Letter From an American in São Paulo

(Part 4 of 4)

PART 4

Believe Your Ears

If Americans are unwilling to believe their own eyes, can they perhaps believe their ears? Mike Huckabee, Trump’s current Ambassador to Israel, has said, “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian. That’s been a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.” Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of The House of Representatives, recently visited an illegal settlement in the West Bank. The Israeli press quoted him as saying, “Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) are the front lines of the state of Israel and must remain an integral part of it.”

And then there’s Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is currently Israel’s Minister of National Security. I live in New York City, so let me tell you the roundabout way many of us New Yorkers have come to know this nutcase. In New York, there used to be an infamous religious extremist named Baruch Goldstein who was born, raised, and educated in the Orthodox Jewish enclaves of Brooklyn. In 1994, Goldstein entered a mosque in Hebron, Israel, and opened fire on some 800 Palestinian Muslims who were praying during the month of Ramadan. He killed 29 worshippers and wounded 125 others, before he was beaten to death by the survivors. After this massacre, Itamar Ben-Gvir hailed Baruch Goldstein as a hero and proudly displayed a portrait of him on the wall of his living room.

Ben-Gvir actively supports using starvation to drive Palestinians out of Gaza. In 2015, he defended vigilante settlers who firebombed a Palestinian home and killed an 18-month baby and its parents. Because of Ben-Gvir’s support for settler violence and ethnic cleansing, he is currently prohibited by seven countries from entering their territory, including the United Kingdom, Canada and Norway.

We also can’t forget what Yoav Gallant said on 9 October 2023, when he was serving as Israel’s Minister of Defense: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” When his statement was first reported, many people, including myself, dismissed it as an understandable outburst of anger immediately following the attacks of October 7th. Back then, we could never have imagined that Israel would partner with the United States to use starvation as a war strategy.

The Enduring Shame of Genocide

Today, it is generally agreed that the United States should have done more to oppose the Holocaust, in which approximately six million Jews were murdered during World War II. As early as 1939, the U.S. government and press were aware that Nazi laws were stripping Jews of their rights, and that growing numbers of Jews were being sent to concentration camps. Nevertheless, America maintained a restrictive, anti-Semitic immigration policy. In 1939, the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner carrying over 900 Jewish refugees, tried to dock in Cuba and then, after being turned away, in Florida. Even though America’s annual immigration quotas for people from Eastern and Southern Europe had not yet been filled, the U.S. refused to allow the passengers entry. The ship was forced to return to Europe, and it is believed more than 250 of the passengers later died in the Holocaust.

The Nazi gas chambers operated from late 1941 through late 1944. By 1942, the U.S. government knew that Jews were being systematically exterminated in Europe. On 25 November 1942, The New York Times printed an article headlined, Himmler Program Kills Polish Jews, which reported on Nazi plans to murder the entire Jewish population of Poland. By summer 1944, U.S. bombers were regularly flying missions over the area of Auschwitz, yet military officials resisted multiple requests by advocacy groups to bomb gas chambers, crematoria, and the rail lines leading to concentration camps. The U.S. War Department said rescue missions would detract from the war effort, and that the surest way to save Jews was to defeat Germany as quickly as possible.

I must confess my ignorance: I never realized that Americans could have been aware of the Holocaust before the concentration camps were liberated. I went to The New York Times website and pulled up that 1942 issue, and was astonished by what I saw. The article was right there. Sure, it was on page 10, when it should have been on the front page beneath a huge headline. It was also rather short – less than a single column. But still, there it was, for all to see. And it was quite explicit. According to the Polish Government in exile, Himmler had put the extermination program into effect earlier that year, and 250,000 Jews had already been killed.

“The victims when caught are driven to a square where old people and cripples are selected, taken to a cemetery and shot there. The remainder are loaded into goods trucks (freight cars) at a rate of 150 to a truck that normally holds forty. The floors of the trucks are covered with a thick layer of lime or chlorine sprinkled with water. The doors are sealed. Sometimes the train starts immediately on being loaded. Sometimes it remains on a siding for two days or even longer. The people are packed so tightly that those who die of suffocation remain in the crowd side by side with those slowly dying from the fumes of the lime and chlorine and from lack of air, water and food.”

The United States has gone from being a nation that negligently ignored genocide during World War II to one that is willfully perpetrating it in Gaza. Perhaps it is best that Trump was forced to wait four years to retake the White House for his second term. Perhaps this interregnum was necessary so the American people could sink down to the point where we morally merited the leadership of this cretin and his ghastly coterie of accomplices.