This short post expands on ‘The Pogroms of 1919,‘ making a few points about the relevance to modern politics. Because, as Immortal Technique said, ‘the past refuses to rest in its shallow grave.’

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Avenger Street, which bears the name of Shalom Schwartzbard, is less than 35 kilometres from the Gaza Strip, and a short car journey from Ofakim, site of a battle during the October 7^th 2023 Hamas raid. It’s remarkable that two significant places in Schwartzbard’s story, Ukraine and Palestine, are sites of conflict at the time of writing. But it has been the Israeli military response, its mass killing of tens of thousands of civilians, its bloody violation of hospitals, schools, ambulances, border crossings and refugee camps, that most reminded me of the genocide of 1919. I thought of Schwartzbard and his fifteen murdered relatives when I read of Abdel Kareem Rayan, a young man in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza who showed journalists a list of 15 family members who were killed in Israeli airstrikes, and Dana Abuqamar, a student activist in Manchester who says 15 of her relatives were killed when a missile hit their residential building. Unfortunately there are many more such examples.

In September 2023 the Canadian parliament gave two standing ovations for Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian by birth described by the Canadian house speaker as a ‘war hero’ who fought against Russia during World War Two. The 98-year-old Hunka was indeed a veteran – of the Waffen-SS, a notorious military organisation which fought Hitler’s genocidal war. There was an apology and even a resignation, but any adult should have known who fought against ‘Russia’ in World War Two.

The incident in the Canadian parliament reflects a thorny problem for ideological supporters of the United States, NATO, Israel and their allies in Eastern Europe. Ideologues must compose a historical narrative which is acceptable to Jewish Israelis but also to people in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States who, for whatever reason, want to rehabilitate collaborators and pogromists as ‘national heroes.’

In discussions about the several thousand collaborators the Nazis managed to recruit in Ukraine, we see scant mention of the far greater number of Ukrainians who fought in the Red Army against the Nazis.

Also ignored are the pogroms of 1918-1919. There is at least some critical discussion about the prevalence of Nazi iconography in the Ukrainian military. Invocations of the Rada and Petliura in modern Ukraine come in for less discussion in the West because very few people know who they were.

The pogroms serve as a reminder that until recently western leaders did not give a damn about either Ukrainians or Jews. For example, in the Russian Civil War, they kept on funding and supporting pogromists who called Ukraine ‘Little Russia’ long after it became obvious they were a lost cause.

Modern Russia, too, has consigned the pogroms of 1919 to oblivion. Putin spoke to a crowd of thousands at the re-interment of General Denikin in a place of honour in Moscow in 2005.

In 1919 and in the 1940s, the Jews were an unarmed captive population. In 1919 armed gangs would come to town and reign supreme for days or longer. In the 1940s the German military machine was bent on mass extermination. In the Middle East today, the Palestinians are the ones who are captive and vulnerable to unrestrained violence, in this case of settler pogromists and the Israeli army, armed to the teeth by the US. The Palestinians are the ones subjected to dehumanising language and narratives, caricatured, confined, treated with contempt and paranoia.

If you ask me, the 21st-century pogromists are the settlers who have killed hundreds in the West Bank since October 7th. The anti-Semitic threat comes from the growing far right in Europe and North America – not from supporters of basic human rights of Palestinians. Another worrying conclusion you can draw from the points above is that NATO interests now cut against a sincere reckoning with the history of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, and provide an opening for attempts to rewrite history, to trivialise the Holocaust, to blame the victims.

The killing and abduction of hundreds of Israeli civilians on October 7th was both cruel and strategically irresponsible. But here again we run into the double standards that are deployed to justify pogroms and genocide. For my arguments in favour of the dignity and humanity of Palestinians to receive a fair hearing, I am expected to include a caveat and a condemnation. But the ‘right to self-defence’ of Israel is invoked by world leaders without any conditionality whatsoever. The humanity of Israelis is – rightly – taken as read. The authoritarian and genocidal character of the government they elected does not diminish their humanity. The thousand atrocities committed by their military does not make civilians fair game. If the humanity of Palestinians were taken as read in the same way, the war would end tomorrow. And I don’t just mean the current onslaught on Gaza, I mean the whole ethnic cleansing project going back to the Nakba.

Those who have read a bit of history, for example on the pogroms of 1919, who have gotten a sense of how people are dehumanised as part of the groundwork for horrific atrocities, should have seen clearly years ago what was being done to the Palestinians, how the whole world was being primed for the slaughter that is now taking place.

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