Holodomor → Shoah → Nakba

Among many realities emphasized by Russia's ongoing brutal and bloody Ukraine invasion is the stark difference between how governments and media in Europe and North America react to Europeans defending a country they have called home for centuries versus Palestinians defending the land they have lived on for millennia. In perhaps the ultimate irony, a number of the first videos and photographs shared on social media as examples of Ukrainians heroically standing up to Russians were in fact footage of 12-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi confronting an Israeli soldier during a protest in 2012.

But while Ukrainians are applauded for fighting back against a monstrous oppressor, the "western" world ignores Palestinians, including the elderly and thousands of children, who are murdered, brutally beaten, mutilated, arrested, and imprisoned in retribution anytime one of them attempts to defend their lives, children, or homes.

Palestinians watched stunned (although the deeply racist double-standard was not unexpected) while the same U.S. and European officials who excoriate them for making Molotov cocktails to defend against Israelis attacking their places of worship, destroying their homes, and murdering them, praise as brave defenders Ukrainians blowing up Russian tanks and transports with ... Molotov cocktails.

When Russia occupied and annexed the Crimea in 2014, the United Nations and international community, including the United States, condemned the move as a dangerous violation of international law and imposed sanctions. Even Israel expressed "concern" and hope that "the crisis will be resolved diplomatically." Every headline about Putin's attempt to annex the occupied regions of Ukraine used words such as "illegal" and even Israel stated that it "supports the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, we do not recognize Russia's annexation."

But, Israel's gradual annexation of occupied Palestinian over the past three quarters of a century has resulted in responses that ranged from at best silence or mild rebuke by "western" governments to outright encouragement by the administration of the 45th U.S. president. "Western" media headlines never mention the word "illegal" although occasionally a reference to annexations violating international law may be buried in a story.

"'Hypocrisy' doesn't describe this adequately. The appropriate word is psychosis. They live in a parallel universe where Europeans, who take up arms to defend their lands & families, are called resistance fighters but Palestinians doing the same damn thing are 'terrorists,'" posted Mohammed El-Kurd, Palestine Correspondent for The Nation.

Others are more pragmatic. "We must stop thinking European 'values' are universal. We must learn and understand that they are exclusively European, and for Europeans alone," Hamid Dabashi, author and professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City, wrote in Middle East Eye.

The racism displayed by media reporting on Ukraine has been so blatant that it was collected and vilified across social media. In one of the most egregious examples, Forbes magazine and the New York Times described the assassination of Al Jazeera reporter (may require log in) Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American who was deliberately targeted and shot in the head by Israeli snipers, as "well-known reporter died" and "journalist killed during clashes" (despite video released a week later confirming the scene was calm and quiet moments before she was murdered, contradicting Israeli officials' claims there was fighting in the area).

The publications later deleted their posts, but the headlines were just as heinous. The NYT headline reporting Abu Akleh's murder read "Palestinian Journalist, Dies, Age 51" (she held dual U.S.-Palestinian citizenship) while headlining the death of Brent Renaud with "an American journalist, is killed in Ukraine." The Guardian went so far as to frame Abu Akleh's slaying with the claim that "Al Jazeera accuses Israeli forces of killing journalist in West Bank."

When Israeli soldiers brutally assaulted the Palestinians carrying Abu Akleh's coffin, mainstream "western" media, which usually blasts stories surrounding U.S. journalists' deaths on the front page, ignored the incident, buried the story, or added erroneous claims defending occupation forces. A month after her murder, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken lied to reporters demanding to know why the U.S. was doing nothing about the assassination of U.S. citizens, falsely claiming the facts "have not been established."

In contrast, "western" media reporting on Ukraine's defense against the Russian incursion is colored by people who apparently only read white history and post absurd statements such as:

"I'm racking my brain for a historical parallel to the courage and fighting spirit of the Ukrainians and coming up empty. How many peoples have ever stood their ground against an aggressor like this? It's legendary."

