Gabor Maté is a renowned Canadian-Hungarian physician, author, and speaker who has gained significant attention for his impressive transformational trauma-informed work on addiction, stress, and childhood development.
Mate was born in 1944 in Budapest, Hungary. According to Wikipedia, his maternal grandparents, Josef Lövi and Hannah Lövi, who came from eastern Slovakia, were killed in Auschwitz when he was just five months old.
His aunt disappeared during the war, and his father endured forced labour at the hands of the Nazi Party. When he was one, Maté's mother put him in the care of a stranger for over five weeks to save his life.
Despite his experiences as a Zionist during his teenage years, he has become an outspoken critic of Israeli policies towards Palestinians.
In his writings and interviews, Maté has drawn parallels between the experiences of Palestinians and those of Jews during the Holocaust. He has described the situation in Gaza as "the longest ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in the recent and present centuries." Maté argues that the power imbalance between Israel and Palestine is stark, criticizing Israel's military actions and the blockade of Gaza.
Maté has called for an end to the occupation of Palestinian territories and the return of land occupied since 1967. In an interview with Piers Morgan, he mentioned crying every day for two weeks after visiting Gaza, saying, "This cannot go on. Piers, you have to go there to see it for yourself, as I have. And you would cry every day for two weeks as well.” In a more recent interview with TRT World, he expressed that "Gaza now occupies my heart."
It's worth noting that Maté has a significant social media presence, with 2.7 million followers on Instagram. He uses these platforms to share his views on various topics, including the situation in Gaza.
Maté's stance on Israel and Palestine has been controversial. While some praise his advocacy for Palestinian rights and his calls for a just resolution to the conflict, others have accused him of being overly critical of Israel. His comparisons between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto have been particularly contentious.
Despite the controversy, Maté continues to speak out on this issue, drawing on his personal experiences, professional expertise, and humanitarian concerns.
What boggles my mind is the absolute irony of his views, in light of his surviving the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, 6 million Jews were slaughtered by the merciless Nazi death machine. These Jews often found themselves trapped, with no country that would allow them refuge. The most crucial fact though is that the State of Israel as we know it today did not exist, in contrast to post-1948 where all Jews the world over know that they always have a safe place to land if things get ugly.
In actual fact, if Israel had existed as a state in the times of pre-WW2, many hundreds of thousands of Jews may well have escaped.
Some lucky ones, like Gabor Mate, did indeed survive, only to turn around in later years and give Israel a vicious tongue-lashing for its treatment of people who only wish to see its destruction. There really is no good way to explain this disgraceful ungrateful behavior, except to understand it in the context of self-hating Jews, a concept which is neither new nor unique.
I think of the Jews who wept as they underwent centuries of hell, torture and endless persecution. I'm sure that if they had the opportunity to see the Israel of today, they would likely feel an incredible sense of wonder and gratitude, two ideas Dr. Mate has obviously never experienced.