Couple weeks ago I passed along that Palestinian Sophie's Choice story from the Gaza slaughter and so did Anna Baltzer: The one in which a Palestinian mother was supposedly commanded to choose which five of her ten children would be killed. Baltzer has defended her decision in an email, and added this forceful context:
The truth is that everyday people of any background in any place are
capable of unthinkable crimes. Germans were not born Nazis.
Palestinians were not born suicide bombers. When you give 18-year-old
boys big guns and tanks and send them into an area full of people they
fear (and consequently hate), the result is predictable. It doesn't
matter where you come from. The story is not anti-Semitic; it's just
one story of many, all testimonies to the dangerous power-dynamic
created by unmonitored occupation and ethnocentric nationalism. And
it's a call for us to change the circumstances that can lead to the
repetition of history.
Comparing Israel's actions to anything done by the Nazis is something
I almost never do, because it is rarely accurate or useful. However, I
am tired of pretending that similarities do not exist. Obviously there
is no comparison between systematically exterminating 6 million Jews
and dispossessing or imprisoning 10 million Palestinians (and killing
tens of thousands more). Still, the ghettoizing, the massacres, the
humiliation tactics, the torture, the religious and ethnic profiling…
they all feel so horribly familiar. I might add that the official
definition of genocide extends also to the destruction of a cultural
or national identity, something of which Israel is surely guilty.
To read this is to be lifted out of the ethnocentric mindset of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which so defined Jewish exceptionalism for the last 20 years. Though I don't know that I go along with the genocide charge. It's a high bar.
(Phil Weiss)
