From Auschwitz to Gaza, From Violence to Peace:

A Vegan, Anti-Zionist Reflection on Zohran Mamdani, Hajo Meyer, and the Deep Roots of War

As I listened to Zohran Mamdani speak with Stephen Colbert

in the final days before his stunning victory in New York’s Democratic primary for mayor, I felt something shift.

When asked about Israel’s right to exist and Jewish fears of antisemitism, Mamdani didn’t flinch. He acknowledged the very real threat of antisemitism - sharing stories of friends and neighbors who confessed their own fears. He spoke with moral clarity about an Israel that has a right to exist as well as a responsibility to uphold international law.” He grounded his stance in Jewish voices themselves - citing, Amos Goldberg, Israeli professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and editor of Studies on the Holocaust

and Hajo Meyer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajo_Meyer, a Holocaust survivor who spent time in Auschwitz and later became one of the most outspoken Jewish critics of Zionism and Israeli state violence. https://promisedlandmuseum.org/hajo-meyer/

The Heart of Meyer’s Message

Meyer’s words, now echoing through Mamdani, have never felt more urgent. After surviving Auschwitz, Meyer devoted his life to warning the world not only of antisemitism, but of the rising dehumanization of Palestinians. “Gaza,” he said after visiting in 2005, “is one big concentration camp.” In his book The End of Judaism, he draws careful, painful parallels between the treatment of Jews in 1930s Germany and the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians today.

He names the tactics:

• Dehumanization (calling Palestinians a “cancer,” “human animals”)

• Collective punishment

• Harassment with impunity

• Economic strangulation

• Destruction of homes and livelihoods

• And, when none of this forces them to flee - worse.

Just as Hitler initially sought to remove Jews before turning to extermination as his "Final Solution," Meyer believed the Israeli state had adopted similar escalation logic in its treatment of Palestinians. And he called on Jews and non-Jews alike to speak out - not in hate, but in truth.

War Has Roots - and So Does Peace

We must ask: what fuels this endless cycle of war, resource hoarding, land theft, and domination? As Mamdani has emphasized in other contexts, colonialism and capitalism depend on extraction - of land, labor, bodies.

Animal agriculture, or what some call agritorture, uses more land, resources, including fresh water, than any other industry. It has displaced Indigenous peoples, razed forests, and normalized institutionalized killing. The domination of animals is the template for a small segment of society dominating the rest.

As Pythagoras wrote:
"For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."

And Albert Schweitzer:

"Until he widens his circle of compassion to include all living beings, man will not find peace"

And as Tolstoy later observed:
"As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields."

We cannot build peace while our plates drip with the suffering of sentient beings.

A Call to Courage and Compassion

Zohran Mamdani’s words are rare not only because he spoke them publicly, but because they connect moral courage to political clarity. The testimony of Hajo Meyer, Holocaust survivor and outspoken critic of Zionism’s genocide against Palestinians and Amos Goldberg, Israeli professor of Holocaust studies, both to whom Zohran Mamdani referred eminds us that it’s not antisemitic to oppose the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians - it’s antisemitic not to listen to Jewish voices who oppose oppression in all its forms.

And if we truly seek peace, we must go further:
We must extend compassion not only to the oppressed humans of the world, but to the animals who are tortured, killed, and commodified with such mechanical efficiency, such utter disregard, and in such staggering numbers, hidden from view and normalized by silence, that even the most habitual consumer of animal flesh, milk, and/or eggs would be shocked.

“Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.”
John Maxwell Coetzee, Nobel Award Winner in Literature

“Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”
Theodor W. Adorno

“Our grandchildren will ask us one day: Where were you during the Holocaust of the animals? What did you do against these horrifying crimes? We won’t be able to offer the same excuse for the second time, that we didn’t know.”
Dr. Helmut Kaplan, an Austrian writer and Philosopher

“We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur fins and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.”
William Ralph Inge

Because peace is not passive.
Peace is a daily practice.
Peace begins with how we treat the vulnerable.🦋

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