Many calamities can befall an outside broadcaster – in this case, the BBC’s best-laid plans to host the Today programme from Auschwitz, and to devote a whole day of broadcasting across several channels to the 80th anniversary of its liberation.
The lines could go down from Poland, which, in these days of the internet and satellite broadcasting, would be an interruption of seconds.
Worse still, the event itself could be overshadowed by something even bigger taking place on the world stage. That is the car crash that happened on Monday.
As world statesmen gathered in the former concentration camp, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had endured 15 months of genocidal bombing, starvation and disease at the hands of a state born in the aftermath of the Holocaust marched for hours back into northern Gaza.
There were two notable absentees from the gathering in Poland. The first and most obvious was the president of the country whose forces had liberated the Nazi death camp, Vladimir Putin of Russia.
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The second absentee was the prime minister of the country who has done the most in his long political career to cash in on European guilt about the Holocaust, aiming to justify Israel’s repeated attempts to ethnically cleanse Palestine of all Palestinians.
There were practical reasons for Benjamin Netanyahu’s no-show at Auschwitz. The first was his fear of being arrested under the terms of the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza.
The second was his appearance in an Israeli court on multiple charges of corruption.
Jarring contrast
In keeping with Israel’s historically shabby treatment of Holocaust survivors, its main television channels did not go into the “Queen Is Dead” mode, as the BBC did. They continued their normal programming schedules throughout the day.
The hypocrisy of this reaction to a significant anniversary in Jewish history, and the jarring contrast it makes to Israel’s habit of jumping on every opportunity to accuse its critics of “antisemitism” and “Holocaust denial”, did not go unnoticed.
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No one has forgotten the shameful stunt Netanyahu pulled when he put yellow stars on Israel’s delegation to the UN in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack – a stunt condemned by the chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as dishonouring both the victims of genocide and the state of Israel.
But the BBC’s answer to this crisis of news values was veritably Soviet: you simply blot out the news that does not fit the party line.
This was patently an order from above because every programme editor did the same thing. After a day’s mature reflection, the BBC News at Ten gave 22 minutes to the Holocaust memorial and four minutes to Gaza.
Gaza is proving to every Palestinian, and to the whole world, that their right of return is not only possible, but it is within their reach
Monday’s commemoration was framed as a message to the world of today. One speaker after another said the lessons of the Holocaust should not die with its last remaining survivors, not least because there are record levels of antisemitism around the world.
One cannot disagree with this statement. And yet, the glaring parallels between what the Nazis did to the Jews and what the Israelis have been doing to Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank over the past 15 months – parallels that are not just rhetorical or polemical but the basis of two legal actions at the highest international courts – were Monday’s elephant in the room.
As the day wore on, it only grew larger. On the Today programme, Philippe Sands, a legal expert on war crimes, led listeners through the interesting history of attempts to make genocide a war crime.
Sands mentioned the forbidden Gaza word, but attempted to argue that whatever Israel’s actions in Palestine and Gaza were called, they should not happen. A charge of genocide brought by South Africa and other nations is currently before the International Court of Justice. Both the interviewer and Sands himself were curiously silent on the case that is still live. They cannot prejudice a jury because there is none. They must be silent for different reasons.
Memorable date
The debate about Israel’s actions in Gaza is just as lively in Israel itself.
Two Israeli Holocaust historians, Daniel Blatman and Amos Goldberg, have drawn chilling comparisons and concluded: “Although what is happening in Gaza is not Auschwitz, it is of the same family – a crime of genocide.”
The clash of these two massive international events on the same day – the biggest return of Palestinians to the land from which they had been expelled in the history of the conflict and the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz – was solely down to Netanyahu himself.
It was his decision to stop Palestinians from returning on Saturday as they were scheduled to do, amid a row over which Israeli hostages should have been released, that delayed the long march northwards for two days until Monday.
In so doing, Netanyahu and the clique of religious bigots around him have unwittingly established a date in Islamic and Arab history all its own.
Monday, 27 January, was not just any Monday at the start of the year. In the Islamic calendar, it was the 27th day of Rajab, which until this week was commemorated by Muslims the world over for two other events.
Al-Isra wal-Miraj is the night when the Prophet Muhammad was transported by angels from Mecca to Al-Aqsa Mosque, before ascending to heaven and returning to Mecca. This journey, during which the Prophet met Moses, Abraham, Adam and Jesus and was instructed by God, is a very strong part of the Muslim faith. It links Muslims to Al-Aqsa, and there is a verse in the Quran about it.
