Many have said it many times: comparisons are how we learn about the world. We come to understand something new and unknown by relating it to something old and familiar, and to which we know how to react. For 11 weeks, Palestinian civilians in Gaza have not only been suffering indiscriminate attacks by the Israeli military machine ( bit.ly/4aoz99c ), relentlessly fueled by the United States—with a death toll of more than 20,000, mostly children and women, tens of thousands wounded, and 2 million displaced—but also by the “global cognitive machine” that does everything to dehumanize and render them invisible. Not only bombs fall on their heads, but also words—when Israel compares them, for example, to “Nazis” ( bit.ly/3SfQiLx )—and something even more lethal: its prohibitions on rebours ( bit.ly/486JXHH ). The same has happened during previous massacres ( bit.ly/3RFLZrk ).
While Israel enjoys privileges derived from the suffering of the Jewish people (see: Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, 2000), being able to do, say and compare literally everything to everything (that “free Palestine” is the “new Heil Hitler”, that the slogan “from the river to the sea” is “genocide” ( bit.ly/47bZx3e ), etc.), a good part of the world is tied by a “manual of good conduct”, according to which, there are “forbidden” comparisons. Forbidden because their application in the case of the Palestinians would humanize them and provide the world with a useful language to understand what is happening and a firm basis for carrying out effective actions to stop it (the “Never Again!” applied to everyone).
While Israel has been communicating its intentions in Gaza – to make the enclave uninhabitable, to cause the maximum number of deaths directly or indirectly through hunger and disease and to expel its remaining population to the Sinai desert in Egypt, disguising it all as a “humanitarian transfer” ( bit.ly/3vhnSr4 ) –, mixing them with lies to cover up its ethnic cleansing and/or genocide, comparable in turn, although not with the Holocaust itself, but with other colonial genocides ( bit.ly/3ShQ3jq ), we continue to be condemned to go on breaking them down again and again.
But what if the "forbidden" comparisons are precisely the right ones? Own them. Use them as tools of critique and ways to save lives, because otherwise they will become part—as they were originally—of the machine of death and oppression.
