With his radio show, his magazine and his arthouse cinema, Oscar Cuervo is something of a one man culture industry in the city of Buenos Aires. He has lately started to take an interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict and in a recent post at his blog he sets about the quixotic task of denying that there has been any recrudescence of antisemitism in Argentina lately.

Given the fact that there have protests against Israeli actions in Gaza outside a hotel in Buenos Aires supposedly owned by a wealthy Jew, and also outside the headquarters of AMIA, a Jewish community organization - to cite only the most obvious evidence - I take it to be self-evident that there has indeed been such a recrudescence and will not seriously engage his arguments on this point. Suffice it to say that the expression of prejudiced views about Muslims and Arabs, of itself, tells us nothing about the nature and extent of anti-Jewish feeling and activity in Argentina.

I do, however, want to seriously question an opinion expressed elsewhere in the text. Cuervo finds it…

… particularly offensive that those who seek to justify these crimes [the Israeli attacks on Hamas ] evoke the victims of the Shoah in their speeches. Its victims are anything but honored by being used to justify current crimes. By evoking the Shoah as an instrument of pro-Israeli propaganda these justifiers are not only offending Judaism - for all their talk of “being Jews” - but humanity itself. It’s intolerable that any person, of whatever origin, use the victims of genocide as media merchandise to distract us from the commission of new crimes.

1.

You might expect that someone who found mention of the Holocaust in discussions about the situation in Gaza to be offensive would also strongly object to the now routine comparisons of Israel with Nazi Germany; comparisons that have been made from the platform at recent protests outside the Israeli embassy. After all, why would it be unacceptable to invoke the victims of a past genocide in a contemporary debate, yet acceptable to accuse those same victims and their descendants of in fact being followers of the very movement that carried it out? Well, you can expect it all you like but you won’t find a hint of condemnation of it in Cuervo’s post.

2.

In any case, what’s so terrible about mentioning the Holocaust when debating current events in Gaza? It happened within living memory and, unsurprisingly, it’s a rather important presence in the consciousness of many Israelis. Asking the Israelis and those who don’t regard them as a unique source of evil in the world to shut up about the Holocaust out of respect for the dead is about as credible as asking the Palestinians to shut up about their sufferings in the war that followed the birth of Israel. Except of course, for those commentators who swallow one people’s national myth whole while spitefully rejecting that of the other as invalid.