At the author’s request, the title of the article presented below, The Gestapo and Wehrmacht of Our Time, was retained. The author is Khalid Amayreh. It was written for The People’s Voice and is based on the remarks of a German Catholic Bishop, who visited Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories on March 5th of this year. He compared Israel’s oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank with Nazi oppression of Jews at Ghetto Warsaw. (The photo above shows the Warsaw ghetto left, and the “Ramallah ghetto” right.)
Khalid Amayreh’s article takes the Bishop’s remarks further by giving them additional substance.
The Gestapo and Wehrmacht of Our Time
I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on the top they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.
Harry TrumanWhen a conscientious German Catholic Bishop visiting Israel and the Occupied Territories on 5 March compared Israel’s oppression of Palestinians with Nazi oppression of Jews at Ghetto Warsaw, Israeli apologists got furious.
Gregor Maria Franz Hanke of Eichstatt couldn’t suppress his rectitude and human decency when he was brought face to face with the affronting ugliness of the “separation wall” which has already morphed Palestinian population centers into modern-day concentration camps.
Upon seeing the misshapen creature, which is as ugly and as deformed as the Nazi-like mentality that gave birth to it, the German bishop said the following:
“This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.”
Unfortunately, we don’t have many religious leaders, let alone politicians, who are willing to call the spade a spade, especially when it happens to be in Jewish hands.
But this man said it as it is, preferring to be at ease with his conscience at the expense of standing accused and vilified by the holocaust cult.
There are many reasons and motives for western flaccidity toward Israel and Zionism. Some westerners believe that the holocaust, which was perpetrated by Europeans, should justify anything and everything Israel does to the Palestinians, including crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.
Many other westerners, especially North Americans, are simply scandalously ignorant of the Nazi-like nature of the Israeli state. Others know the facts very well, but are too cowardly and dishonest to speak up for fear of Zionist intimidation and retaliation. Others are simply malicious and believe that Israel, by virtue of being powerful militarily, has the right to pursue Nazi-like policies in order to serve its goals and interests. This is the same folk who would have embraced the Third Reich soul and heart because power is their God and “realism” is their religion.
I believe that people like the honorable bishop and all other free-minded voices that speak up in defense of truth, that don’t flinch from calling the spade a spade and refuse to cringe or cower in the face of evil, are the salt of mother earth and the crème de le crème of humanity. It these sporadic candles of light that keeps our world from plunging into moral nihilism.
Hence, we must salute them for their courage and morality and never allow ourselves to betray them or let them down. We must seek to emulate them in their courage and honesty and moral defiance in the face of evil, because in the final analysis life itself is a moral stand and is too short to be squandered and exhausted in the zigzags of political correctness. The Quran states:
“By the passage of time, man is indeed in a state of loss, except for those who believe, and do good deeds, and counsel each other to truth and counsel each other to patience.”
Of course, the bishop of Eichstatt is not inventing anything. He simply saw this diabolical, gigantic structure meandering around Palestinian population centers all over the West Bank, from Jenin in the north to Dahiriya in the south, cutting of neighbor from neighbor, and creating ghettos congested with poverty, misery, hunger and oppression.
In fact, had the bishop gone a little deeper and a little further, the overwhelming ugliness of Israel’s shame would have shocked him even further. I am saying this because Israel has not stopped at merely converting Palestinian towns and villages into virtual detention camps, but went many steps further by making sure that the tormented souls in these ghettos are constantly and relentlessly hounded and surrounded.
Indeed, not a day passes these days without the Israeli occupation army and the Gestapo-like Mishmar Gvul (Border Police) carrying out several raids into Palestinian towns and villages. During these criminal rape-like forays, innocent people are killed, injured and arrested, and their property is destroyed.
This writer witnessed an incursion at the village of al-Kum, 20 kilometers west of Hebron on Saturday, 10 March.
