by George Miller, November 26, 2004
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Israelis are Nazis
by George Miller, November 26, 2004 |
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London Calling: George Miller* This in The Daily Telegraph today: “A young Palestinian was forced to play his violin to pass through an army roadblock in the West Bank as Israeli soldiers laughed, according to Israeli human rights activists yesterday.What’s wrong with this sentence?: “She said the scene reminded her of images from the Holocaust when Jews were forced to play for Nazi officers to save their lives.”Answer: The Palestinian was not playing the violin in order to save his life. As much as Horit Herman-Peled would like us to think so, Israeli border guards are not Nazi officers. The Palestinian was playing the violin to prove he was who he said he was. He was trying to get through a checkpoint, not to save himself from the gas chamber. Am I under whelmed by this “human rights” violation? Yes. Do I think the Israeli border guards were behaving badly and seeking to embarrass or even humiliate the Palestinian. Yes, again. Prolonged occupation is debasing to both the occupied and the occupier. There should be no occupied territories. The Palestinians should have their own state. But to return to Horit's image of the German Jew playing his violin for the Camp Kommandant. Unlike Horit, I find myself unable to complete the historical analogy. Where are the suicide Jewish bombers slipping into the centre of Berlin to blow the arms and legs off German shoppers? Where are the Jewish ideologues, the year 1939, hysterically threatening to drive the Germans into the sea? Put another way, instead of the image of Jewish people forced onto cattle trucks for transport to the death camps, we have the image of a Palestinian, at an Israeli road block, playing a violin. As wearisome as it is to say it again and again, there is no comparison between the State of Israel and German Nazis. Wildly inaccurate, not to say glib, historical comparisons like the one made by the befuddled Horit are evidence of something worse than liberal stupidity. Horit’s analogy is morally perverse. Asserting moral equivalence between Israeli border guards, under the fear of attack, with German Nazi officers, ordering Jews to their death at their leisure, reveals a one-sided analysis of the conflict that infects the thinking of Western liberals. Does it matter that Western liberals like Horit have lost their moral compass and perhaps related to this, are incompetent at drawing historical analogies? I think it does. Not only does Horit’s analogy, in some indeterminable way, give encouragement to terror by excusing the moral culpability of the terrorists; it attacks the very hope that there can ever be peace between the two peoples. For if self-defence (and bad behaviour by Israeli border guards) is equivalent to systematic genocide, then how can we condemn Palestinians who walk on to buses and blow the arms and legs off themselves, and fathers, mothers and children who ride on them? Only evil as great as that of the Nazi’s could justify such a terror strategy. There is a perfectly moral response to the actions of the border guards and it is provided in the same article and comes from the mouth of a left-wing Israeli MP. "I am shocked beyond words," said Zahava Galon, a legislator for the Left-wing Yahad party. "On the face of it, it is a bizarre, incomprehensible incident. Yet it is a blatant example of the harsh reality of the Israeli occupation."It is pointless to argue with this – it is a statement of fact. While not seeking to justify inexcusable behaviour by Israeli soldiers, one can pose the following, essentially political, questions: Will the occupation cease while Palestinians continue to embrace an ideology that demands that Israel is driven into the sea? Will checkpoints come down while suicide bombers blow up civilians in Israeli cities? How can Israel support the creation of a Palestinian state and at the same time ensure its own survival? If securing Israel is equated with Nazi genocide then why should there be any limits to the terror strategies adopted by the Palestinians? If Palestine is the Warsaw Ghetto, then every Israeli is a Nazi pig. This is the dead end of Horit’s historical analogy. Copyright (c) 2004, George Miller |