This is an article of faith. But a fact of Arab history also occurred on the same day, which again links Arabs to Jerusalem. It was the day in 1187 when Saladin liberated the city of Jerusalem from Lord Balian of Ibelin, ending nearly a century of Crusader occupation.
Now Netanyahu has added a third memory to the 27th day of Rajab.
Joy and defiance
This is the first day in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict when Palestinians have exercised their right of return to lands from which Israel is bending every sinew to expel them. All three events cement and reinforce the Palestinian claim to Jerusalem as their national capital and the Muslim claim that Jerusalem is a seminal part of their Islamic faith.
The scenes this week of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians on their long march home, with their possessions on their backs, are epic and historic – not just because of the images themselves, but because of the resonance this event will have for every generation of Palestinians to come.
Gaza is proving to every Palestinian and to the whole world that their right to return is not only possible but it is within their reach.
An estimated 500,000 Palestinians have now returned to the north, with the full knowledge that their homes are shards of brick and concrete and that they may never again see the family members they left behind.
They are joyous, defiant and determined. Kabir Rusoomi, from Beit Lahia, told Middle East Eye that she was making her way north to find her loved ones – both those alive and those dead.
“The north is the heart and soul, the north is the land we lost. We hope to envelop ourselves in this land, the land of our homes, and the land of our people who are lost,” she said.
Rusoomi is right. Northern Gaza suffered the longest and hardest period of occupation – the full 471 days of the war – of all of Gaza. It was the place Israel tried to clear repeatedly of Hamas fighters, and then of all citizens, by trying to starve them out.
We can now put figures on this: at least 5,000 people have been killed or are missing, with another 9,500 wounded, as a result of an ethnic cleansing campaign dubbed the “Generals’ Plan”, which began in early October 2024, a medical source told Al Jazeera.
And yet, it was from this blasted landscape that Hamas fighters and their hostages emerged. Millions of Israelis who supported the war can now see with their own eyes the futility of what they have done and the damage it has caused.
Here to stay
The images of Gaza’s devastation will burn a historical hole in Israel’s foundational story of a state born from Holocaust survivors.
The end of the siege of northern Gaza – however temporary – will go down in Palestinian history as the relief of the siege of Leningrad (which also happened on 27 January) went down in Russian history of the Second World War. It’s that significant.
More than anything else, this collective display of human resilience against overwhelming odds, and in the midst of Hiroshima-scale destruction, is the best reply to Netanyahu and to the international community, which watched on the sidelines and let it happen – and latterly to US President Donald Trump.
Happily, there is no chance of Trump and Netanyahu’s plans of ethnic cleansing – now renamed ‘voluntary repatriation’ – being realised
It is no accident of timing that on the eve of this historic event, Trump mused – in the deceptively casual way he has of making deeply calculated moves – that 1.5 million Palestinians should be “cleaned out” of Gaza and relocated to Jordan and Egypt, to make way for the reconstruction of the strip. This aligns with Netanyahu’s request in the early days of the war for his right-hand man, Ron Dermer, to consider ways of “thinning out” the population of Gaza.
Only Bernie Sanders, the independent Senator from Vermont, called this plan what it is: “There is a name for this – ethnic cleansing – and it’s a war crime,” he said.
Happily, there is no chance of Trump and Netanyahu’s plans of ethnic cleansing – now renamed “voluntary repatriation” – being realised. Within hours, both Jordan and Egypt had restated their rejection of any population transfer – out of no great sympathy for Palestinians but primarily because both states know that a large influx of Palestinians could become an explosive mixture.
Both Jordan and Egypt consider this an existential problem for their regimes. Albania’s name was then raised but rejected by Tirana within hours.
In his first term, Trump failed to sell to the region the “deal of the century”, an attempt to bury Palestinian rights in a grave paved over by trade deals and much concrete. In his second term, his attempt to sell the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to their neighbours failed before it even started. This is even more significant.
It means that Palestinians are here to stay, in greater numbers than Jews, in historic Palestine. This has been achieved amid unprecedented personal suffering, but the Palestinian people have, once and for all, affirmed their connection to this land.
This is the triumph of the human spirit over organised oppression. It, too, is the lesson of the Holocaust.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.