Wingnut Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, whose only saving grace is his willingness to challenge Abu Gonzales and his ilk for torturing prisoners, has a column in today’s paper openly comparing an action of the Israeli government to tactics employed by the Nazis.
He even quotes critics of the action who called it “an order the likes of which were last signed in German.”
More on the other side…
Of course, he’s not talking about curfews in Palestinian territories, targetted assassinations of Palestinian leaders, or the internationally-condemned construction of the West Bank wall (which seals off some Palestinian communities similar to the way Nazi ghettos isolated European Jews). No, he’s talking about the Israeli pullout from Gaza — a territory, it should be noted, whose occupation and settlement violate international law — and the forced removal of Jewish settlers there who have refused to leave.
This action, he writes, makes Israel:
He goes on to say that:
Now, to be fair, Jacoby notes that Nazi comparisons have been sharply criticized in Israel, but by the end of the column he clearly has come down on the side of those who are making them. He justifies the criticism of Israel, in essence, by arguing that Palestinians are racist, and therefore Israel should never abandon the territories.
What’s really happening here, of course, is that Israel is reaching the limits of the racist assumptions that underlie the foundation of the Jewish state — which was never intended to be fully free of Palestinians, but in which Palestinians were clearly considered second or even third class citizens. Racism, however, is a double-edged sword, and he who lives by racist assumptions dies by them as well.
Jacoby, along with his vision of Jewish dominance in the Mideast, is being swept away by historical reality. He’s grasping at straws, but they are ever further out of reach. The question now is whether Israel itself can even survive the coming upheaval.
Thank you, George Bush, for failing to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and bringing all of this down upon our heads.