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Israeli prof says Israel is committing suicide like Germany– and lobby ‘coerced’ Obama to go along

This commentary was published by Haaretz in Hebrew, “No to Boycott, Yes to Suicide,” by Moshe Shoked a professor emeritus of anthropology at Tel Aviv University. He responds to the boycott bill, which would make it a crime to push for boycott of Israeli institutions. Excerpts, focusing on the German analogy.

The Knesset is entitled to believe that the entire world is against us, and make laws in that spirit, but in the Middle East’s only democracy, one is still allowed to argue that the state is committing suicide.

It is hard not to recall the 1930s and 1940s, when another great nation took its own life under a mad vision of border expansion. And the most terrible aspect of this is that before Berlin was destroyed, Germany’s leaders, as well as the majority of its citizens, had not turned their backs on the insanity of the Greater Germany dream. Like the postcards circulated by the protagonists of Hans Fallada’s book, “Alone in Berlin”, my articles, and articles written by others, are disturbing the peace of the real patriots, the believers in the divine promise to Abraham, those who distort the lessons of the Holocaust, and the silent majority sheepishly following the vacuous, frightening slogans of the right wing.

…As part of the nationalist education at our schools, we lead our youth on expeditions to the killing furnaces of Poland, for the upkeep of the belief in our right way, and we lead them on visits to the tombs of our ancient patriarchs in Nablus and Hebron, to reaffirm the mythological right.

We have managed to coerce US President Barack Obama into making a fool of himself for us, in front of the whole world. Who will not believe now that the world is indeed ruled by Elders of Zion languishing on heaps of dollars, which serve them in the moving and shaking of the globe? Who will not look forward eagerly to the day when the Jewish lobby’s power is eroded, and its “Zionist extension”, guarding its patriarchs’ tombs is left abandoned, exposed to the vengeance of its enemies?

Translated by Ofer Neiman.

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