See also my recent diary – Dutch Likud Vilifies Guest Speaker Haneen Zoabi, an Arab-Israeli MK.

A “Blue and White” Kristallnacht: Only a Matter of Time | Tikun Olam |

Israeli Palestinian MK Haneen Zoabi is once again stirring up a hornet’s nest among Israeli Jews.  For those not well versed in how she is perceived, imagine Malcolm X in the year or two before he died, when he was reviled by white America as a white-hating firebrand and inciter of racial violence.  She has been threatened with death too many times to mention, including a Facebook group which put a bull’s-eye right above her forehead.

Invited to address a Dutch Jewish leftist group, Platform Stop Racism and Exclusion, in Amsterdam on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, Zoabi took the opportunity to link the victimization of European Jews by the Nazis to the suffering of Palestinians under Occupation.  Zionists insist they have a monopoly on suffering and the world’s sympathy and exploit the Holocaust regularly for this purpose.  Having a Palestinian probe the issue and point out both the flaws in the argument and the implications racial hatred may have in today’s Israel-Palestine conflict is simply maddening.

That is why Zoabi is not just vilified, but under constant police investigation and repeatedly scolded by her Knesset colleagues who strip her legislative privileges for her temerity.  Another impact of her activism is to rebut the Likudist meme that Palestinians are the modern incarnation of Nazis (remember Bibi’s false claim that the Mufti told Hitler to “burn them”?).  Zoabi, in effect, turns the tables and notes that it is the Israelis who are adopting many of the practices of the Nazis, if not yet the cardinal one of genocide.

The coverage of Zoabi’s speech is incomplete.  Most Israeli news outlets paraphrase bits of it.  And I don’t yet have a transcript of her remarks (UPDATE: I do now here).  But a Dutch newspaper published an interview with her just before she spoke this evening.  In it, she goes over the points she would’ve likely made in her talk:

    Faced with criticism from Netherlands, Zoabi said by telephone, they can “just laugh.”

    “I’m used to it, that I am accused of being anti-Semite or Hamas supporter. The fact is that I stand up for the Palestinian people. This makes many Israelis, and apparently others angry. That is the real reason for the sedition against my person. “

    Do you understand that Israelis feel that you undermine the state?

    Zoabi: “For Israelis, the Palestinians have no right to resist. After all, they find that there is no occupation of Palestinian territory. In their eyes, the Palestinians do not suffer humiliation, arrests, land grabbing and so on. Israel is in total denial of the occupation, the harassment of Palestinians, of crimes against humanity. If you demonstrate against it, you’re supposedly agitating. They even have a problem with Europeans supporting the Palestinians, who they seek to prevent entering the country. Israel is the one who incites against the truth.  Every critical European voice it silences by calling it anti-Semitic.”

[Read on lenghty article @TikunOlam by Richard Silverstein]