This take was immediately ratioed on Twitter with long lists of examples from Indigenous tribes of the Americas -- including Lakota, Cheyenne, Seminole, Pueblo, Chiricahua, Cherokees, Muscogee, Pequot, Wampanoag -- to Haitians, Algerians, Vietnamese, Ethiopians, and even citizens of other countries in Europe such as Poland, Finland, Hungary, Greece, Ireland, Croatia, Bosnia, etc.

Other reporters, after statements expressing shock over war happening in a "relatively civil" country, were lampooned on television. This did not prevent them from making more cringe proclamations such as "... a vacuum bomb, which to be fair the U.S. has used before in Afghanistan but the idea of it being used in Europe is stomach churning."

Reporters extolled Europeans flocking to the Polish-Ukrainian border to offer fleeing Ukrainians strollers, food, rides, and places to stay as "the best of humanity" while ignoring African nationals prevented from crossing, discrimination against Roma refugees on both sides of the border, and Poland's long-standing refusal to accept Muslim asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East.

Governments and other entities which refused to divest from Israel's NSO Group (a notorious spyware company) and spurned constituent, shareholder, and customer calls for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli apartheid, were quick to call for boycotts, divest funds from any and all Russian investments, and impose sanctions. In December 2021, for one example, John Russell who chairs the Oregon Investment Council overseeing investment and allocation of the state's trust funds, a majority investor in Israel's NSO Group, responded to demands funds be removed from shares of the Israeli-backed company by claiming "that divesting from fossil fuels and other questionable sectors goes beyond the council's mandate and would turn the council into 'an activist body.'"

But at the beginning of March 2022, the same state's Treasurer, Tobias Read, stated, "We support the people of Ukraine. I've asked my team to fully evaluate the portfolio's exposure to investments in Russia and to identify our options as institutional investors." (The State of Oregon invests almost twice as much money just in NSO Group as it does in all Russian-related funds and companies combined.) This incongruous response is typical at the federal, state, and corporate level.

As Russians murdered Ukrainians to annex the eastern oblasts, so have European Jews, including Ukrainian immigrants and their progeny, murdered Palestinians to annex more and more Palestinian land over the past seven plus decades. But, the world that ignores the atrocities committed in Palestine gives full attention to the villainy befalling Ukraine.

As a descendant of European Jews (Ukraine, Russia, and Poland) and grandchild of one who left Palestine before World War II, I have watched in dismay over my lifetime as European colonialists aka Zionists become more and more like their former subjugators. They turned the world's sympathy for Holocaust victims and survivors into contempt indistinguishable from that reserved for the Nazis who murdered millions of us as exemplified by:

• the shifting Overton window on Israel and Palestine,
• a groundswell of support for Palestinian victims of Israeli apartheid, and
• a 213-page Human Rights Watch report, detailing Israeli apartheid and persecution, released in April 2021 (to predictable rants about anti-Semitism).

Using organizations based in the U.S. as well as Israel, vocal Zionists fight this contempt by ignoring the harsh reality of the Israeli occupation and the brutal treatment of those it tyrannizes while furthering the false narrative that anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism. They brush aside millions of Palestinian victims over decades to point the world's attention to thousands of Ukrainians killed and displaced in a few months.

My perspective is two generations distant. Around the time the Soviet Union subsumed Ukraine in the 1930s, my mother's grandparents and their children immigrated to the U.S., escaping both the Soviet-imposed Holodomor ("extermination from hunger" in Ukrainian, which the Russians now seem determined to repeat) and the Holocaust, also known as the Shoah ("catastrophe" in Hebrew). When the Nakba ("catastrophe" in Arabic) that allowed creation of the Jewish-majority state of Israel began, my Palestinian-born paternal grandfather already lived in the U.S. where he had married and raised a family (although he later returned to finish his life in Israel).

None of the relations I know about were among the mostly European Jews who -- with help from the U.S. and the U.K. -- slaughtered 13,000 Arabs, destroyed 530 villages, and forced almost a million native Palestinians to leave their homes.