Around 2: a.m., numerous Israeli troops and paramilitary policemen stormed the small village (pop. 3000), placed it under curfew amid loud explosions of stun grenades meant to terrorize the people. Then the forces spread all over the village, vandalizing property and smashing glass and turning furniture upside down. After that, the mostly undisciplined soldiers used an elderly man, in his early 70s, as a human shield. Then they raided the local mosque, arrested three young men in their early mid 20s and left seven hours later.
Around the same time, a Palestinian driver, who reportedly transferred Palestinian laborers into East Jerusalem was beaten to death by the grandchildren of the Holocaust. According to eyewitnesses, Israeli Border Policemen ganged up on the man, identified as 32-year-old Wael Yousef Karawi, beat him on the head with the butts of their rifles, causing him a massive brain hemorrhage. The man collapsed and died on the spot. Then a few hours later a mendacious statement coming out of the Israeli mill of lie claimed that the man died of “natural causes.”
A day earlier, another poor Palestinian worker was killed in Gaza as he sought to enter Israel to find work. Israel has been starving Palestinians en mass by preventing them from accessing work and food. This manifestly criminal policy is carried out by barring Palestinians from fishing off the Gaza shore “for security reasons.” Today, as I write this piece, an Israeli naval patrol opened fire on two fishermen, injuring them both. More to the point, Gazans are not allowed to travel abroad for work or even medical treatment, because the so-called “border terminal” between Gaza and Egypt (Gaza’s only exit to the outside world) is kept closed by Israel nearly all the time for no reason other than tormenting an already thoroughly tormented people.
None the less, Israel still has the audacity to tell the world that it has ended its occupation of Gaza. You see God’s lying people.
Two weeks ago, the Israeli occupation army murdered two people in Nablus, including a young boy who hurled a stone toward (not on or at but toward) an Israeli Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) rampaging through the streets of the city. The other man was shot dead as he stood at his rooftop to fix a TV antenna. Responding to charges of cold-blooded murder, an Israeli army spokesperson said rather tersely that the “incident is being investigated.”
Of course, this is a lie, nothing is being investigated, and even if there was an investigation, it would blame the victims and declare the killers `innocent of any wrong doing” because they acted in accordance with outstanding army instructions.!!!! Well, even the Gestapo and SS were also acting in accordance with outstanding army instructions.
In the meantime, the Israeli state keeps swelling its dungeons and detention camps with young Palestinians. The declared reason is “security,” but the real reason is to keep as many Palestinians as possible behind bars in order to use them as bargaining chips in any prospective negotiations with the inherently weak Palestinian Authority.
According to both Israeli and Palestinian sources, the Israeli army rounds up an average of 15-20 Palestinians per days. Now the number of Palestinian detainees and internees in Israeli jails and detention camps stands at 10,000-11,000.
On Friday, 9 March, an Israeli military court sentenced Hebron MP Hatem Qafisha, to six months of “administrative detention,” without charge or trial. The six months are renewable depending on the mood of the Shin Beth officer in charge of the Hebron region. There are Palestinian detainees who have been languishing in Israeli dungeons for 80 or even 90 months without charge or trial. Usually, the mantra of security is always ready to be evoked in defense of the Nazi-like justice system.
In fact, Qafisha has already spent 93 months in Israeli jails first for “harboring extremist views” and second for “competing in legislative elections under the banner of a terrorist organization,” a clear allusion to Hamas.
Well, didn’t Israel and the United States consent to the participation of Hamas in the elections, which took place in 2006? If so, why arrest these people, including democratically-elected lawmakers, cabinet ministers, and even the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council Aziz Dweik, and dump them in detention camps for lengthy terms? If they have committed any crime, let them be tried before a genuine court of law, not before the court of the occupation for which a Palestinian is guilty even if proven innocent…just as the Nazi courts viewed Jews as guilty even proven innocent.
Are the Zionists the Nazis of our time? Is the Israeli army and police the Wehrmacht and Gestapo of our time? This is a question for Jews to answer. Maybe they will come to the realization that this sick and sickening state is corroding their humanity. Just maybe.
