Hajo Meyer

Meyer was born on 12 August 1924 in Bielefeld, Germany, to Therese (née Melchior) and Gustav Meyer, a notary who had fought in the First World War.^[3] Meyer was Jewish.^[4] Aged 14, he was sent by his parents from Nazi Germany to the Netherlands on 4 January 1939 as part of a Kindertransport convoy, and settled in Holland on his own. Their decision was made after Hajo was no longer permitted to attend school in the aftermath of Kristallnacht, His parents' maxim was: 'We do not dote to death on children' (bei uns gibt es keine Affenliebe).^[5][6] He went into hiding in 1943, but was arrested after a year and spent ten months in Auschwitz. After Auschwitz he swore would never speak German again. He broke the rule at a scientific conference in Amsterdam after the war, when he happened to be speaking on a similar topic to that discussed by Hermann Haken.^[7]

His parents had originally been deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1943, and after his father succumbed to an illness on 15 May 1944, it was decided that there was no more reason to allow his widow Therese to stay on, and that she should be deported to Auschwitz. She had hidden a cyanide capsule in a piece of bread and chose suicide, knowing that the chances of survival there were non-existent.^[8] His correspondence with his parents while in exile during the war were published. The autobiography of his elder brother, Alfred, also dwells on their experiences during the war.^[9]

After the war, Meyer returned to the Netherlands, and studied theoretical physics. He eventually became director of the Phillips Physics Laboratory (NatLab).^[10]

After his retirement he took courses in woodwork and constructed violins and violas.^[10]

In his later years Meyer became politically active, including as director of A Different Jewish Voice. He was a member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network,^[11] founded in 2008 and the Dutch political party GroenLinks.^[12]

Meyer wrote a book titled Het einde van het Jodendom (The End of Judaism) in 2003,^[a]. In 2007 an English language edition of the book was published.^[13]

In his book Meyer draws a comparison between the way Jews were treated in the nineteen thirties by the Germans in Germany and later in The Netherlands and what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, in Israel itself as well as in the occupied territories. All with the objective of making them leave the country. It was not until this strategy turned out not to work that Hitler began to consider other solutions.^[14] Elements of this treatment were:

• Dehumanizing Jews by referring to them as animals, parasites or a plague. The then Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon is quoted as speaking of the Palestinians as "cancer".^[15] Prime Minister Ariel Sharon later corroborated this statement as "true and correct".^[16] Former Minister of Education, Shulamit Aloni, confirmed the demonization of the Arabs in Israeli schoolbooks.^[17]
• Exaggerating the threat. Hitler was obsessed by the notion that Jews were planning to sweep Germany from the map.^[18] Likewise Israelis insist that the Palestinians not only want to drive Israel into the sea, but actually have the capability to do so.^[19]
• Intimidation and harassment by the armed forces. Meyer finds it particularly painful that his "own people" are now involved in similar behaviour towards the Palestinians.^[20]
• Inflicting economic hardship by banning Jews from certain professions and boycotting Jewish stores. Analogous economic pressure has been put on Palestinians.^[20]
• Not intervening and looking the other way when they were being harassed by non-jewish citizens. Meyer recalls a Purim celebration for children that was broken up by the SA. Complaints to the police had no effect. Israelis have been reported as attacking Palestinian farmers during their harvesting and targeting Palestinian schools with impunity.^[20]
• Applying collective punishment. For instance: If a Jew did something that displeased the regime, his or her relatives could be punished for it. Likewise if a member of Hamas blows himself up, his family home may be destroyed.^[21]

The book accuses the successive governments of Israel of using the Holocaust to downplay the suffering and injustices they inflict on the Palestinians.^[22]

Contrary to what Israel's government would have everyone believe, criticism of Israel is not the same as anti-Semitism, Meyer writes.^[23] In fact: "...at present the only reason to expect a revival of dangerous anti-Semitism is Israel's increasingly reprehensible policies".^[23] Meyer encourages non-Jews to shed their guilt about the Holocaust and feel free to criticize Jews who are clearly committing crimes.^[23] Jewish people and organizations must openly distance themselves from the current Israeli policies.^[23]

Among other things, Meyer concludes that the State of Israel and Zionism have failed because they have not lived up to the promise of a safe haven for the persecuted Jews of the world.^[24]

In the epigraph of his book Meyer quotes Rabbi Hillel: "That which is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole of the Torah." In the last chapter he states: "A people that has betrayed the basic ethical foundation of its long and astonishing survival will lack the vitality to preserve an identity of its own in the midst of an increasingly homogenous world".^[25]

Meyer repeatedly argued that there are parallels between the Nazi treatment of Jews leading to (but not including) the Holocaust, and Israel's dehumanization of Palestinians.^[26] At one talk, organized and hosted by the leader of the UK's Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, in 2010, Meyer was later reported to have repeatedly likened Israel's actions against the people of the Gaza Strip to the mass killing of Jews in the Holocaust and likened the government of Israel to that of Nazi Germany.^[27][28] During the talk, Meyer said that "Judaism in Israel has been substituted by the Holocaust religion, whose high priest is Elie Wiesel."^[27]

Meyer participated in the 2011 "Never Again – For Anyone" tour. He argued there are different interpretations of Judaism, and that Jews ought to return to the principles of the Book of Leviticus and the rabbinical principles of figures like Hillel, and avoid the 'doomsday Judaism' he identifies in the Book of Joshua and the positions of Abraham Isaac Kook which have in his view underwritten Zionism.^[29]

Meyer claimed Zionism predates fascism, that Zionists and fascists had a history of cooperation, charging, among other things, that Israel wants to foment anti-Semitism in the world to encourage more Jews to migrate to Israel.^[30]

Meyer spoke in favor of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.^[31]

He was the first signatory of a statement by 250 Holocaust survivors and descendants of Holocaust survivors protesting the killings that were taking place during the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict.^[32]

Meyer developed a theory based on the work of Hans Keilson regarding "sequential traumatizing," according to which Jewish collective remembering in a ritual setting of numerous past traumatic events befalling the community. Meyer argues that the current government of Israel has used this re-traumatization of Jews with regard to the Holocaust, in order to indoctrinate and inculcate loyalty to Israel against its enemies. He applied this to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that Israel dehumanizes Palestinians the same way that Nazi Germany dehumanized Jews.^[26][33] He expanded on this sense of an analogy in the following terms:

I cannot help but hear echoes of the Nazi mythos of "blood and soil" in the rhetoric of settler fundamentalism which claims a sacred right to all the lands of biblical Judea and Samaria. The various forms of collective punishment visited upon the Palestinian people — coerced ghettoization behind a "security wall"; the bulldozing of homes and destruction of fields; the bombing of schools, mosques, and government buildings; an economic blockade that deprives people of the water, food, medicine, education and the basic necessities for dignified survival — force me to recall the deprivations and humiliations that I experienced in my youth.^[34]

Henryk Broder was sentenced in 2006 to a term in prison by a German court after he had publicly accused anti-Zionists including Meyer and Abraham Melzer for their putative "capacities for applied Judeophobia" (Kapazitäten für angewandte Judäophobie) because they had compared the Israeli occupation policy to measures taken by the Nazis.^[35][36] On appeal, a court mostly cleared Broder saying that there was no such thing as "Jewish anti-Semitism."^[37]

On 23 August 2014, Meyer died in his sleep in Heiloo, Netherlands at the age of 90.^[38]

 

Wikiquote has quotations related to Hajo Meyer.

• (in Dutch) Het einde van het Jodendom
• An Ethical Tradition Betrayed