For someone in my line of work, among the most disturbing things in these disturbing times is how often, when I try to speak about the Holocaust and genocide, I'm met with one response, especially from the young. That response is, "well, but what about the Israeli genocide?" By "Israeli genocide" is meant the "genocide" that Israel is supposed to be perpetrating on the Palestinians. By "what about" is meant something along the lines of "the Jews are no better than Nazis and the world should treat them like Nazis".
Trying to explain why this accusation is grotesque and disgusting makes one feel like Sisyphus – you can get the rock so far up the hill but it always seems to roll back down again. The reason why it does lies at the heart of the matter: people won't accept the truth about Israel because it rubs the wrong way against deeply ingrained fantasies concerning Jews, which are the fruit of millennia. Jews are evil, Jews murdered Christ, Jews steal children and stage human sacrifices, Jews are in league with Satan, Jews wield immense power in secret and run the world.
The existence and longevity of these extraordinary accusations - coupled with the almost literally incredible facts of the Holocaust - mean that few can see Jews dispassionately. Jews appear forever through the distorting lens of history and prejudice. If it were possible to strip away these historical distortions, Jews would emerge plain and simple as human beings, flawed like anyone else, every bit as good and every bit as wicked, every bit as interesting or dull, every bit as cynical or sincere. But the image of Jews as sub- or super-human seems like a fly caught forever in amber; we cannot let it go.
The appalling use of the term "genocide" as a charge against Israel is rooted in this deeply distorted attitude to Jews. But what can we say about the reality of genocide in our new century?
Genocide is surely the most horrific and terrifying form of mass violence imaginable. The definition of genocide is not sharp or precise. There are several definitions in use and plenty of wiggle room to argue your case. But most agree that genocide must involve the intent to eliminate a group or race as such.
When a real genocide occurs, we again and again find a way to live with it
The violent death of even large numbers of people doesn't constitute genocide, although it can certainly amount to mass murder. Shelling a community that is shelling yours is not genocide, but a ghastly conflict. This is true even when one side is better armed and stronger.
Today, accusations of genocide are readily made when groups come into conflict. This is all the more true in our age of global and social media, and the tidal wave of news and information swamping us every day. Only the strongest messages can hope to break through to our overloaded consciousness. This means that anyone hoping to communicate with a mass audience must crank the rhetoric up to the maximum. Shouting on YouTube about genocide is likely to grab more attention than writing a thoughtful article in a newspaper.
Yet, when a real genocide occurs, we again and again find a way to live with it and are resigned (if not happy) to be bystanders - those who see but don't act to intervene or help. We stood by in Rwanda, we stood by in Yugoslavia.
We're doing it right now in Darfur - where a kind of slow-motion genocide has been perpetrated day by day for a decade. The widely available figure for how many have been murdered there is 400,000. But this is far from being a credible figure - it hasn't been possible to bring it up to date for several years because the country is effectively sealed off. Very few can get in; very little news can get out. Our attention always seems to be elsewhere.
Paradoxically, hysterical claims about an "Israeli genocide" may serve to mask real genocides that are taking place elsewhere in the world and allow them to continue unchallenged and uninterrupted.
Among the claims about Israel as a perpetrator nation, the strongest concern attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. There is international outrage that 504 children in Gaza died in the recent conflict, and of course this loss of innocent life is wholly tragic. Yet isn't it equally shocking that the international community ignores the fact that close to 225,000 children have been internally displaced in Afghanistan or that Syria has produced one million child refugees.
We seem hardly to care that about 200,000 women and girls are rape victims in the Congo and that there are some 60,000 hungry and starving children in the Central African Republic (the figures come from the War Child charity). All our focus is on the 504.
People are free to take any view they choose of the specific policies or actions of any government, including Israel's. That's not the issue. The issue is when special attention is paid to Israel, when that country is held to a different political and ethical standard from other states and when hostile statements about Israel refer to the ethnic, historical and religious totality of this tiny nation rather than specific governments, policies and actions. Hating Israel is antisemitic; hating Netanyahu's (or anybody's) government and its policies is not.
Condemning Israel because of the 504 children while demonstrating total indifference to the 200,000 rape victims of the Congo looks a lot like applying different ethical standards to different nations.