I introduced Khalid Amayreh’s article with the idea that the Nazi analogy to Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians is the most hated comparison of all. Essays and diaries appearing on blogs that propose such an analogy are greeted fast and furiously with condemnation of the author, who is immediately overwhelmed with charges of anti-Semitism, and every measure taken to disturb discussion of just how it might be applicable, if it is. Mixed in with the condemnations one can also find charges against the Palestinians, that they send suicide bombers into Israeli pizzerias to kill innocent Israeli civilians and engage in similar atrocities, while conveniently failing to mention the inciting causes of such acts.
However, let us suppose that the Bishop’s analogy is incorrect. Most Americans, who are really ignorant of the reality of life in the West Bank and Gaza, the true history of the conflict, and the real purpose of Israel’s 40 year military occupation of the Palestinian people, i.e., to confiscate their lands, would certainly not find that hard to believe. From what most Americans know (been told), Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is (portrayed as) the victim of Palestinian terrorism. “Terror, terror, terror,” was the way Ariel Sharon often put it, and what the Israeli propaganda machine, which now has the full complicity of the US State Department, keeps repeating.
But if the Nazi analogy is incorrect, by how much is it incorrect? Before any suicide bomber entered Israel during the second Intifada, Israel soldiers had killed many innocent Palestinians. Included among them were 27 innocent children, aged 4 months to seventeen, most of whom were shot in the head by live ammunition. What kind of people engage in or condone such behavior? As Khalid Amayreh addressed it, “This is a question for Jews to answer.” Actually, this is a question for Israelis to answer. Jews in organizations like Not In Our Name and Jewish Voice for Peace and dozens of other activist organizations in Israel, Palestine, the US, and around the world already seem to know the answer.
The above article originated on http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org – Permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media if this credit, © By Khalid Amayreh for thepeoplesvoice.org, is attached and the title and text remain unchanged.
This version was reprinted with permission from: http://umkahlil.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html
Let’s call it what it is: genocide. Whether it be compared to that of the Nazi Holocaust or the American Holocaust(i.e., the genocides committed by European conquerors and settlers of the North and South American continents), I’ll leave to others. As Rafael Lemkin (the person who coined the term) sez:
I am as unhappy with what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians as anyone, but I can’t agree with you here. Even if Mr. Lemkin did coin the term “genocide” (and I am taking your and his word that he did), that doesn’t mean that his understanding of the term corresponds to the term as it is presently used.
According to Lemkin, “Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.” This makes genocide a matter of destroying “national patterns”, not human lives. I don’t think most people use the term genocide in this way, and with good reason. What if the national patterns are highly undesirable? According to Lemkin’s definition, both the North’s fighting against the Confederacy, destroying the latter’s “national pattern” of slavery, and the Cold War, ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union, constitute genocide.
No matter how much Israel’s oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank may remind us of Nazi oppression of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, I think that we should keep in mind that Israel is not taking the “final” step of exterminating Palestinians on an industrial scale. It is that which would constitute genocide to most people.
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
link here
We can argue all day if you like as to what degree Israel is inflicting a-e on the Palestinian people, but the fact is that they are certainly carrying out atrocities that closely align with the international definition of genocide, and go unpunished for it. Like every other genocide, we as a global community bear the responsibility of stopping it, and the concomitant shame in this instance for comprehensively failing to act.
That’s a much better definition. By that definition, a good case can be made that Israel is practicing genocide.
I think the hardest part to wrestle with is the lead in sentence, ie regarding the intent. For some, intent means a detailed plan from wo to go just as the Nazis eventually had and acted upon. For me, taking in the broader ‘diversity’ of genocide, I interpret it also to mean that it’s possible for a state/group/other to commit genocide by refusing to acknowledge the end consequence of their actions.
I don’t think Israel has a plan per se to destroy the Palestinians, but I do think there are many extremists within Israel, many of whom have power, who actively pursue it, and the terrible conditions on both side therefore make it possible to justify to the Israeli people a range of actions, that taken collectively, sure look like acts of genocide to me and many others.
