How the Gazan differs from the Jew in the Nazi camps, or the sameness of Hitler and Netanyahu

After the ceasefire in Gaza, the genocidal, barbaric Israeli attacks did not stop, but it is as though both the attention paid to Gaza and the aid have largely stopped. Yet attention to Gaza is an attention that will revive those who pay it, rather than the valiant people of Gaza who put their lives and property on the line there.

At the panel in Bingöl, we especially emphasized that Gaza is not a story of helplessness, wretchedness, or drama, but a story of resistance, revolt, and a new hope for all humanity. This is not something said for the sake of saying. The people of Gaza did not set out on this path hoping for help from anyone. They entered a path of freedom, devoting themselves not to anyone or for anyone, but only to God and for God. Martyrdom was included in this path, and so was what they endure today, and because of what they endure they have so far shown not the slightest hesitation or regret, nor taken a step back.

From their point of view, the helplessness, the indifference, even the betrayals of the world and of Muslims were included in this path. The sacrifice they have put forth on this path lights a ray of hope for those suffering under the brigand order that dominates the whole world. It shows that man does not have to bow down, calling lowly creatures gods, in this world. It shows another possibility in a place where servitude to fellow creatures is a normal that people have grown used to.

Israel, which today is trying to make the Palestinian people live the same, even worse, than what their fathers and grandfathers suffered in the Nazi camps, has come to resemble its former enemy enough. But it has not been able, and is not able, to make the Palestinians, on whom it inflicts the same cruelty today, resemble itself. The difference between them is exactly the difference between Moses and Pharaoh. The difference between Abraham and Nimrod. The difference between Isaac in the Jewish narrative and Isaac or Ishmael in the Qur'anic account.

The Jew exalted in the Holocaust, subjected in the Nazi camps, is a wretch, a wronged one, a victim, a bare life, a homo sacer. There is nothing in him but his wrongedness, his victimhood, and the cry of "help" he will address to humanity. And if he escapes from there, there is nothing in him that he promises for humanity but rancor, grudge, rage, and revenge.

Indeed, after escaping from there, he set out on the path of taking revenge not only on those who did those cruelties to him but on all of humanity. At first he worked out a rule of virtue, with the slogan "never again," closing the way to all possibilities of genocide. But in time even that rule was turned into a racket of exploitation serving only Jews, indeed only the state of Israel. Over his own sufferings he declared himself a creditor to the whole world. He interpreted the whole discourse of human rights, the international legal order, the economic order, in such a way as to turn them into compensation for his own sufferings. He even took the sufferings of genocide into his own monopoly. He successfully instilled the impression that no one else's sufferings are of any account.

He suspended even the ten commandments that his God gave him, for non-Jews: he killed, he lied, he spread prostitution, adultery, and pornography, he stole, he exploited humanity to the marrow with the system of usury, he ignored all the rights of his neighbor, he raped. For all of this he had one excuse: the victimhood of the Holocaust. Such endless rage and revenge from a victimhood: that is Israel. Israel is the machine of slaughter that the wretched, victimized, helpless, desperate Jew of the Nazi camps promised and gave birth to for humanity.

The Gazans, however, although the sufferings they endure today are plain to see, never resemble their enemies, who have resembled the Nazis all too much. They do not display helplessness before the Israeli terror machine, they are not pure wronged ones and victims, they do not give up, they do not play dead before the genocide machine, they do not bend like the image of the Muselmann of the Nazi camps. As is known, Muselmann is the name given by the other victims of the camp to those people in the Nazi camps who had reached precisely this point of exhaustion, hit bottom, and whose bodies displayed a hunched curve. Yet they were not Muslims. In those camps, even in that condition, they continued to run the demeaning orientalist image about Muslims.

On October 7, the Gazan emerged as a subject who, as if on behalf of all humanity, objected and resisted against a power that had vowed to take revenge for the Holocaust on the whole world, a power that had become the Nazi of its time. Today the people of Gaza suffer great pains not only from Israel and its patron the USA, but also from the regimes that watch what they do with boundless silence, indeed at times inwardly take pleasure in it. But despite this, the Gazan is not in an approach that turns the sufferings he has lived into a justification for revenge. This is a very great, very vital difference. Exactly as we said, it is like the difference between Pharaoh and Moses, Abraham and Nimrod.

The Gazans today, in standing against this cruelty, do not demand a debt from the whole world. They are waging the struggle for their own freedom. Even if they are behind prison walls, even if they are put in chains, they declare that as long as they lean on God, only on God, they are free and will not be servants to servants (Akhi anta hurr...). They do not dramatize their own sufferings and, with a literature of helplessness, make people pity them and from this issue people a bill, a revenge account. On the contrary, with their stance they expose that all people have become captives and servants in the hands of this brigand order, and they show all people that the way of liberation from this captivity, of shedding servitude to fellow creatures, is possible. They do not ask for a favor, a kindness; they offer to give a kindness, and with their stance they promise it.

To pay attention to Gaza is to respond to this offer; it makes hopes for liberation from captivity grow green, and revives the human being.