So what is all this about? Why the disproportionate attention on Israel and Palestine? Why the claims about their conflict involving a genocide? One thing we can be sure of is that the attention and the claims are not based on a dispassionate assessment of the evidence. It is widely known that several of the most heart-rending images of dead children released by Hamas in fact originated from the Syrian and other conflicts, so include the victims of Muslim-on-Muslim violence.
Fantasies about Jews are extremely potent. In Europe, hate and fear of Jews is part of the cultural DNA, most people are completely unconscious of the prejudice they harbour, which recapitulates 2,000 years of Christian antisemitism, with its blame, persecution, and murder. Beyond that, the majority of Europeans struggle to face the immense evil their predecessors perpetrated in the Holocaust. They clutch desperately at anything that might get them off the hook of their guilt. More than this, the Holocaust has implications for European identity that we are really just beginning to work through.
One example of this process: Some years ago, the author Elie Wiesel wrote: "the sincere Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not the Jewish people but Christianity".
This striking sentence cuts to the very core of European identity: after all, we may be a largely secular society today, but European history, European art, European literature, European music, European architecture and European thought have all been shaped by and with reference to Christianity. I suspect that few Europeans could readily accept Wiesel's dictum without feeling intense discomfort.
An authentic and thoughtful response to Wiesel was made by the German Protestant theologian Rolf Rendtorff. He acknowledged openly that the Holocaust represents a vast crisis for Christianity, and argued that Christians can overcome this only by recognising that their religion took a fundamental wrong turn when it separated church from synagogue, became the ally of state power in the 4th century CE and thereafter increasingly victimised Jews.
If it is to move forward, Christianity must re-focus on its own roots within Judaism. In the words of the Swedish-American theologian Krister Stendahl, Christians must recognise themselves as "a peculiar kind of Jews" and seek acceptance from Judaism.
Obviously, such an approach to post-Holocaust identity work is immensely challenging. The chances of, say, representatives of the current Hungarian or Latvian governments identifying themselves as peculiar Jews is remote. It's far less trouble to identify the source of the problem within Jewry itself, and Israel offers the intellectually lazy an easy approach. When we hear accusations that Israel is perpetrating genocide, at least certain threads of the accusation are antisemitic.
My personal view is that the accusation is wholly antisemitic. My reasoning is as follows. The Nazis orchestrated and carried out an unprecedented genocide on civilian populations of Jews. The evidence for this is overwhelming.
There can be no rational grounds for questioning it and any effort to question it can only be motivated by political malice fuelled by hatred of Jews.
But if, by some distortion or denial of reality, Jews can be accused of being, not innocent victims, but perpetrators themselves, then perhaps the Holocaust can be made to disappear - or at least be called into question. If the Jews are really Nazis (as they are depicted in so many cartoons about the Palestinian conflict), then we can say they lied about the Holocaust and used it as a vehicle to continue their global oppression of the human race. Pretty much any measure we take against them is acceptable and morally sound.
This is obviously phantasmagorical rubbish that belongs in the mad house. And yet it is current - out in the open or implied - in many nations around the world, not least inside the European Union. The existence of such thinking in the European heartland is simply scandalous, given the historical roots of the EU in the recognition of the need to prevent Europe ever again falling to the depths of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
The insecurity and social pressures caused by banking crashes, economic depression and ongoing Islamist terror (and let's be clear: IS, Al Qaeda and their ilk do not speak for Islam; they have hijacked a great world religion to pursue a political agenda of hard-line fascism) have pushed many away from political moderation and towards extremes. Intolerance, xenophobia and the hunger for radical solutions to our ills seem greater at present than at any time for decades. Immigrants and refugees are widely viewed with suspicion, hostility and hatred. The EU appears to have decided that the way to deal with illegal immigrants crammed into boats trying to reach Italy is to let them drown - as an example to the others.
Sir Nicholas Winton was recently fêted for his rescue of Jewish children in 1938. If he were attempting his rescue today, can we be sure those children would find a welcome in the UK?
Rhetoric about the Holocaust and genocide is used cynically as a political tool by anti-democratic and antisemitic groups and nations and we in the liberal, democratic west are in danger of ceding the rhetorical victory to them.
We seem simply not to have the stomach to tackle this threatening new reality.
Instead, we sleepwalk on the edge of the abyss.