One of the tipping points for me was watching an Australian live debate program called “Insight” on the channel SBS several years ago, where contentious topics are debated and discussed by experts and reps from different viewpoints in front of a live studio audience, many of whom are usually directly linked to the topic at hand.
On it was a very senior retired Israeli general. In the course of a very fraught discussion, a young Palestinian woman related how her 3 brothers were shot and left to die in an incident, and how an Israeli soldier had spoken to her on her wounded brother’s mobile phone when she called to tell her flatly that her brothers were either dead or dying as a result of a ‘hostile incident’ and it was not possible to get them an ambulance. They were left to die. The Israeli General quite literally said (in response to a challenge from the woman) that Palestinian lives were worth less than Israeli lives. To hear a senior government representative say that sent chills down my spine.
I don’t think Israel has a plan per se to destroy the Palestinians, but I do think there are many extremists within Israel, many of whom have power, who actively pursue it
Since this is a thread comparing Israel with Nazi Germany, the problem with your line of thought is that you neglect to consider that Israel is a democracy, whereas Nazi Germany was a dictatorship. If Israel were a dictatorship, would it be a big surprise if it implemented a plan to destroy the Palestinians? (Even then it might not do so, since it relies upon the support of another state, the U.S., which of course was not the case with Nazi Germany.)
The analogy can be argued away. That’s not the point. It is in the argument that we get to ask: just what is it then if not a Nazi style occupation? It is something less, surely, but does that make it beneficient?
Agree again with most of what you asserted. But the analogy does have some uses because it ask the Israeli government to reflect on its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. There is just so much you can cover up with propaganda. The leaks reveal enough to suggest that the US should not be condoning this kind of behavior from an occupying force. Targeted killings, sniper fire, blowing up houses with people in them, sending missiles, shells, bullets flying into civilian neighborhoods.
This kind of killing by an occupation force does not deserve our support. We are better than this!
Even the G word may be a little overboard, just as the Nazi analogy. But from the knowledge we now have, arguments about how applicable these terms are, are legitimate.
Link to the life expectancy figures?
Source: CIA Factbook:
West Bank: 73.27 years
Gaza Strip: 71.97 years
World Health Organization: 72.6 years
Thanks. Do those figures include infant mortality, child mortality (<age 5), and deaths caused by occupation?<p>
Are you the guy who said he was another American on Kos?
In 2000, when Arafat wanted the “Right of Return”, I had no idea what he was talking about. I’ve since readThe Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. What an eye opener. I was “scandalously ignorant” of the crimes perpetrated on the Palestinian people. Israel violated a UN mandate and seized most of Palestine.
There was no war in 1947 there was an ethnic cleansing. Palestinian land was stolen. Palestinians were run off their land or killed. There must be justice for the Palestinians. The US has no moral ground while we support Israel in crushing these innocent people.
I’m no apologist for Israel, but comparing Hitler’s final solution to what is happening today illustrates an utter lack of knowledge of history. Not to belittle the events/victims of recent history, but it is simply not the same thing. Flame me, argue with me, whatever, I will simply never believe these two things to be equivalent.
To wit:
Final solution
it is about 1935, not 1942. You assume that the Final Solution came about when the Nazis assumed power. That is not the case. It was a gradual thing.
We are 7-10 years from a serious problem.
Ah, so it only applies to certain years. (smacks forehead) Now I understand.
It may apply in the manner in which the Israel government has conducted the occupation. Makes for good discussion.
Firstly, while the Jewish Holocaust enacted by the Nazis is the ‘model genocide’ as commonly understood by the west, it is by no means the first or last genocide humanity has seen. I in now way mean to talk flippantly about a topic of such profound and disturbing magnitude (I’ve been to Auschwitz and Dachau and will never forget them, and I’m Australian, home to another truly appalling genocide), but I would contend that the Jewish holocaust has become the modern benchmark of a ‘classic’ genocide for westerners, therefore we both ill-conceivedly compare all others to it and find ‘flaws’ on both sides of an argument such as Palestine.