However, many of my grandfather's children and grandchildren have "returned" to Israel and embraced rabid Zionism (a movement founded by non-natives, including many leaders born in Ukraine, to colonize Palestinian land and create the Jewish state of Israel). They frequently detail the "horrors" they "endure" at the hands of Hamas and other "terrorists". Their mostly embellished (at best) or entirely fictional (at worst) accounts give me great empathy for friends whose relatives turned to the dark MAGA/Q side.

Because, in reality, since 1950 Israel has:

• killed tens of thousands of Palestinians,
• pushed more and more Palestinians out of their homes,
• created an open-air prison in Gaza,
• continuously built settlements in the West Bank that are flagrant violations of international law, and
• with the help of the previous U.S. administration, stolen Jerusalem (designated an "international city" by U.N. resolution) for its capitol.

The United States not only ignores these atrocities, it enables them. In May of 2021, after essentially receiving permission from the U.S. in the form of the April 22 Deutch-McCaul letter (signed by more than 300 member of Congress), Israel bombed, fired rockets at, and shot Palestinians for eleven days.

Unlike in Ukraine, "western" media portrayed Palestinians not as victims or defenders but as instigators. During just those attacks, Israel killed 256 Palestinians, including 66 children and 40 women; wounded 2,000 others, including 600 children and 400 women; and destroyed 1,148 buildings, partially damaging 15,000 others, displacing more than 100,000 civilians.

Although Israeli land theft, destruction, slaughter , abuse, and murder of Palestinian woman (may require log in) and children continued more than a year later, as soon as a "cease fire" was signed, Israeli, U.S., and Non-Government Organization (NGO) public relations machines jumped into action. The ongoing apartheid disappeared from mainstream headlines and "western"-focused social media.

After slaughtering hundreds of Palestinians, Israel used the excuse of twelve dead Israeli Jews to convince the U.S. Congress to hand over $1 billion in additional funding for Israel "defense" even as the threat of another U.S. government shutdown for "lack of funding" loomed. While U.S. children starved and more than a million adults died in the U.S. from a global pandemic and inadequate access to health care, its Congress handed the apartheid (may require log in) state enough money to feed every child living in poverty in the U.S. (This was in addition to the approximately $4 billion the U.S. commits to Israeli "security" every year.)

However, when Ukraine tried in 2021 to purchase an Iron Dome to defend itself against the very real threat of a Russian invasion, Israel rejected the sale, not wanting to harm its relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Israel also refused to sign the U.S.-backed United Nations Security resolution condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, attempting to take a "moderate" tone on the "Russian-Ukrainian crisis". These actions came despite Ukraine's Jewish president, its Zionist history, and tens of thousands of Jews still living there (the fourth largest Jewish community in Europe) now vulnerable to Russia's notorious pogroms.

On March 2, 2022 Israel did vote in favor of the U.N. Assembly demanding that Russia stop the war in Ukraine. But, nine days later on March 11 Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who refuses to even discuss a Palestinian state or equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to accept Russian conditions and surrender. Israel also is sheltering Russian oligarchs fleeing there to escape sanctions and "blocked Ukraine from purchasing Pegasus [NSO Group's software which the Israeli government uses to spy on Palestinians], not wanting to alienate Russia."

In mid March 2022, while the world watched Russia invading Ukraine, the U.S. Congress passed the "Israel Relations Normalization Act" (which Palestinians and their supporters refer to as the Normalizing Israeli Ethnic Cleansing Act), after burying it within H.R.2471 -- the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022. The bill supports expanding and strengthening the Abraham Accords, a failed policy of the previous administration devised by the president's Zionist son-in-law "to coerce Palestinians to give up their political rights in exchange" for economic inducements. It "incentivizes neighboring nations to isolate the Palestinian people and ignore Israel's apartheid rule," according to Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO).

In the House, 332 of 435 members, including 55 of 94 members of the House Progressive Caucus, co-sponsored the bill and in the Senate the corresponding bill, S.1061, had 72 (of 100) co-sponsors. Some of the co-sponsors include members of Congress, such as Democratic Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois (recipient of more than $1 million in pro-Israel contributions) and Ron Wyden of Oregon (recipient of more than $1.2 million in pro-Israel contributions), who have been around long enough to have voted for -- and to override President Ronald Reagan's veto of -- the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 which imposed sanctions against South Africa.

