Postponed by one day (Saturday 16th instead of Friday 15th) and in a very reduced form. Thus ended the presentation of the Hannah Arebdt prize to Masha Gessen – Jewish writer and intellectual, currently the clearest anti-Putinian voice in the world – after the controversy linked to an article of hers which appeared in the New Yorker in which she compares Gaza to the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. Gessen spoke about the story for the first time during an interview with Democracy Now with these words: «The comparison I make between Gaza and a Jewish ghetto is intentional, it is not provocation. This is precisely the point: the way memory politics works today in Europe and in the United States and in particular in Germany is that you cannot compare the Holocaust to anything. It is a singular event that stands outside of history. My thesis is that to learn from history we must make comparisons. It must be a constant exercise. We are not better people, nor smarter, nor more educated than those who lived 90 years ago. The only thing that makes us different is that in their imagination the Holocaust did not yet exist. In ours yes. We know it’s possible. The way to prevent it is to be vigilant as Hannah Arendt was and as other Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust were. There was a conversation, especially in the first two decades after World War II, that was really about how to recognize the signs of slipping into darkness. Our international humanitarian law is essentially based on the Holocaust, as is the concept of genocide. And I argue that this framework is based on the assumption that we always look at war, at conflict, at violence through the prism of the Holocaust. The question must always be asked whether crimes against humanity are recurring. Israel has conducted an incredibly successful campaign not only by placing the Holocaust outside of history, but also by isolating itself from the lens of international humanitarian law, in part by weaponizing the politics of memory and the politics of the Holocaust. I think the only way to try to ensure that the Holocaust never happens again is to know that it is possible, to continue to know that it can arise from what Arendt calls superficiality and which she reports in “The Banality of Evil”. For this book she was ostracized both by the Israeli political mainstream and by much of the North American Jewish political mainstream. It was interpreted as a trivialization of the Holocaust, but what you are saying is that the most horrible things of which humanity has proven capable can arise from something that seems like nothing, from the inability to see the fate of the other. I interpret this as a call to doubt the kind of overwhelming consensus that certainly seems to support the Israeli assault on Gaza in Israel and the North American Jewish community. Because this is how we stumble in our darkest moments.”
What Gessen was keen to underline is that his comparison between Gaza and a ghetto was intended to highlight the way in which, both now in Gaza and in the Second World War, extermination is accepted to the point of being dismissed.