People compare the Palestinian situation to the Jewish holocuast because of both that benchmark and some obvious similarities, but of course mostly because they can’t believe that the Israeli state, home to the majority of those who survived the holocaust, is enacting a similar policy on another people. It’s easy to pick apart the comparison if you want to go blow by blow through history, but it misses two points: firstly that this is not the point (ie is the Palestinian situation a point by point re-enactment of the jewish holocaust by Israel), and secondly we now have the luxury of hindsight to look back at Nazi actions, and tend to telegraph our understanding of history to assume that the ‘final solution’ was widely planned and embraced from early on. This is simply not the case, or at very least, is contested as historic consensus.
My second broad point is that since the Jewish holocaust, the international community has grappled with genocide and come to recognise that it takes many forms, and that the destruction of the fabric of a distinctive group’s society and culture is just as much a genocide as setting up gas chambers and marching them through. In other words, making it impossible for a people to be is genocide in another form.
The modus operandi of the Chinese for example in Tibet was /is a combination of destruction and desecration of all the cheif cultural arhcitecture ie monasteries, and forced sterilisation of many thousands of Tibetan women, coupled with ‘standard’ practices such as killings, disappearences to concentration camps etc. But what stands out in the Tibetan genocide attempt looking at article 2 of the Convention is points b, c and d.
The international community now also recognises with that convention that modern genocides are a lot more subtle that the “godd old days” of round them up, slaughter them and burn it to the ground – in fact, genocide is a horribly, relatively common practice by humans, and os often a lot more nuanced in terms of its level of planning as compared to the NAzis with a mass-produced copy of the Final Solution. China is an active practitioner, Indonesia is merrily waging it against West Papuans, it seethes and bubbles to the surface in many parts of Africa, and the Indigenous people of many South American countries have suffered terribly from it, as have tribes in India, and on it goes. Yet the general public understandably clings to a view of genocide that involves overt and (preceived as) rapid organised slaughter.
Finally, genocide is commonly perceived to have an endpoint of total extinction of a people; the reality is that most practioners will ‘happily’ settle for less than this – a totally fragmented, culturally shattered, minimised people is usually ‘enough’.
This is the general mistake I think many make when examining the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Israeli genocide is arguably not necessarily planned to achieve complete extinction of the Palestinians; but depriving them of a functioning culture and community, persistently terrorising and brutalising them, taking their land, randomly imprisoning and/or killing them, destroying their houses and livelihoods, turning off their water, isolating them from the rest of the world, and fundamentally treating them as less than ‘others’ is in my eyes a form of genocide, whether it’s fully “intended” or not.
It can be argued that one reason the Shoah “resonates” more in the West as a genocide than do other genocides is that the killing of all the Jews is already an issue in the Old Testament, specifically, in the Book of Esther. Furthermore, the Holocaust can seem to have been an act against God himself, since even for Christians on one level, the Jews are the chosen people. (The Nazis were of course fond of using the phrase “the chosen people” mockingly.)
Here is a thought-provoking essay on this subject: From Esther to AIPAC.
Yes, the Judaic roots of Christianity create an additional level of resonance for many westerners. However, I still think the main reason that so many white people see the Holocaust as different from other genocides it that it happened to white western people.
This is also true of how most white people see WWII – that it happened in Europe to europeans. Forgetting of course, that WWII spanned the globe and was murderous for much of Asia and Africa as well.
And while in no way diminishing the devistating effect of the Holocaust on European Jewry (as they were the single largest targetted group with 6 million killed in the death camps), there were 8 million non-jewish people exterminated as well. The Romany (Gypsies), communists, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, etc. were all targeted en mass. Yet the “standard” use of the word “holocaust” excludes them as well.
The Holocaust analogy is not what is indicated by invoking this analogy by those that do. There is no Palestinian Holocaust. What there is is something considerable less. How less? Let’s argue.
