We started our morning by visiting Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial and museum of the Holocaust. It is architecturally interesting and probably the best laid-out museum I’ve visited, with an easy flow from one area to the next, where guests explore–in order–the events leading up to and during the Holocaust. Photos aren’t allowed in the main area of the memorial, but the exhibits utilize photography, found items, and other details to immerse visitors in a time, place, or specific family’s experience to great effect.
When I left the main exhibits to wait for the others at the scenic overlook that caps the museum’s tour, I noticed the difference between my response at 23 at this Holocaust memorial and my response at 14 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The first time I was immersed in the history of these horrific acts in Washington, I was obviously emotional and overwhelmed as well, but it didn’t quite seem real or relatable to me. I remember being most affected by the deep chasm filled with shoes in D.C., something tangible to represent the real people who were murdered. This time, it wasn’t the stories of the victims, or the resisters, or the perpetrators that affected me; it was the sheer horror of the dark side of a mechanized world. While millions have perhaps been slaughtered ‘by hand’ during epic battles of history, the Holocaust provides an extreme example of how abstraction and mechanization enable evil to thrive in humans.
Humans wanted to become ‘civilized’, meaning at least partially ‘unlike other animals’ and we succeeded. No other animal plans out and builds infrastructure for mass murder of its own kind. That’s the core of what I was processing immediately after touring Yad Vashem. A slow process took us from a more animalistic lifestyle to where we are today with benefits (I couldn’t communicate with all of you at once from around the world without it) and devastating drawbacks and within it developed changing methods of punishment and tools for killing. A fellow delegate pointed out the day before our visit that he was struck by the societal shift “from the efficiency of the guillotine to the slow degradation of the soul through everyday violence”. This is a pattern playing out through history and today in the U.S., the West Bank, and all over.
If the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is at least partially a “bureaucratic occupation” with contradictory, confusing paperwork and arbitrary rules and regulations, can the Holocaust be considered the first largely “bureaucratic genocide”? Yad Vashem and other exhibits highlight this aspect of the Holocaust and the insidious way that something as simple as minorities in society filling out special paperwork, or being discriminated against in seemingly small ways can quickly spiral out of control in a haze of propaganda, fear, and industrialized violence. While I want to avoid drawing direct and specific parallels between the suffering of Jews and other marginalized groups during the Holocaust and the suffering of Palestinians (and others around the world) under military occupation today, it strikes me as bizarre that a nation like Israel, so inculcated with the remembrance of the dark past, could knowingly carry out its own policies which so foreshadow further state repression and racially-charged violence.
Unfortunately, the message of Holocaust remembrance the State of Israel chooses to promote is one of fear, fear of the repression of the past used to justify repression of others in the present, destabilizing a region on a racist platform to ensure security. I was thankful to meet many Israelis who reject the extremist, Zionist narrative of an exclusive Jewish state and glad to hear many Americans and people everywhere who agree with me that more separation and fear are no way to peace, anywhere.
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