Dr. Hajo Meyer -- Selections from an Interview

My name is Hajo Mayer. I was born in August 1924 in Bielefeld, Western Germany and so I am 86 years old and I had to leave Germany in January 1939 because from November 1938 on I was not allowed to go to school anymore. and in the Netherlands first I made my entrance examination for a university under the German occupation. It occured in April 43 then I went underground and then in around a year later I was caught and brought to Auschwitz and survived 10 months in Auschwitz. And in my view I was educated in the tradition of enlightened reformed Judaism without any relation to the prescripts of the Halacha but just to the social cultural heritage and the enlightened parts of Judaism this ethical tradition is absolutely contrary to everything which is at the basis of zionism. Because zionism was created by Mr. Herzl and others who were in the end of the 19th century, in that era it was commonplace to be colonialist, to be racist, to be supernationalist, to adore the nation state so the idea of France for the French, Germany for the Germanics and then some state for the Jews They were very bad ideas and they all formed a basis for zionism. Very often they cannot get the education they want and that is terrible. If you are not allowed to get an education you do your utter best to go against the forces which made you stop education, you search for education and I learned to get an education by myself for years and eventually had a very high education and was very successfull profesionally but it may have given me also the idea that preventing people - young people who are eager to learn - from getting education is a form of genocide! Becausse if you cannot realize your own ambitions because the access to educatoin has been made impossible, then you cannot develop your personality and its a form of slow motion genocide and that´s where my great sympathy and my connection to the Palestinian youth comes from. Because I think they suffer from exactly that that they very very often cannot get the education they wanted. I think that this is absolutely murderous. Besides I mean look - I was a refugee and most of them come from refugee homes and are refugees, so we have very much in common, yes. I saw in Auschwitz that if a dominant group wants to dehumanize others so as the Nazis wanted to dehumanize me This dominant group must dehumanize itself by diminishing the empathy due to propaganda and indoctrination in order to be able to be as cruel as some were. But the same here holds nowadays for Israel And this fact has been documented by at least ... I know two very impressive documents. One by ´Shule Miterlobi´ who was appaled who was once the minister of education in Israel how hateful how rasist how depreciating the school books in Israel talk about the Palestinians and ´Louis Penacham´ who is a pedagogue at the University of Tel Aviv has made a big study of the school books and she is appaled about the racism which is taught to children in Israel and then you get nowadays the rabbis especially the army rabbis - they get ever more aggressive, they are so aggressive, they are so racist. Its so ... I m appaled about how hateful how dehumanized they are that they don´t see any human aspect in any Palestinian anymore. Its terrible. The zionists have not any right whatsoever to use the holocaust for any purpose I mean times like Netanyahu did the other day in the General Assembly of the United Nations He used the number of ´mayamon´ - the number of our arms to defend the comming attack on Iran. They´ve got nothing to do with each other. Look, they have given up everything which has to do with humanity, with empathy for one thing - the state the blood and soil just like the Nazis. I learned at school about Blood and soil and that´s exactly their ideal too and and humans do not play a role. Judaism as I learned it is highly highly ethical and so you cannot connect zionism with the highly ethical. You can only connect words like aggressive oppressive stealing robbing with zionism, but not highly ethical. Zionism and Judaism are contrary to each other because Judaism is Universal and humane and Zionism is exactly the opposite. It is very narrow very nationalistic racist colonialistic and all this There is no national Judaism there is zionism and there is Judaism and they are completely different. transcription by Hugo Fogo