On Thursday night, I went to a Gaza fundraiser at Abdeen Jabara‘s place in New York. We raised $4300 for the march. Jabara told the people who are going to Gaza what Gaza looked like a few years ago, before the removal of settlements. There were guard towers overlooking the Palestinians and they were in a big outdoor prison. Jabara’s description reminded me of European concentration camps, or D.P. camps.
And indeed, Gaza isn’t much different today; the watchtowers are outside the border, but the Israelis can shoot people the other side of the fence.
The Holocaust narrative is at the bottom of the Israel/Palestine situation: a narrative of Jewish victimization that justifies the endless mistreatment of Palestinians, who stand in for Nazis. And it seems that much of what the Nazis did to the Jews must now be reenacted, as the abused becoming the abuser.
The Israel lobby, whose strength has been demonstrated again and again in the last few months, also has Holocaust roots: the righteous outrage on the part of American Jews over the alleged American complicity in the Holocaust. We don’t trust the goyim to handle Jewish interests. The lobby is just compensation: a Jewish hammerlock on foreign policy in this region.
There were many Jews in the room the other night as Jabara spoke. One good sign is that there’s a generational component to this thinking. Young Jews and not-young forward-thinking-Jews don’t feel the way my generation or my parents’ does about the American power structure. The Holocaust is not a living part of this new wave’s historical myth structure; and they are better equipped to look at Israeli behavior for what it is, extremist, and also to disinter the pain that lies behind the atrocities that Jews are committing in Israel/Palestine, and that American Jews here are licensing.
Thus Jabara stirred the Jewish conversation on these issues. A friend for whom Jewish company is as important as it is for me said to me the other day, "we’re engaged in our own mythic liberation struggle- Palestinian liberation IS Jewish liberation." Thrilling words. Please… join us.
