The Memorial is the Message

A slick, high-priced television production. Speeches from top officials. A live audience of thousands. A unified show of collective sorrow and military resolve. That is how the Israeli government hoped to mark the passing of one year since Hamas’s surprise and bloody attacks last 7 October.

That is from “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war,” an October 5 Guardian essay by Naomi Klein, “professor of climate justice at the University of British Columbia.” As the professor explains:

It’s a simple fable of good and evil, in which Israel is unblemished in its innocence, deserving unquestioning support, while its enemies are all monsters, deserving of violence unbounded by laws or borders, whether in Gaza, Jenin, Beirut, Damascus or Tehran. It’s a story in which Israel’s very identity as a nation is forever fused with the terror it suffered on 7 October, an event that, in Netanyahu’s telling, will be seamlessly merged both with the Nazi Holocaust and a battle for the soul of western civilization.

The particular stories that Israel tells about Jewish victimhood providing the rationale and cover story for the shattering violence and colonial land annexation now on such stark display. And nothing makes these connections clearer than the ways that Israel chooses to tell the story of its own people’s trauma on 7 October – an event that has been memorialized continuously since nearly the moment that it occurred.

I am speaking, of course, about the persistent and repeated comparison between 7 October and the Nazi Holocaust. In an inversion of actual power relationships, this analogy casts stateless Palestinians – living under prolonged Israeli siege, illegal occupation and apartheid as the Nazis, and casts Israel – with one of the most powerful armies in the world, backed by the United States hyperpower, and a clear policy of expanding its land mass and erasing Palestinian presence in a baldly colonial manner – as their helpless victims.

Meanwhile, in the streets of Gaza and Beirut, crowds continue to gather in ululation to honor their dead, knowing that not even their funerals are safe from the next wave of Israel’s carnage.

And so on, for more than 6,000 words. For the climate-justice professor, the problem is not the incineration of infants, the murder and torture of innocents, and Islamic terrorists displaying corpses while chanting “Allahu Akbar.” With 10/7, as the late Canadian Marshall McLuhan might say, the memorial is the message. In Annie Hall, Woody Allen had McLuhan shut up a Columbia U windbag droning on about Fellini and such. Klein could stand a similar intervention from Canadians with experience fighting Nazis.

Those include the 3rd Infantry Division that landed on Juno Beach on D-Day, taking control of the area from Nazi forces. The First Special Service Force (FSSF), a unit of Canadians and Americans, scaled Monte la Difensa and swept Nazi forces from the heights. Consider also my uncle Jim’s unit, Canada’s Eighth Reconnaissance.

On April 12, 1945, troops from that regiment liberated the Westerbork transit camp in Holland, from which the Nazis shipped 97,776 Jews to extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen. In April of 1945, 876 Jews remained in Westerbork and they were glad to see the Canadians. A memorial remains on the site, with railroad tracks bent upward signifying “never again.” That’s what Israel is on about with the memorials of 10/7, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

The WWII vets, familiar with the Nazis’ Einsatzgruppen, would understand the parallel. Their term for those who refused to oppose the Nazi menace, though fully able to do so, was “Zombie.” If anybody applied that to climate-justice professor Naomi Klein it would be hard to blame them.