LISTENING TO this interview, Gaza And Israel Evokes Holocaust Film 'The Zone Of Interest' - Israeli Journalist Gideon Levy, I couldn't help but remembering this:
Campo dei Fiori
By Czeslaw Milosz
In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.
On this same square
they burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again,
baskets of olives and lemons
again on the vendors' shoulders.
I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.
At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in midair.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died.
But that day I thought only
of the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.
Already they were back at their wine
or peddled their white starfish,
baskets of olives and lemons
they had shouldered to the fair,
and he already distanced
as if centuries had passed
while they paused just a moment
for his flying in the fire.
Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
our tongue becomes for them
the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed,
on a new Campo dei Fiori
rage will kindle at a poet's word.
Warsaw, 1943
The recently constructed and enforced POV is expressed during the interview by Gideon Levy, that it's forbidden to make comparisons to the Holocaust even when the parallels are unavoidable. I'll forego going into details that I think that was constructed so as to allow the Israeli government to commit genocide without that embarrassing comparison to be made. But I think even if that's not the motive, it's an enormous mistake because to do that is to demote genocides as to never be as "significant" as that one genocide. That is to invite others to not care as much about the Holocaust because it is inevitable that those under active genocide are going to care about that more than something that happened in the ever more faintly noticed past. Why shouldn't those of African heritage care as much about the genocide of the middle-passage and slavery, why shouldn't Native Americans care about the genocide that is ongoing against them as it has been for centuries? Hitler and the Nazis, going back to the proto-Nazi Haeckel took encouragement from the genocide and land theft against the Native Americans just as Charles Darwin presented the genocides and land theft under the British Empire as salubrious for the human species.
To elevate one such genocide over the others is an invitation to other People to not consider the Holocaust as significant. The best way to honor those who were murdered is to take all genocides, ESPECIALLY THOSE HAPPENING DURING OUR LIFETIMES, as being exactly as significant. To not do that is to give tacit approval to other genocides, if at least in part.
In fact, the interview, itself, in which that prohibition was invoked is proof that it is impossible to ignore the parallels.
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