btw did you guys see how the hannah arendt prize committee tried to revoke masha gessen's prize after gessen, a jewish journalist, wrote an essay about how zionists and zionist-sympathizing gentiles, particularly in germany, wield accusations of antisemitism to shut down anti-zionist jews... an essay in which they specifically quoted hannah arendt several times

related but the amount of (well-meaning, ostensibly anti-zionist?) posts I've seen on here lately about how you should never ever ever invoke or even mention the holocaust in relation to israel's occupation of palestine strikes me as... very bizarre. if not outright counterproductive. because I keep thinking back to gessen's essay (which I realize I never linked) and how one of the core things they point out is that anti-zionist jews are routinely accused of antisemitism by israel and its allies for, as israel puts it, "trivializing" or "de-singularizing" the holocaust if they (meaning anti-zionist jews) compare any form of genocide to the holocaust in any way, let alone make specific comparisons to what's going on in palestine and e.g. the warsaw ghetto. which isn't to say that there aren't many ways it can be antisemitic to invoke the holocaust, only that "it is always inherently antisemitic to even talk about the holocaust and palestine in the same breath" is literally a page out of the zionist playbook.

a major argument gessen (and others) make is that painting the holocaust as a singular event immune to all comparison (1) obscurses the conditions that birthed it (which in turn helps absolve its perpetrators; they mention a holocaust memorial panel that got shut down for "trivializing" because it talked about the german-led genocide in colonial namibia as a precursor to the holocaust, specific how germany used similar violent tactics in both instances) and (2) makes it very difficult to prevent other forms of genocide from happening again. which is one place where gessen cites arendt's thinking on the banality of evil, and how it's a disservice to cast the holocaust as a flash-in-the-pan event carried out by uniquely and otherworldly agents of evil rather than a particular kind of mass violence whose scale and tactics can be repeated by anyone willing to use them. because recognizing those parallels is key to shutting them down

Gessen's New Yorker article

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust

Their speech after they got the prize in spite of the criticisms

https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2023-12/masha-gessen-rede-hannah-arendt-preis-english