The Shoah began with concentration into ghettos, isolation of jews into single-religion areas, the theft of property from the jews, the exclusion of the jews from the society of Germany, the Kristalnacht in which the jewish businesses were trashed and destroyed.
Much of this has happened.
No, the Israelis have not yet implemented the Final Solution. But the Wall, which institutionalizes the theft of Palestinian property and destroys Palestinian society, while demeaning and dehumanizing Palestinians, IS THE PERFECT ANALOGY TO THE GHETTOIZATION.
So, this is not an exaggeration, and if we speak up now, there will be no final solution to the Palestinian problem.
Yes, Jews were not free to leave and move elsewhere. They were forced to live in the point of concentration. Is there such a restriction here? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not indicating that moving elsewhere will solve this problem, but it is a distinct and important difference, one that by itself makes the comparison invalid.
No offense intended, but I have found in the past that discussions of this subject have given rise to more ill will than they are worth. I’ll respectfully bow out now.
Hi b2-I know this becomes a very tense subject for many but I always value your comments.
Thank you, CI.
Not directed at you, CI, but just for general clarification purposes, it’s not statements directed at Israeli activities that bother me, it’s the comparison between the current and the historic events that is troubling. But it’s likely that the diarist will see my statement here as further support for his post.
I had a similar exchange of ideas with Feldman, the guy of the Open Frameshop. He argued that when Cheney went to Auschwitz, he claimed that the Jews and the US had both been the victim of terrorism. Feldman argued that by no means the Jews had been the victims of terrorism, and that it should be framed in that way (that is pretty much what I remember). I argued that the Jews had been the victims of terrorism, specifically, state terrorism, and cited [people like Noam Chomsky,and Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon. The fact still is that the holocaust was the highest form of state terrorism. That other forms of state terrorism have not had as many victims as the holocaust does not change the facts that they all were acts of terrorist states.
similarly here, it seem s to be a matter of numbers. Maybe the Plalestine situation could in some future time equal or surpass the nunbers of the holocaust. Probably not. Maybe the system by which human beings are killed may not be the same. Some “more humane” while other more monstrous. Does it really matter??
The Belgium Congo
With all due respect to you, cruz, if you believe that the only difference is the numbers, then you owe it to yourself to do some reading.
And now I am truly out of here because this casual comparison of the two events is just too upsetting. See ya.
I replied to Keres here (http://www.boomantribune.com/comments/2007/3/20/201458/696/18#18)
As for reading… mI will leave it there
It is neccessary to make these comparisons, and it is not at all “casual”, even if the comparisons are not 100% analogous.
Why? Because the “people who suffered as the Jews did during the Holocaust could not possibly visit atrocities on others” argument is central in perpetuating the monstrous treatment of Palestinians by Zionists/Israelis.
Whether you desire it or not, every time you refuse to participate in this “casual comparison” you devalue the lives of the Palestinians who suffer at the hands of Israel.
Did you find that argument in any of my comments? Check again to be sure.
In fact, I started my comments by saying that I will not be an apologist for Israeli actions. What is disturbing to me is the comparison itself, invalid as it is. But there I go again, letting myself get drawn back into this unfortunate discussion.
As you can see, Jews themselves are making those same comparisons. They are not casual. They are essential because they are the legacy of all those who perished. Ironically, they have excluded the Gypsis and the Roma, whose numbers are almost the same as those killed by the Nazis.
The estimates of 12 million killed by German actions during WWII include Gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled though it is the portion that encompasses the 6 million Jews that seems to draw the most attention.
Right. But if They are going to remember, and are asking not to forget, then they should include the other almost six million that they haven’t mentioned in the above piece. Plus they always seem to exclude them.
My falult. I finished reading the whole article, and further below they do mentioned the non-jewish victims.
Please don’t think I take this lightly. I have already written about my family’s experience during the Nazi era, of how my family had been accused/ linked to Nazi war crimes. And now I am about to prove that my father was a Nazi hunter. Having almost been a victim of the Argentine genocide, I feel very strongly about the subject: I will condemn genocide any time, any where, just as strongly.