In Europe, the "Normalization Act" would be the equivalent of urging Germany, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, etc. to join Russia and Belarus in isolating Ukrainians -- ignoring Russian occupation, destruction of cities, and murders of civilians -- coercing Ukrainians to give up their political rights in exchange for "economic inducements" while relocating a few hundred thousand of them who are not ethnic Russian speakers to facilitate the destruction of Ukrainian culture and decrease the percentage of Ukrainians in Ukraine.

It is of significant note that whether or not a member of Congress signed the Deutch-McCaul letter and/or co-sponsored the "Israel Relations Normalization Act" could be predicted not by their religious affiliation, the color of their skin, the party they belong to, when they were elected, or the state they allegedly represent, but by how much money they have accepted from Israeli lobbyists.

Even members of the House Progressive Caucus accept Israeli blood money. Only 15 of the progressive House members signed a May 31, 2022 letter asking Secretary of State Blinken to stop the Israeli government's expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in Masafer Yatta. But those signatories included Henry C. "Hank" Johnson, Jr ($110,750) and Mark Takano ($65,380) who signed the Deutch-McCaul letter and Mark DeSaulnier ($17,650) one of H.R.2748's co-sponsors. Of the 15, only Bush and Ilhan Omar have never accepted contributions from Israeli lobbyists. The others have received amounts ranging from Ayanna Pressley's $5 to Marie Newman's $127,063.

The United States does not stand alone in its hypocrisy of encouraging Ukraine's defense while supporting Israeli apartheid. Although in Canada Justin Trudeau's government presents itself as evenhanded in its dealings with Israelis and Palestinians, Ottawa pursues policies that enable Israeli expansionism. Canada usually joins the minority, along with the United States, voting against United Nations General Assembly resolutions that criticize Israeli abuse of and apartheid against Palestinians while both countries voted to condemn Russia.

Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, Greece, Cyprus, and Poland spoke in Israel's favor in May 2021 when the European Union called for an Israel-Hamas ceasefire and an increase in Palestinian aid. All those countries, except pro-Russia and pro-Nazi Hungary, have thrown their support behind Ukraine.

Part of this is a result of Israel's constant work to increase the number of governments subscribing to the lies it tells about Palestinians. In October 2021, for one example, Israel designated six prominent, highly-respected, Palestinian human rights groups as terrorist organizations. The documents secretly distributed "supporting" this claim, in an attempt to persuade European governments to cease funding the NGOs, contain no concrete evidence substantiating any of the allegations.

Because of these efforts, too many people accept spurious Israeli claims of Palestinian threats. Too many people, especially in the U.S., are unaware of (or applaud) the ongoing apartheid, genocide, and mass murder committed by survivors (and their descendants) of apartheid, genocide, and mass murder and supported financially by survivors (and their descendants) of apartheid, genocide, and mass murder living in the U.S. Too many believe the non-stop (and false) propaganda that anti-Zionists must be anti-Semitic by default. Too many of those who defend anti-Zionism or support BDS (including Omar) against Israel get trolled online, doxxed, fired, and harassed. (BDS against Russia, of course, is perfectly acceptable.)

The many, many nationalist, authoritarian, brutal examples of Israeli attempts to exterminate an entire people are why pro-Israel Zionism forces me ask whether Jews (including my own relatives) deserve a "homeland." At the very least, the atrocities prompt the question of whether Zionists' real rage about the Holocaust is that they were not the ones openly committing apartheid, genocide, and mass murder.

For that matter, although Hitler's minions slaughtered sixteen to seventeen million children and adults, Zionists tend to only remember, name, and memorialize the five to six million of those who were Jews. They often ignore the eleven million others including more than a quarter million people with disabilities and thousands of homosexuals (both among the very first victims), as many as a million and a half Romani, possibly five thousand Jehovah's Witnesses and two hundred thousand Freemasons, and eight to nine million non-Jewish Soviet civilians and prisoners of war, as well as Poles, Serbs, Slovenes, and Spanish Republicans (all in addition to war casualties). Some Zionists even lobbied against the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum recognizing LGBTQ and Roma victims of the Holocaust.

