Yesterday we pointed out Yale scholar Marci Shore’s piece on the Times op-ed page about the Warsaw Ghetto resistance of the 1940s, and the ways in which this Jewish resistance was memorialized by Zionists as a foundational myth for the Jewish state.
Shore cited an often-overlooked fact:
In October 1942, the Jewish Combat Organization carried out its first death sentence, assassinating a Jew serving as a policeman in the ghetto. They had to send a message: there was a price for collaboration.
Oppressed Palestinians seem to operate by a similar code. Last November political forces in Gaza killed six men accused of being informants for Israel and dragged the body of one through the streets of Gaza City.
But those actions brought round condemnation from valiant defenders of the civilized world.
For instance, Jeffrey Goldberg tweeted:
This is what Hamas does to Palestinians it doesn’t like
Hey
#HumanRights organizations: when#Hamas drags bodies through the street, its time to condemn.
Sort of like terrorism. It’s barbaric– unless Jews do it.
P.S. Annie Robbins points out that Hamas condemned those executions.
Hamas’ Deputy Politburo chief Mousa Abu Marzook posted a message on his Facebook page condemning the execution of six people accused of being Israel collaborators.
He demanded that those behind the act be tried.
She notes that Hamas also kills collaborators, but after a trial.
The sad reality is, likely, that Hamas (and PA?) would prefer that Palestinians fear THEM more than they fear Israel. Or fear their retaliation for collaboration more than they fear whatever blackmail Israel uses to compel/induce collaboration.
And anyhow, the civilized people of the world don’t see Warsaw Ghetto Jewish anti-collaborationism as unreasonable: after all, they were facing a monster, as (we all know and may freely declare) the Nazis were, whereas the Palestinians only face the
(relatively)benign Israel (a lie we may nevertheless all freely declare).Awesome. So having discovered a 70+ year old murder in the Jewish ghetto you can simultaneously justify widespread Palestinian murder of collaborators and (inaccurately) equate the Jewish experience under Nazis with that of the Palestinians.
After France was liberated from the Nazis, the French executed literally thousands of French collaborators. On the other hand, after Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon after two decades of occupation, Lebanon (and Hezbollah) treated collaborators in the “South Lebanon Army” with leniency in the spirit of reconciliation.
Not just in France or the Warsaw Ghetto, all over Europe collaborators were killed by the resistance while the war and occupation were ongoing. And during liberation ordinary people took revenge on collaborators by shaving their heads and lynching them if they got the chance, with allied forces not always able to stop them.
I disagree with the opinion of Haim Baram that the Israeli education system has managed to instil a ‘Holocaust awareness’ in its pupils (Kol Ha’Ir 12.5.89). It’s not an awareness of the Holocaust but rather the myth of the Holocaust or even a falsification of the Holocaust (in the sense that ‘a half-truth is worse than a lie’) which has been instilled here.
As one who himself lived through the Holocaust, first in Warsaw then in Bergen-Belsen, I will give an immediate example of the total ignorance of daily life during the Holocaust. In the Warsaw ghetto, even during the period of the first massive extermination (June to October 1943), one saw almost no German soldiers. Nearly all the work of administration, and later the work of transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, was carried out by Jewish collaborators. Before the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the planning of which only started after the extermination of the majority of Jews in Warsaw), the Jewish underground killed, with perfect justification, every Jewish collaborator they could find. If they had not done so the Uprising could never have started. The majority of the population of the Ghetto hated the collaborators far more than the German Nazis. Every Jewish child was taught, and this saved the lives of some them “if you enter a square from which there are three exits, one guarded by a German SS man, one by an Ukrainian and one by a Jewish policeman, then you should first try to pass the German, and then maybe the Ukrainian, but never the Jew”.
One of my own strongest memories is that, when the Jewish underground killed a despicable collaborator close to my home at the end of February 1943, I danced and sang around the still bleeding corpse together with the other children. I still do not regret this, quite the contrary.
It is clear that such events were not exclusive to the Jews, the entire Nazi success in easy and continued rule over millions of people stemmed from the subtle and diabolical use of collaborators, who did most of the dirty work for them. But does anybody now know about this ? This, and not what is ‘instilled’ was the reality. Of the Yad Vashem theatre, I do not wish to speak, at all. It, and its vile exploiting, such as honouring South African collaborators with the Nazis are truly beneath contempt.[that was John Vorster with Menachem Begin]
Therefore, if we knew a little of the truth about the Holocaust, we would at least understand (with or without agreeing) why the Palestinians are now eliminating their collaborators. That is the only means they have if they wish to continue to struggle against our limb-breaking regime.
http://jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com/2005/11/remember-shahak-forget-rabin.html