Last week, passengers on a Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv helped foil an attempt by the co-pilot, Hamam al-Hammami, an Omani national, to bring down the plane in a 9/11 style attack. Flight FZ1073 carried 174 people, mostly Israelis, including 27 children. The captain, Smit Machchhar, was grievously wounded by the axe wielding al-Hammami, but still managed to kick open the cabin door allowing passengers and crew to overpower the attacker.
A few weeks earlier in the small town of Belleville, Ontario, Sean Ward, a 29-year-old former corporal in the Canadian Armed Forces, tried to massacre some 20 Jewish worshippers at a Yom Kippur evening service at the Sons of Jacob synagogue. Two police officers - Constable Jeff Smith and Constable Michael McCurdy - stopped him. Smith is still in hospital recovering from life threatening gunshot wounds.
Now imagine if I insisted on reversing the roles.
The true heroes, I would say, were the axe wielding co-pilot and the murderous gunman, and their victims were the oppressors. And I would justify my positions by arguing that these hateful and misguided individuals were practicing “heroic resistance" in the struggle against the cabal of their Jewish and Israeli oppressors.
Yet something like this is happening on Canadian campuses as the anniversary of October 7, 2023 attack of Hamas on Israel approaches.
Student events announced in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto planned to honor the Hamas fighters who murdered some 1,200 people - most of them Israeli - on that day, as "martyrs" and symbols of liberation. (The university cancelled the Toronto event.)
What was being honored?
The students may not have read what Hamas's own leader planned for that day. According to the UK's October 7 Parliamentary Commission report, Yahya Sinwar instructed commanders to film and broadcast "point-blank shootings" and "slaughter people with knives".
“Images must be released which will trigger a surge of euphoria, frenzy, and momentum for our people, especially among the residents of the West Bank, the “internal” [Israeli Arabs], Jerusalem, and our entire Islamic nation. This is meant to spur them to respond to the calls to rise up and revolt….”
The cruelty was meant to be seen and to terrify.
Do the students who plan these events really believe this is a model to admire?
An old inversion
Turning the victim into the aggressor is a pattern the Jewish people know well.
The most common example concerns the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
Before Israel had set on foot into Gaza in retaliation for the events of October 7, 2023, she was already being accused of committing genocide against the Palestinians - even as the horror of the events of October 7 were unfolding in real time.
In fact, for decades, Israel has been accused of carrying out a Nazi style genocide against the Palestinians. Some of these charges were fomented by Soviet propaganda in the 1970s, as part of its anti-Zionist campaign that characterized Israel as a colonialist, imperialist, and racist state. Further, Gaza has been often compared to the Warsaw Ghetto, Hamas fighters equivalent to the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, and Gaza has been described as the “world’s largest open-air concentration camp”, which has been subjected to an “ongoing genocide” by Israel for over 75 years.
Many of those levelling these false charges of genocide against Israel for decades, do so for one reason: The quest to delegitimize the Jewish state by drawing parallels between the Holocaust, and the suffering of the Palestinian people. If one can show that Israel is the new Nazi Germany, one of the pillars for her founding has now been critically undermined - and the Jewish state is no better than those who sought the annihilation of the Jewish People during World War II. Scholars refer to this phenomena as “Holocaust inversion”. As the by now familiar quote reminds us: “The world will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz!”
The most egregious encounter with Holocaust inversion I have ever come across happened in July 2015 in a public lecture delivered by journalist Christopher Hedges at Ryerson University which CBC Ideas broadcast nationally.
Hedges reminded his live audience of images of the horrific beheading of the American reporter James Foley and other hostages by ISIS. But instead of blaming ISIS, he faulted the United States, Israel, and even Canada. Hedges claimed ISIS’s actions were not the result of a fanatical Islamist ideology, but were an inevitable consequence of “years, at times decades, of random violence, brutal repression and collective humiliation, the United States, Israel, and I'm sad to say even Canada has inflicted on others.”
“We do not understand our own complicity”, he argued.
Hedges recounted the story of Jewish prisoner Chaim Engel, who took part in the uprising at the Nazi German Sobibor death camp in Poland, during which he killed one of the German officials in the infamous camp, where up to 250,000 Jews were murdered.
Hedges stated, “The act carried out was no less brutal then the beheading of Foley or the executions in Gaza. Isolated from the reality he and the other inmates endured, the act was savage. But set against the backdrop of the extermination camp, it was understandable.”
“It's not a decision”, Hedges quoted Engel as saying: “You just react instinctively….And I went with the man in the office, and we killed this German. With every jab, I said this is for my father, for my mother, for all these people, all the Jews, you killed.”
Hedges concluded his argument with these words, “Murder and other violent crimes almost always grow out of years of abuse of some kind suffered by the perpetrator.”
So Hedges is comparing the Holocaust inmate who led the revolt in Sobibor and killed one of the Germans officials at the camp to the ISIS murderers who beheaded journalist James Foley. And James Foley, the journalist, who was beheaded by ISIS, is on par with the Nazi killers of Jews.
The effect of Hedges argument is to blur the line between those who murder and those who rise up against their murderers and that blurring has now moved from a lecture hall to a campus rally.
Hedges “Holocaust inversion” is being mirrored by the next generation, as students on campuses around world portray Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters, and Israel as the modern reincarnation of Nazi Germany.
So who owns October 7?
Oct 7 should not belong to those who applaud the murderers. It belongs, first, to the people who lost their lives, to those tortured and taken hostage, and to the families who still carry the memory of that day and their loved ones in their hearts. And it belongs to everyone who refuses to let the story be turned upside down.
As we approach the anniversary of October 7, 2023, let all fair minded people mourn the deaths of the 1200 innocent victims.
Instead of attending demonstrations, falsely accusing Israel of genocide, calling for the destruction of Israel, and the glorification of the Hamas terrorists, do the following: Choose one Oct. 7th victim, or a family, or an entire Kibbutz and print up a picture and information about them. Share what you’ve found with your loved ones and friends, and together, illuminate a candle for them, sending your energy and prayers out into our universe hoping for a world that sees things straight once again.
Then – instead of shouting angry slogans - commit to building a world of peace and justice for every member of the human family, Jew and Arab, Israeli and Palestinian.
And let this October 7th and everyone thereafter, belong to all those who choose love over hate, and who seek a better world for all.
Eli Rubenstein is the Director of Education at International March of the Living