, they’d got them. It removed the nuisance of the Holocaust — and the Holocaust was a nuisance to people who hate Zionism and Israel, because it went on conferring pity on the Jews, and they resented that pity; they envied it. There was almost a feeling — is it fair to say this? I’ll say it whether it’s fair or not — that ‘the Nakba’ was the Palestinian answer to the Holocaust: Holocaust envy, if you can believe that. How do you get rid of envy? You get something better. And what was better, propaganda-wise, than the Holocaust the Jews suffered? The Holocaust the Jews visited on others.
But it’s a long interview, and you need to see/read it all to get the full flavour.
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