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.
How may Americans liberate themselves from their own government?
Its not rational to dismiss the holocaust in a community’s experience, memory, and tradition.
The trauma that Israelis and most Jews experience (and/or fear), is more of a never-ending stream of harrassment for being Jews (and now Zionists). An element of it knows the face of the different parties.
Some of the different parties that hate Jews are a continuous stream, or rely on and evoke similar stimuli and references to their hate. That has been the case with some of the anti-Zionist movements, that have derived some direct alliance and ideology from nazi and other fascist movements. (They’ve included elements of all of the prominent Palestinian parties, communist approaches, Christian and Muslim religious approaches).
It is true that some Zionists treat all that they experience as oppressing as a generalization of “other”, Goyim to adopt an often misinterpreted term. (It applies to ANY “other”, even Jews from nearby villages or from other religious orientations.) Faceless, uneducated, impractical in not understanding the varying possibility of coexistence.
The Palestinians also experience a trauma that is imprinted, and hinders their ability to coolly consider and create options, to think freely. And, different individuals adopt that generalized fear and/or hatred in different forms.
Its an accompaniment to post-traumatic stress, and further abstracted by diaspora solidarity.
The way to reduce post traumatic stress is NOT to attack it head on. If those that see a knew way to relate to Palestinians are to have any beneficial relevance, it will be to urge mutual humanization.
That must include compassion on one’s own, not ONLY a political approach. It is the great failing of people like Norman Finkelstein, that they did not derive a conclusion of universal compassion and healing from their experience, instead derived a political animosity and neglected to heal wounds, thereby continuing the process of wounding.
Its not too late. Avraham Burg’s and others comments are not a map to harrass, but a suggestions to practically urge compassion and reconciliation.
Palestinian nationalists like Ali Abunimah dismiss the emotional as of any relevance. It reminded me of Dr Zhivago. “The personal and emotional is irrelevant in political struggle”.
For what its worth on language of Gaza as a prison. The West Bank is described as a prison. Israel is described as a prison. Those without property in New York describe it as an open-air prison.
Its a meaningful description and not.
Its interesting news to hear of the progress of the march. I hadn’t heard anything about it hear in a long time. What is going on?
Post traumatic stress? No. The point you are missing is that everyday a Palestinian wakes up is a new day of stress forced on him or her by Israel–with USA funding and UN Veto support. This isn’t post anything. It’s in the NOW. Your cloying words
mask that you don’t get the basics of reality.
And yet, the Nakba was merely sixty years ago and the Palestinians really need to move on, huh?
Wittypocrisy.
Let’s put the comments side by side, shall we?
@ 10:52
@11:34
And I think this line, admittedly taken out of its original context, really sums it up well.
Update from today’s news. It’s on both sides of the fence:
link to haaretz.com
This exposes the lie that Israeli soldiers only fire in self-defense. Since the man was not running towards the soldiers and was actually running away from Israel, what was the imminent danger of him approaching the Gaza border.
Israeli soldiers = East Berlin border guards?
What is the ground of Jewish resentment of the pre-WW2 West? Presumably in part that the Evian Conference on refugees led to so little, despite the very great danger the prospective refugees faced at home. But was that failure a breach of a moral law? I think it may well have been – but if so, we have still not learned our lesson. Few in the West would say that we had a duty to accept everyone, however many they might have been, fleeing in fear of their lives from Rwanda during the crisis there, or indeed accept anyone now who might flee the desperate situation in Gaza. Few in Israel would accept massive refugee waves from Darfur.
Does a serious attack by a government on the civil rights of some of its citizens justify war, rather than acceptance of refugees, by other governments? This is not an easy question and we know that humanitarian intervention has a mixed record – Saddam’s tyranny does not seem totally convincing as a justification for the Iraq War.