For all those unaware (as opposed to the willfully ignorant) I offer evidence below -- collected by a non-practicing, cultural Jew who has personally experienced a lifetime of anti-Semitism in the U.S. -- of how pro-Israel Zionists attack Palestinians every day in myriad ways ranging from brutal and racist humiliation to horrific assault and murder including:

Content warning, many of the links below go to photos and videos of victims of horrific Israeli attacks.

• Israel soldiers brutally attacking the Abu Akleh funeral, while busloads of Jewish settlers took over a building in Hebron and bragged about it (may require log in);
• Israel continuing to murder anyone who dares document their atrocities, including Mohammad Sabaaneh shot September 6, 2022 while 15,000 people watched his video;
• Israeli courts ignoring proof of innocence and lack of evidence supporting false charges used to imprison humanitarian aid workers;
• Half a dozen young men wearing yarmulkes, faces twisted in derisive disparagement, attacking a solitary female Arab-Israeli citizen, screaming profanities with expressions mirroring the hatred of American racists and Nazi Brown Shirts;
• Zionist settlers breaking windows, cheering destruction of Palestinian businesses, and brutally beating shop owners during Kristallnacht 2.0;
• Israeli bulldozers threatening to demolish the beautiful stone buildings of Lifta, listed by the World Monuments Fund as endangered heritage, in yet another of myriad attempts to erase all traces of Palestinian identity and history;
• Israel forcing Palestinians to destroy their own homes, by threatening them with outrageous demolition fees, to build a religious theme park expanding the tactic of declaring land under Palestinian homes archaeological sites, condemning and expelling the residents to create artificial archaeology parks;
• Bulldozers razing tens of thousands of homes under the pretext that they were built without necessary permits which Israel refuses to issue;
• Zionist settlements violating International law created with the assistance, approval, and funding of a government that ignores settlers murdering Palestinians to steal their land and homes;
• Israeli doubling the number of settlers in the occupied Golan Heights while the U.S. pretends Israel has sovereignty over the territory despite the vast majority of the international community's belief that Israel's occupation is illegal under international law;
• Media and politicians cooperating with U.S. and Israeli governments by broadcasting "both sides" fallacies to silence Palestinian voices;
• Israeli forces raiding one of the holiest sites in Islam during Ramadan, destroying windows of the centuries-old Al-Aqsa Mosque to attack thousands of worshippers with rubber bullets, tear gas, and sound grenades, injuring 50-150 Palestinians including a journalist brutally beaten by Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) and a young man shot in the head with a rubber bullet who slipped into a coma;
• Israeli military and civilians throwing grenades into crowded market places, firing tear gas (may require log in) and stun grenades at Muslims while they pray, and spraying a chemical weapon, the putrid stench of which can last for days as well as cause nausea and vomiting, onto and through the Damascus Gate, the entrance used by Palestinians to enter the Old City and worship at al-Aqsa;
• Israeli special forces protecting hundreds of Zionist extremist settlers repeatedly invading the Haram al-Sharif compound in occupied East Jerusalem, assaulting Palestinian worshippers performing dawn prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque;
• The world ignoring massive evidence of Israeli war crimes, funded with billions of U.S. tax dollars, while Palestinians endure incessant Israeli state violence;
• Israeli troops and squatters interrogating, arresting, jailing, assaulting, maiming, and murdering hundreds of children;
• Children weeping over their parents' bodies among the ruins of their homes and growing up without arms and legs, forever maimed by Israeli bombs and bullets;
• Wailing parents holding (may require log in) dead babies in their arms;
• The overwhelming collective bloodlust of Israeli Zionists justifying and perpetuating the colonialist myth of "we conquered these places rightfully" (may require log in) while advocating the murder of all Arabs, including women and children, as "divine justice";
• Zionist members of the Knesset chanting "Death to Arabs" at a nationalist march;
• Israel disenfranchising Arab Israeli citizens;
