My old fur-palmed friend Nim Chimpsky says I'm taking shots for quoting Israel Shahak. (I'm lousy with comments; I hide under my desk, also I'm unpaid). Here's an excerpt from Christopher Hitchens's eloquent if also slightly bloviatory obit in 2001:
Israel Shahak, who died on July 2. His home on Bartenura Street in
Jerusalem was a library of information about the human rights of the
oppressed. The families of prisoners, the staff of closed and censored
publications, the victims of eviction and confiscation – none were ever
turned away. I have met influential “civil society” Palestinians alive
today who were protected as students when Israel was a professor of
chemistry at the Hebrew University; from him they learned never to
generalize about Jews….
He had no heroes and no dogmas and no party allegiances. If he admitted
to any intellectual model, it would have been Spinoza. For Shahak, the
liberation of the Jewish people was an aspect of the Enlightenment, and
involved their own self-emancipation from ghetto life and from clerical
control, no less than from ancient “Gentile” prejudice. It therefore
naturally ensued that Jews should never traffic in superstitions or
racial myths; they stood to lose the most from the toleration of such
rubbish. And it went almost without saying that there could be no
defensible Jewish excuse for denying the human rights of others.
Oh and this just in: Nim Chimpsky has also dug up an appearance at MIT 14 years ago featuring Noam Chomsky and the late Shahak, who had the vision to see apartheid even then. I think Chimpsky was a lab animal at MIT, so that's how come he remembers this story lo these many years later:
Shahak described the situation of Palestinians as a "manifestation of
apartheid in the territories" of Israel. Although Palestinians account for
70 percent of Israeli citizens, they are regularly dealt with unjustly and
are denied resources such as land and water, Shahak said.
Palestinians are also subject to unfair legal treatment, Shahak said.
Israeli Jews who have killed or wounded Palestinians are freed, but
Palestinians are punished – often tortured – for committing the same acts
against Jews, he said.
"We are doing to Palestinians � what Christians � have done to [Jews],"
Shahak continued, tracing the history of the oppression of Jews throughout
European history. "It is quite common that a persecuted group becomes a
persecutor," he said.
Audience members had the opportunity to voice their questions and
comments after Chomsky and Shahak spoke. Some accused Chomsky and Shahak of
exaggerating and not speaking the truth. One audience member called Chomsky
a liar.
Another accused Chomsky of promoting "a cesspool of misinformation."
Echoing the words of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin about Baruch
Goldstein, the Jew who last February murdered 29 Palestinians in a mosque
in Israel, the audience member said to Chomsky, "We spit you out with every
bit of power we have."
Chomsky responded, "The feeling is mutual."
In reply to the audience's hostility, Shahak said that Jews who
perpetuate a "denial of common humanity" are "Jewish Nazis."