Not necessarily. But you discussion brings us to a better definition of just what is going on in the West Bank and Gaza. It may not be Nazism, but it is not especially pretty.
The barrier/wall is objectionable because, and to the extent, it attempts a land-grab by running, only in part, east of the Green Line (the pre-Six Day War border), and because, in some places, it encloses Palestinians in enclaves. But were the security barrier/wall to run only on the pre-1967 border, it would be entirely legitimate.
It’s also significant that, in more than one case, the Israeli Supreme Court, responding to complaints by Palestinians, has required that the route be changed to one that is less intrusive.
Give us a break. The Israeli Supreme Court?
The recent retired chief justice (name?) was a good example of what a Scalia Court would be like in America.
He consistently ignored international law pertaining to military occupation and prior agreements signed by the Israeli government to respect 242/338.
He said severe torture was not unconstitutional, but moderate torture was just fine. Security uber alles.
He said targeted killings by hit squads was fine as long as it was for security.
He said that the wall was fine so long a minor adjustments were made along the path, signifying that land confiscation was perfectly constitutional.
Quit kidding yourself about the Israeli High Court. It has been an instrument of occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands.
I am not saying that the numbers don’t matter. Of course they do. But whether the numbers are 1 million or 5 millions does that change the nonstruosity of it?
Does it make a difference if it was a religeous genocide, or a political genocide (remember that political genocide is not accepted [at least in for the USA] as a gencide)?
Hi Cruz. I didn’t think you were saying that numbers don’t matter. I just wanted to introduce some “other” numbers into the discussion.
Because I believe white bias to be a big part of the problem of recognizing genocide, I think it’s important to keep “re-memebering” and re-inserting facts and figures into the discussion, like the above info about Belgium Congo.
I wasn’t too sure. But just in case I wanted to make sure that to a point numbers do matter. It is not the same 10 than 10 million. That is obvious. But when it comes to Israel, they are acting as if they forgot the Never Again. And by doing so, they dishonor all the victims that the Jewish suffered. So, when Argentina convicted a member of the police “in a frame of genocide” although “only” 30000 people were murdered, no. the numbers dont matter. And I guess we are doing our share to keep the memory of those who were slaughtered before ours, alive.
I also guess that some don’t know, or forgot that the Nazi party began the Holocaust by eliminating the political organizations, which in turn allowed them to kill undetered the jewish community.
I also have a lot of disagreements with the definiton of Genocide as “religeous and racial”. For me it is the extermination of a society (a group of people) for whatever reason. Just ot be clear (and this is not directed to you Keres, nor the above) the Holocaust, Sierra Leon, Sudan, or Chile is just as abominable.
Want to argue numbers? If so then Stalin’s 26 million somewhat dwarfs the Nazi Holocaust of 6 million Jews, and another 6 million Gypsy and disabled who were murdered. Numbers may be less important than method. And again, there has been no Palestinian Holocaust. What has there been? The arguments don’t exculpate the Israelis in what they are doing to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Relief from the analogy does not mean that being less than a Nazi is something to be praised.
I used to have arguments with a German friend about whether the Holocaust was worse than the killing of the Russian nobility and bourgeoisie by the Bolsheviks, assuming the numbers were about the same. Is singling out people for extermination on the basis of ethnicity and religion worse than singling them out on the basis of class? He insisted that it was. I never understood that, until I ran into the notion of the Holocaust religion. To quote from the essay I link to in my post above:
I think there’s definitely something to this idea. It’s the only way of explaining, I think, Holocaust denial laws. Why can’t Holocaust deniers be treated in the same way other cooks, like people who believe in geocentrism (which apparently many American fundies do), are treated? What interest can the state possibly have in sacrificing the right of free speech to suppress an opinion which is obviously false, that is, an opinion that cannot possibly be dangerous, since no one takes it seriously?
