I’m sorry, but the Holocaust does not belong in the same sentence or paragraph or library as the Nakba. This isn’t meant as a criticism of this person, who seems entirely well meaning. It’s about the implicit comparison, which is common among Palestinians and western liberals. The Holocaust’s death toll was 6,000,000, the Nakba’s somewhere between 9,000 and 13,000. The importance of the Nakba wasn’t mass death but mass displacement. Here’s the thing: Understood that way, the Jews suffered half a dozen major nakbas in the 20th century, alongside waves of mass murder that reached into six figures (for example, in the Russian civil war) and then ultimately the Holocaust. Most Israeli Jews are descendants of such displacements and survivors of those great campaigns of mass murder. Maybe the reason this difference isn’t obvious to some diaspora Jewish discourse (I have books on my shelf that talk about Nakba and Holocaust in the same breath) is that most western Jewish communities are the products of a Nakba-style mass flight from Eastern Europe in 1881-1921. They then largely sat out the twentieth century’s great evils from their perch in the West, saved by Anglophone liberalism from wars and killings and Holocaust. Maybe it makes a kind of intuitive sense to these Jews to think of Jewish history in terms comparable to Nakba, and not the unimaginably larger tragedy that produced the other half of the Jewish world. We need to learn about the Nakba, we need to understand our neighbors, we need to respect their history and identity. But we also need to acknowledge that the Jews were emphatically and brutally told to “get over” their own many nakbas. Iraq and Poland and Yemen and Lithuania and Hungary and Algeria do not pretend that there’s any chance in hell that the Jews will ever be allowed to contemplate mass return to their lost homes and decimated ancient communities. And the world agrees with them. People who compare displacement to Holocaust mean well. Most of them are not trying to diminish the Holocaust but only to reach across today’s divides. I get that. It’s still historically unjustifiable and in my view morally wrong. https://bird.makeup/@queenmab87/1830739047267897832
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