On Friday, 9 August, South African Jews for a Free Palestine held a picket outside the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre (CTHGC). The picket was mostly silent, but included Jewish prayers and songs for peace, such as “Lo Yisa Goy” (whose lyrics translate to “nation shall not take up sword against nation, never again will they know war”) and the Mourner’s Kaddish (an ancient prayer for those who have died). We decided to hold this picket after numerous failed attempts at engaging the Centre about their silence on the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Friday marked the end of a six-day conference hosted by the Centre titled “Building Resilience Through Holocaust & Genocide Education”.
The Centre has been utterly silent on Gaza. It has failed to acknowledge the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel, and the dehumanisation tactics that have primed the world to turn their backs on plausible genocide. However, it is not only to note an omission that we are taking a stand against this Centre. The Centre’s silence on the atrocities in Gaza is a poignant indication of how dangerous education can be when it becomes an instrument of a violent political ideology.
On the surface, this violence may seem at odds with the education offered by the CTHGC. On its website, the Centre claims that a core purpose of Holocaust education is to “draw attention to the dangers of indifference, apathy and silence.” The Centre does not only teach about the Holocaust but other genocides and human rights violations such as the Rwandan Genocide, the Holodomor in Ukraine and Apartheid.
However, when digging deeper into the Centre’s approach, it becomes clear that their education is far from universal in its spirit. For example, in a talk titled “New realities of Holocaust education” the content omitted any reference to the atrocities — which have been likened to those by the Nazis — being committed against Palestinians. Instead, it reinforced time and time again, how Holocaust memorialisation can be a useful tool to understanding and responding to the events of October 7th.
Lectures like this one and others on the conference programme illustrate how the Centre’s approach to Holocaust and genocide education is not only tainted by its omission of the genocide currently underway in Gaza, but is deeply and actively complicit in the Zionist project’s goal of systematic and often “intellectualised” dehumanisation, laying the groundwork for genocide denial.
In this sense, the silence of an institution that takes on the purpose of genocide education makes them complicit. And it is the denial of genocide that enables it.
This is the story that the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre is a part of, and it is one in which a hateful, dehumanising and violent ideology is given intellectual nourishment. This was made clear to us by one incident at the picket where, after reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Zionist man arriving at the Centre made threats of extreme violence and sexual assault against some of our members. Such threats reflect the violent, oppressive fantasies of Zionist ideology at its all too often manifest extreme.
After inciting a generations-old Nakba, after forcing Palestinians from their homeland, destroying villages, and after decades of miseducation, historical manipulation and Zionist propaganda, Israel now seeks to erase the world’s memory of Palestine and its indigenous people. It does this by murdering civilian populations en masse, bombing their places of worship and culture, targeting educational institutions, preventing the social reproduction and education of future generations.
As long as the CTHGC fails to address this, it fails in its duty to educate the public about genocide. As Jews, we share a responsibility to always act against genocide and to continue to insist on the universal lesson from the Holocaust — that never again means never again for anyone.
From the River to the Sea, Palestine will soon be free!
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