Source : AUN News
The Guardiam, an unmanned vehicle created by Elbit Systems for the Israeli Defense Forces, constantly patrols the border with Gaza. CC BY-SA 3.0
When people in the worldwide armaments trade exploit it to justify war and mass killing, it is one of the most obscene distortions of Holocaust history.
The visit by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to Yad Vashem in September 2018 was perhaps the most heinous instance. By equating himself favourably to Hitler, Duterte announced in 2016 that he intended to launch a campaign of mass murder against accused drug traffickers and addicts in his nation. More than 10,000 persons had been murdered by the Philippine government by 2018. Duterte travelled to Israel to purchase weaponry. Duterte had to go through Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust monument, just like all other heads of state on official visits to Israel. Thus, the irony of a mass murderer adoring Hitler at Yad Vashem while on an armaments purchasing trip in Israel was plain to see for everyone to notice.
A book that was released last year with funding from Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, is the most recent instance of the Holocaust being used to the advantage of the Israeli arms industry. The Bulgarian Army and the Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews, 1941-1944 is a book written by Dr. Dimitar Nedialkov, a professor at the Bulgarian Military Academy and a former lieutenant colonel in the Bulgarian air force. It is decorated with the Elbit Systems logo and is available in both English and Bulgarian. The book brings a fresh perspective to the story of the Bulgarian state’s efforts to save Jews during World War II. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Bulgarian King Boris III, and a number of politicians are the principal characters in this story, which first came to be told immediately after World War II. Nedialkov today contends that the army played a crucial part in this rescue scheme by enlisting Jews as labour battalions and used this as a justification for the state not to send them to the Nazi death camps.
The official story of the state’s rescue has been seriously questioned by recent study on the war and the Holocaust in Bulgaria: It demonstrates that the Bulgarian state actively pursued the forced expulsion of Jews from Bulgaria during World War II; that the mass arrest, looting, and deportation of approximately 12,000 Jews from Bulgarian-occupied western Thrace and eastern Macedonia to Nazi death camps in March 1943, where the vast majority of them perished; as well as the fact that the practise of forcing Jewish males to enlist in the army’s labour battalions really started prior to the Nazi “final solution” and was a part of a scheme to leave Jews economically destroyed, socially ostracised, and without a future in the nation. Therefore, it was not surprising that by the early 1950s, about 40,000 of the 48,000 Jews who had survived the war in Bulgaria had departed the nation, largely for British Mandate Palestine (which became Israel after May 1948). In conclusion, Nedialkov’s book and the Bulgarian state narrative about the liberation of Jews during World War II both distort the truth about the Holocaust.
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Recent studies have also revealed that the Bulgarian state targeted Jews for persecution and deportation as part of a larger plan to establish an ethno-national “Greater Bulgaria,” which also included the exclusion of Greeks, Muslims, and Roma and the use of lethal force against them. In fact, the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities by the Bulgarian state was so severe that in 1944 Raphael Lemkin—who popularised the term “genocidal” and was a driving factor behind the UN Genocide Convention—described the Bulgarian state’s assault on Greeks as “a real genocide policy” (p. 188).
Therefore, Bulgaria’s state story of saving Jews during World War II is a Holocaust fabrication contained within a larger historical fabrication. In Nedialkov’s latest novel, the damage is further compounded: The argument that the Bulgarian army sought to save Jews is not supported by any evidence in the book, and the Bulgarian army’s participation in atrocities like the September 1941 massacre of about 5,000 Greeks in and around the town of Drama in Bulgarian-occupied western Thrace is completely forgotten.
Dr. Shlomo Shealtiel, an expert on Bulgarian Jews, and Dr. Moshe Mossek, a former chief archivist of Israel, uncovered the book’s distortion of Jews in a recent piece published in Haaretz. They also questioned how “a renowned Israeli corporation like Elbit Systems came to sponsor the book’s publishing.” Elbit Systems assisted in the publication of a book that promotes this delusional narrative, according to Jacky Vidal, chair of the Bulgarian Jewry Heritage House in Jaffa, Israel. The business issued a brief apology “if someone was upset” in a statement that was only published in Hebrew in the print version of Haaretz as a reaction.
Why, in fact, did Elbit Systems support this Holocaust denial project? And why did the business scarcely react after being exposed?
Elbit Systems now joins the narrative at this point. The corporation has developed a sizable market over the past 20 years for its surveillance equipment and weapons for use against refugees in general as well as on and near border barriers and fences. Elbit, for instance, has placed armed, semi-autonomous robots on the wall dividing Israel and Palestine, which the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion determined to be against the law. As another illustration, it has erected numerous surveillance towers in Arizona along the US-Mexico border, gravely violating the rights of the Tohono O’odham Nation there and escalating violence along the border between the US and Mexico.
In 2007, the Bulgarian government cancelled an agreement with Elbit Systems to purchase military helicopters. Currently, it appears that Elbit Systems wants to reclaim its position in the Bulgarian arms market and may have backed Nedialkov’s nationalistic and revisionist book to gain access to the country’s military procurement, with the militarization of the country’s border with Turkey serving as a potential incentive.
Elbit Systems was referred to as a “respected” company by Mossek and Shealtiel, but it is obvious that this respect is only held by governments that engage in violent acts; governments like those in Bulgaria that use the Holocaust to obscure and distort violent acts are now also supported and funded by Elbit Systems.
It is a terrible irony that an Israeli weaponry business is using Holocaust denial to promote its collaboration with a violent regime today. It underlines the glaring failure to fulfil the commitment of “Never Again” and draws attention to a serious crisis in the effort of global Holocaust commemoration and education. However, it also provides a window for us to recognise and comprehend significant historical and modern connections between Holocaust denial, racism, and xenophobia. These connections may aid us in the fight against the widespread violence that Elbit Systems promotes and supports.
