Osvaldo Bayer is an Argentine writer who made his name with a series of books about the massacre of ranch employees by the Argentina army in Patagonia in the 1920s. In recent years he has become something of a national guru on questions relating to human rights.

Writing about the Gaza situation on the back page of today’s Pagina/12 he says,

Death can’t solve problems. And this is even truer in the case of the Jews, a people who, with their own history of persecution, ought to have learned what hatred always leads to. As the crimes of the Holocaust have remained forever in the conscience of the German people so they should in the conscience of the people who were its victim, because for a child there’s no difference between dying in a gas chamber and being destroyed by a bomb dropped from a government airplane.

Bayer’s rather oracular style makes it hard to be sure but he seems to be implying that Jews risk having another Holocaust inflicted on them due to the amount of hatred their actions in Gaza are producing. If this is indeed what he means then I think we are in the presence of an interesting variation of the “you’d think that the Jews, of all people, would have learned” trope, which usually holds that the Jews, having been victims of great suffering themselves ought to be particularly reluctant to inflict it on others, something that is never said of other peoples with catastrophic events in their history.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Bayer and others of his ilk that there are many lessons to be drawn from the Holocaust. One of them with particular relevance for Jews is that relying on the goodwill of progressive intellectuals to protect their lives is a strategy not free from risk. And, of course, Bayer’s article only contains the most veiled and muted criticism of Hamas’s activities and nothing at all about its ideology and stated goals.

Also in Argentina, Luis D´Elía yesterday weighed into the current debate on events in Gaza demanding that the “…Nazi government of Israel stop the genocide in Gaza”, which he held to be “a sad rerun of the Warsaw ghetto” with one of the most important points in common between the two events being,

The same right wing, expansionist executioners and tramplers of the dignity of others.

You can’t fault him for lack of audacity. It’s not that the Israelis are behaving like Nazis, they are Nazis and not only in the sense of sharing the ideology and methods of the Nazis, they are the selfsame Nazis who committed the Holocaust.

So who is Luis D’Elía? He’s a figure whose prominence in public life here is rather difficult to explain to readers outside the country. Those in the United States might wish to imagine something like a pro-government Al Sharpton; a social activist , someone who commands the loyalty of a certain section of the urban poor, who is a big fan of Iran, a great hater of Israel and the United States and who can be relied upon to bring hundreds of supporters onto the streets at a moment’s notice to do the government’s bidding. He is also popular with certain progressive and revolutionary intellectuals who, coming from refined backgrounds themselves, are rather thrilled by an authentic son of the poorest districts of Buenos Aires who is not afraid to settle arguments with his fists.