Many of your remarks ring true. But for the most part, I think that this Nazi analogy is wrong literally, but has an intent. That intent is to remind Israelis to self-reflect a little on their own history, and to take seriously Truman’s comment, made most likely in response to information he might have received about the ethnic cleansing of 1948. That is only my conjecture. Since then, Israel has tried, but eventually failed to suppress the truth about it. In fact, it began to surface at a time when it also became evident that Israel was pursuing the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for the sole purpose of protecting the colonization of the land, and not at all for some trumped up notions about security.
To date, through a massive propaganda effort directed at the US, they have been able to keep Americans clueless about the truth, even twisting it into a reframed idea that Israel is fighting the war against terrorism against the Palestinians, who they now claim are terrorists being trained by the Iranians, the terrorist sponsor par excellance.
But Americans are slowly learning the truth. It is filtering in and before long it is going to be discussed openly. 40% of Americans now believe that the “Jewish lobby” has too much influence on our government. The Lebanon and Gaza invasions were PR catastrophes. Too many American Jews are becoming more Judaic and unable to associate the treatment of Palestinians on behalf of a minority of extremists with being Jewish. Nazis they are not; but nice people for what they have done to the Palestinians over the years they are not as well.
Too many American Jews are becoming more Judaic and unable to associate the treatment of Palestinians on behalf of a minority of extremists with being Jewish.
What is that supposed to mean?
It means that the diarist is without logical reasons for his statements and now embarks upon fantasy.
B2 as ever, I admire your restraint.
For some reason, this dialogue has shifted from a bishop’s comments about the treatment of Jews in ghettos as depicted in the Holocaust museum and Palestinians in what he called the “Ramallah ghetto,” or in more general terms how the jews and Palestinians were treated by military occupiers, to the Holocaust.
The treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza recently, has nothing at all to do with the Holocaust. It is something considerably less, but obviously it is treatment that is still subject to analogy between how Germans and Israelis treat victims of occupation.
That’s all this article is about. The author also made a mistake in conflating Jews and Israelis, since the hardest critics of Israel’s 40 year occupation of the Palestinian people have been Israeli Jews and Jews living around the world.
All it says is, if you were treated in this manner yourselves in the past, how could you now engage in similar behavior toward others?
You posted this diary along with the 2 juxtaposed photos at the top , did little to clarify the comparison discussion and now you’re backing off? Once again, I am a Jew not pleased with Israeli actions, but I find this comparison demeaning to those that suffered 70 years ago. But then again, I must be wrong. The things that are being done to the Palestinians are exactly the same as as holocaust events of so many years ago. It’s exactly the same as a carefully planned, systematic Swabian cleansing of the earth. Even now, the Israelis must be planning where to set the railroad lines for the trains to the camps for gassing and incineration of the bodies. At least for those that are not subject to forced labor and/or experimentation.
Read my comments in the diary, but also the comment I made above pertaining to the value of the Nazi analogy.
Saying that the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians was not as bad as the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany is like saying that gray is not as dark as black.
I can only suggest that you reread Truman’s observation in the diary. Some diehard supporters of Israel just don’t get it.
Perhaps you need to reread my comments and spare me the insult. I am no diehard supporter of Israel. But apparently you’ve made up your mind about me no matter how many times I’ve stated this. I really don’t care what you say about Israel, it is the comparison that is troubling. I’d suggest instead that you read a good history book if you believe that these 2 events are even close. It’s interesting though that you’ve found a little niche here based upon this subject. Good luck with this. I can assure you that in the future I won’t be commenting in your threads.
For some reason, hah! Umm, could it be your 2 shamelessly juxtaposed photos at the top? From these and the text of your post, one could reasonably conclude that the discussion was actually intended to go in the direction that it has taken. Perhaps it was the blowback that surprised you. Did you really expect everyone here to fall in line? Some of us actually do have independent thoughts.
This is still America where all views are permitted.
No boran. The Nazi analogy does not apply. Something less does apply. That’s what we need to be talking about. Why do the two photos correspond to?