• A crowd of Jewish Israelis engaging in civil disobedience and protesting in front of Israel's internal security services headquarters next to Tel Aviv University without arrest while a dozen police officers chased and violently arrested a Palestinian student who only stood briefly with the protestors and did not participate in the civil disobedience;
• Israel denying Palestinians access to medical care including vaccinations against a global pandemic and lifesaving emergency care (may require log in);
• Israel depriving Palestinians of clean drinking water, allowing partially treated wastewater to discharge into the Mediterranean, and causing flooding in residential neighborhoods by deliberately delaying permits for hundreds of necessary valves, filters, pumps, pipes, electro-mechanical equipment, electric cables, and other vital replacement parts for Gaza's water and sewage systems;
• The Israeli Navy, in violation of the 1993 Oslo accords, attacking Palestinian fishing boats off the coast of occupied Gaza hundreds of times each year, confiscating, vandalizing, and destroying vessels, and preventing thousands of people who make their living fishing from supporting their 50,000 dependents;
• Israel violating ceasefires by provoking acts it exploits to justify atrocities including firing grenades and tear gas at Palestinian protesters and repeatedly bombing Gaza;
• Israel's massive public relations team, which seems to have studied under Joseph Goebbels, twisting facts and historical evidence to justify apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing;
• The Israel Defense/Occupation Force, equating small home-made rockets, which have been compared to fireworks and do minimal damage, to U.S.-manufactured bombs dropped from jet planes which kill thousands and destroy homes, sanitation facilities, schools, and hospitals;
• Zionists suppressing free speech around the world, harassing and silencing anyone (including me as versions of this piece were rejected more than 65 times, including by publications that routinely published anything I submitted to them) who stands up for Palestinians, accusing them of anti-Semitism and terrorism;
• Israeli military executing Palestinians, including teenagers and "freed" political prisoner, accused of injuring Israeli citizens -- no arrest, no trial, no appropriate punishment -- while Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, and other officials praise extrajudicial executions, saying the officers' action was "quick and decisive";
• Israeli Occupation Forces interrogating family members of one man they murdered, taking his brother into custody, and attacking and injuring an additional 40 Palestinians in the area where they shot the teenager to death;
• Two adult Israeli soldiers in full combat gear dragging a Palestinian child (may require log in) out of his home, covering his mouth so he can't scream for help;
• Israel failing to investigate state-sanctioned shootings that killed more than 200 Palestinians and wounded thousands at weekly protests aimed at highlighting the plight of Palestinian refugees, because the military erroneously claimed the protests were providing cover for cross-border attacks;
• Israeli occupation authorities forcing Palestinian families living in the occupied West Bank village of Ibzeq to evacuate their houses in December with temperatures as low as 9°C/48°F to accommodate Israeli military training exercises;
• Israeli soldiers arresting citizens for speaking out against the occupation on Facebook or granting interviews to such radical outlets as CNN and MSNBC.

"Israel's ruthless, systemic persecution of Palestinians is not to keep Israelis safe. Rather, Israel's sinister aim is to impose ethnic supremacy in occupied Palestine and to crush Palestinians into ghettos with grinding, inhuman efficiency," Andrew Mitrovica wrote in Al Jazeera.

"With more than 300 Palestinians killed by the IOF this year alone, and with thousands still facing violent dispossession," Mohammed El-Kurd posted, "it's clear that the outcry is never about violence itself. It is about maintaining control over who has the authority to commit violence & against whom."

I have to agree with them both, because the only difference between the Nakba, the Holodomor, and the Shoah is that the latter two each lasted for less than a decade and the former is ongoing three quarters of a century later. And, while I do not condone Russia's invasion of Ukraine or Putin's attempt to reenact the Holodomor, I believe the immediate willingness of media, corporations, and governments to champion Ukrainians for the same actions they condemn Palestinians is racist, colonialist, and exceedingly problematic.