The ‘righteous anger’ over the lack of sufficient international action on behalf of persecuted Jews has led some to say – by way of a universal demand, rather than of a demand for privilege for Jews – that every distinct human group, perhaps in particular every national or racial group, deserves the protection of a country where that group is the majority. As one application of this demand, the existence of Israel is justified by the protection that it will always extend to Jews in distress, a justification which presupposes that countries in general cannot be trusted to protect and afford the rule of law to all, regardless of nationality or race. But we should note that the proposition pressed on Europe by Hitler – that national (in particular German) minorities could not trust non-national (in particular non-German) governments to provide the protection and fairness due to them, so it was up to the German government to protect them by what means were necessary – was another application of the same demand. We resisted this proposition to the point of war. More generally, the demand for political protection from your own race entails the opinion that the only viable states are those where one race is securely dominant: a horrible opinion.
RE: “What is the ground of Jewish resentment of the pre-WW2 West? Presumably in part that the Evian Conference on refugees led to so little…” – MHughes976
SEE: “The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict”, Third Edition, published by Jews for Justice in the Middle East
(EXCERPT) Wasn’t the main goal of Zionism to save Jews from the Holocaust?
“In 1938 a thirty-one nation conference was held in Evian, France, on resettlement of the victims of Nazism. The World Zionist Organization refused to participate, fearing that resettlement of Jews in other states would reduce the number available for Palestine.” John Quigley, “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice.”
“It was summed up in the meeting [of the Jewish Agency’s Executive on June 26, 1938] that the Zionist thing to do ‘is belittle the [Evian] Conference as far as possible and to cause it to decide nothing…We are particularly worried that it would move Jewish organizations to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees, and these collections could interfere with our collection efforts’…Ben-Gurion’s statement at the same meeting: ‘No rationalization can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.’ ” Israeli author Boas Evron, “Jewish State or Israeli Nation?”
“[Ben-Gurion stated,] ‘If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second—because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.’ In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, Ben-Gurion commented that ‘the human conscience’ might bring various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany. He saw this as a threat and warned: ‘Zionism is in danger.’ ” Israeli historian, Tom Segev, “The Seventh Million.”
“The Zionist movement…interfered with and hindered other organizations, Jewish and non-Jewish, whenever it imagined that their activity, political or humanitarian, was at variance with Zionist aims or in competition with them, even when these might be helpful to Jews, even when it was a question of life and death…Beit Zvi documents the Zionist leadership’s indifference to saving Jews from the Nazi menace except in cases in which the Jews could be brought to Palestine…[e.g.] the readiness of the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, to absorb one hundred thousand refugees and the sabotaging of this idea—as well as others, like proposals to settle the Jews in Alaska and the Philippines—by the Zionist movement… “The obtuseness of the Zionist movement toward the fate of European Jewry did not prevent it, of course, from later hurling accusations against the whole world for its indifference toward the Jewish catastrophe or from pressing material, political, and moral demands on the world because of that indifference.”
Israeli author Boas Evron, “Jewish State or Israeli Nation?”
“The Origin of…” (40 pages) - link to cactus48.com
Thankyou, very interesting. My knowledge of the Evian business is fairly superficial, I admit. When I visited the Washington Holocaust Museum I was struck by the reproachful attitude taken towards the United States, rather than just towards Europe, in respect of Evian – no pro-American exceptionalism. Has anyone made any kind of plausible challenge to Boas Evron’s interpretation of events?
The Eastern European Jewish part of my family say that they were abandoned by the Zionist charities in WWII. Their disgust and derision for Jewish Zionists’ actions during WWII is still palpable and is carried down through the generations. It is outright hatred for Zionists. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it close to 100 times, and it’s this: “You Americans have no idea what caused WWII and you have no idea what those Zionist Jews did to cause the war.” [These are people who nearly died, who suffered tremendously, who were poor, and who lost everything.] But they wont talk about it. They absolutely refuse. They will only express their hatred. And it is palpable with them.
bears repeating:
MHughes976 wrote:
just no getting around the Golden Rule,
unless one prefers its opposite, the rule of the psychopathic god:
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
~W H Auden
Interesting Auden Quote.