Stop Playing the Anti-Semitism Card & Get Real about the Rise of Fascism in Israel
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 1 Sep 2014
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
Maung Zarni
“If you don’t want to kill Palestinians, if that’s what pains you so much, you don’t have to kill them. You can give them their rights, and you can end the occupation. And to put the blame for the occupation and for the killing of innocents that we are seeing in Gaza now on the Palestinians — why? Because they want a state of their own? They want what Jews wanted and achieved? This is a great moral insult.”
Henry Siegman, U.S. Jewish Leader, 31 July 2014
Any discussion of Israel – beyond the immediate violence, overwhelmingly towards the Palestinians – has been an extremely sensitive subject.
Each time the subject of Israel’s on-going genocidal treatment of Palestinians, many Jewish individuals throw around the anti-Semitism card, and non-Jews take a default position: self-censorship, rather than frank and brutally honest look at the empirically genocidal situation.
Israel has no intention of living with an independent Palestinian state in Palestine. It has already grabbed most – more than 90% of Palestine – while attempting to empty the Palestinian pond to kill the fish in it. Today Gaza is nothing but a vast prison, a ghetto in the worst senses of the word. Like its founding strategic principle of driving Palestinians out of their land through organized terror – Ben-Gurion reportedly ordered his deputies to line up innocent, unarmed civilians against walls and shoot to kill them – for the terror effect on the rest of the Palestinian population: terror would drive them away from their land.
(I have visited concentration camps in Germany where the Nazis lined up their victims – Jews, German Communists, Poles, the Czechs, the Romas, the gay people, the disabled, Jehovah Witness, etc. – in small ‘death alleys’ – and sprayed bullets on them).
Nazism or Fascism is not encoded genetically or culturally in any people.The word “fascism’ is not exclusive to historical discussion of the Germans, Italians, Japanese or for that matter any group with a brutally fascist past. Plenty of examples of victims of past Fascisms morphing themselves into Fascists – for instance, my own country of Burma with its genocidal hatred and treatment of the Rohingya – and the Muslims there.
Just as there were the good Germans and the Nazi Germans, I would argue, there are “Nazi Jews”, based on the available evidence of popular and legalized racism in Israel towards ALL Arabs, like the mainstream media broadcast public chants demanding ‘Death to Arabs’.
What else would we call the Jews of Israel who demand ‘death to Arabs’?
Should we refrain from associating the word “Nazi” or Fascism from its past victims when the country and a group of people with political affiliation with the state founded as a result of Nazism/Fascism? I for one certainly don’t think so.
Nor are any group – however civilized, educated and prosperous immune from self-inflicting on themselves Fascist thoughts, worldviews and attributes.
There is, yes, a thin – but important – line between hating all Jews and despising Israel for its categorically racist policies and unconscionable ghettoization of the Palestinians from whom Israel has grabbed 98% of the land.
Here is a brilliant self-reflection on the reality of strong – very strong – anti-Israel sentiment around the world and the idea of anti-Semitism by a Jewish professional who has lived on 4 continents for 17 years.
source: אהרן רובין
“When I was in the UAE and in Oman, I never hid the fact that I was Jewish. When I was in Indonesia, the country with the most Muslim people in the world, I never felt the need to hide that I was Jewish. When I was in Malaysia, a country divided into Sultanates, I never hid the fact that I am Jewish.
I never heard anti-Semitic remarks in Asia or in the Middle East, but I would hear plenty of anti-Israeli sentiment. In fact, at the time it seemed like most people in Asia didn’t even know what a Jew was…most of those that did first associated Jewish with Jesus. Yet, they certainly knew what an Israeli was, and they sure had strong and critical opinions.
I remember that everywhere that I lived, Israeli embassies and Hebrew language synagogues were always surrounded by heavily armed guards…almost like the US embassies.
This was quite rare for English speaking synagogues, whether in Belgium or in Venezuela, two other places I lived. After 17 years of living on four continents, the scene is quite clear. People have opinions of Israel because of the politics of Israel. There is not the global specter of anti-Semitism often conjectured by right-wing pundits. But when Israelianism and Judaism are forcefully associated, then those that act out towards Israel might extend this deviancy to further and further associations. Israelis need Diaspora Jews, but Diaspora Jews don’t need Israelis. In fact, Israel takes advantage of the goodwill of the USA and the naiveté of the US population, particularly American Jews. Israel peddles a lie, that the Diaspora Jews share in the Israeli struggle, when they do not. Israel expects to be allowed great liberties and, like Citibank, the State of Israel expects to be bailed out by the US when clearly-obviously-PREVENTABLE shit hits the fan!
If you are Jewish, you know the history of persecution. You know that nationalism was always the menace hanging over our heads with a blade to the jugular, and our weapon was in language and in thought: humanitarianism. We ought not to neglect this lesson, that nationalism has been a poison where humanitarianism has been a life force. I fear that Israel learned the wrong lesson, prioritizing a nationalist agenda over a humanitarian agenda. This is the effect of rallying cries over reasoning. The rally cries divide us by constructed attributes. The reason undermines these constructions, and in the wake of the blessed subversion blossoms an egalitarian pluralism…”
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Here is an extremely self-reflective 2-part interview with a German-born Jewish leader, a son of a leader in the European Zionist movement where he argues that Hamas is not more terroristic than Zionist movement was in its formative, operational years of 1940s.
Henry Siegman, Leading Voice of U.S. Jewry, on Gaza: “A Slaughter of Innocents”
U.S. Jewish Leader Henry Siegman to Israel: Stop Killing Palestinians and End the Occupation
According to this American Jewish leader with a highly admirable soul, Zionism was built on ‘un-truths’, like the idea of ‘Palestina’ without people as the home for the Jews, disregarding and dismissing the already residential Palestinian Arabs there.
In fact, the founding of Israel was accomplished through nothing other than organized and deliberate terror and violence, bursting the myth that Israel has only become progressively violent and terroristic towards the Palestinians.
Siegman pointed out what some of us know through our own research and writings of the late Edward Said: besides forcibly dislocating the majority inhabitants of Palestine, the founding fathers of Israel such as David Ben-Gurion ordered their deputies to “line up innocent, un-armed Palestinian civilians and slaughter them” – with the sole purpose of terrorizing the entire population into leaving their birthplace – ah, homeland – for good.
Additionally, he punctured crucial lies on which the discourse of Israel as a peace-desiring and Hamas as repugnant terrorist organization. It is absolutely worth your while to watch this 30-minute interview of Siegman on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!
A Jewish intellectual and spiritual leader like Siegman and other well-known Jewish intellectual such as Naomi Wolf keep people with a very strong opposition to Israel’s 67-years of occupation of Palestine and Fascist-like mistreatment of the Palestinians, from crossing the distinctive line between the oft-mentioned global anti-Semitism and despising Israel, its genocidal politics and its anti-Arab racist public culture and popular psyche.
A couple of other honest self-reflective views and analyses by Jewish and Israeli writers and intellectuals are also worth reading/watching. You will certainly not get these from any corporate or mainstream western media.
Israeli Writer Gideon Levy: If Netanyahu Wants to Stop the Rockets, He Needs to Accept a Just Peace
Israel Provoked This War It’s up to President Obama to stop it.
By HENRY SIEGMAN, July 22, 2014
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Professor Ilan Pappé: Israel Has Chosen to be a “Racist Apartheid State” with U.S. Support
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RACISM IS THE FOUNDATION OF ISRAEL’S OPERATION PROTECTIVE EDGE
How pervasive anti-Arabism has paved the way for Israel’s latest assault on Gaza.
by JOEL BEININ
Joel Beinin is Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History at Stanford University and a past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. He is coeditor of The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005 andSocial Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa and author of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora as well as The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt. He is the series editor of Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures.
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On the United States’ role in the genocide of the Palestinians, here is a good one:
“Blood on American Hands”: Richard Falk on Palestine
Monday, 21 July 2014 13:03
By C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout | Interview
“For over 20 years, Israel and the United States have been working to separate Gaza from the West Bank, in violation of the Oslo Accords they had just signed declaring them to be an indivisible territorial unity. The latest carnage in Gaza is part of an ongoing Israeli imperial policy which, as Noam Chomsky wrote to me just a couple of days ago, seeks “to take over what’s of value ‘in the land of Israel,’ reduce the population to marginal existence (with the usual neocolonial exception: an enclave for the rich and Westernized sectors in Ramallah), and if they leave, so much the better.” But, as Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, former UN special rapporteur for Occupied Palestine,and author of the forthcoming book Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, which will be published in October by Just World Books, underscores in this exclusive interview, Israel always claims that its attacks against Palestinians are provoked by the Palestinians themselves.”
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Dr. Maung Zarni, Associate Fellow, the University of Malaya, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment,founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), and a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press. He was educated in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years. Visit his website www.maungzarni.com.
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