Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Israel's Mirror

"WHY ZIONISM-NAZISM COMPARISONS ARE LEGITIMATE"

Why Zionism-Nazism comparisons are legitimate

some victims of the Sabra and Shatila masscre
"Comment by Khalid Amayreh

I strongly believe that Jews around the world, including those in Israel , ought to be constantly reminded of the evil crimes committed in Palestine under their collective name, as well as understand the close ideological similarity between Nazism and Zionism.

This, I believe, is a legitimate tool to get Jews, especially those who still value justice and honesty, to reconsider their identification and infatuation with this evil entity and its equally nefarious ideology and actions.

Jews all around the world simply can’t love Israel and support its wanton criminality against the Palestinian people while at the same time continuing to lecture the world about the evils of Nazism. Moral consistency is absolutely paramount.

Supporting oppression and racism is often as bad as practicing oppression and racism. Indeed, oppression such as occupation can’t persist for a long time without the material and moral support and backing by people who may often look nice and speak softly. Many of the supporters of Apartheid in South Africa and Nazism in Germany also looked very nice and spoke softly, not knowing (or knowing) that they were tacitly backing evil, racist criminals committing ghastly crimes against humanity.

Zionism (the central embodiment of which is the apartheid Israeli state) is evil because of its racist evil ideology and criminal actions and behaviour in Palestine .

Zionism has declared all Jews a distinct ethnicity, just as the Nazis had declared all Germans a distinct ethnicity.

Both Zionism and Nazism strove to build a ‘state’ that would be ‘redeemed’ through violent purification (in the case of Nazi Germany) and ‘an Iron wall’ (in the case of Zionist Israel).

In both instances, ethnic cleansing was the main tool used to obliterate the ‘inferiors,’ the ‘water carriers and wood hewers’ in order to create ‘German-only’ settlements in Europe and ‘Jewish-only’ settlements in Palestine .

In all honesty, there are no fundamental differences between Jewish national socialism (Zionism) and German national socialism (Nazism). The Nazis preached the ‘Master Race’ to justify Nazism while Zionists adopted the ancient myth of the ‘Chosen People’ to justify Zionism.

Moreover, we can’t really ignore the absolute similarity between the Zionist ethnic conquest of Palestine and the implanting therein of ‘Jewish settlers’ at the expense of the native Palestinian Muslims and Christians, and the Nazi drive for ‘Lebensraum’ in Poland and the importation of ‘Aryans’ at the expense of the indigenous population.

Yes, there in Europe , the Nazis sought to steal the Sudetenland and here in Palestine , the Zionists are stealing the West Bank . The arguments are the same, the lies are the same and the means are nearly identical.

We need to highlight these similarities and the ‘common ground’ between Zionism and Nazism, irrespective of how many people will be upset by these comparisons. The truth is always a paramount value in itself.

There is no doubt that the Third Reich committed monstrous crimes against helpless Jews far greater than those committed by Israel against the equally helpless Palestinians. Yes, we all know about Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Treblinka and the other detention camps where many Jews, mainly non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, perished at the hands of the Nazi exterminators.

However, let us ask ourselves the following question: Were the Nazis ‘Nazi’ only because they created and used gas chambers to incinerate their Jewish and non-Jewish victims? Would the Nazis have been less evil and therefore ‘less Nazi’ if they had annihilated their victims by way of bullets instead of ovens, or by starving them to death as Israel has been doing to the Palestinians? Besides, if Jews had the right to call the “Exodus Ship” a floating Auschwitz, why is it wrong for the Palestinians to describe as “Nazi” the ongoing extirpation of an entire people from their ancestral homeland? Do Jew have an exclusive right to call their critics and enemies “Nazi” while others, e.g. the Palestinians, don’t have a similar right to call Israeli crimes and criminals “Nazi”?

Besides, should we refrain from using the Nazi epithets to describe the racist criminals of our time, wherever they happen to be and regardless of what religion they adhere to, until and unless they start using gas chambers to exterminate their victims?

More to the point, by what logic are Israel and its supporters using the Second World War (a cruel war in which a few million Jews as well as nearly 50 million non-Jews perished) as a justification and cover-up to dispossess, dehumanize and ethnically cleanse the indigenous Palestinian people?

Well, Israel could theoretically annihilate most Palestinians with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or simply through a sustained campaign of massive artillery bombardment and air bombing. Would such an act make Israelis less ‘Nazi’?

I want to ask those who might rave and rant against me the following question: At what point should we start calling Israel ‘Nazi’? When the number of its victims reaches one million? Two million? Or perhaps six million? Or when the Zionists start introducing Zyklon B to kill us? Or when 90% of Palestinians are packed into detention camps, surrounded by 8-meter high concrete walls fitted with watchtowers that are manned by trigger-happy Zionist Gestapo?

I know some Zionist apologists will be prompted, almost instinctively, to argue that, unlike Israel , the Third Reich had devised a plan, a final solution, to exterminate all Jews in Europe and the world.

Well, regardless of the historical authenticity of such a claim, I would challenge the Zionists and their supporters and apologists to prove that Israel doesn’t harbour a final solution for the Palestinians.

Isn’t the brutal extirpation of virtually an entire people from their historical motherland tantamount to a kind of final solution? Isn’t ethnic cleansing a form of a final solution? How about the continuing starvation, encirclement and hounding of the Palestinians? Besides, is there a fundamental difference between attempting to destroy an entire people pursuant a plan and attempting to destroy them without a plan? Wouldn’t the ultimate outcome be the same?

Don’t invoke the calumny of terror. We know and you know and the whole world knows that words like ‘terror,’ ‘terrorists,’ ‘axis of evil’ and ‘enemies of freedom’ are all ideological terms used tendentiously by the powerful and the arrogant, such as Israel and the United States, to justify their own true terror against the weak and the oppressed. Even Satan himself would call his enemies terrorists.

In the final analysis, ‘terror’ is the poor man’s war against the powerful and the arrogant, and ‘war’ is the strong man’s terror against the weak and the oppressed.

Yes, the scope of the Nazi Holocaust is greater than that of the criminal Zionist occupation of Palestine . But the mentality, the psychology, the malice, the hatefulness and especially the sheer evil intent in both cases are certainly not that far apart from each other.

There is no doubt in my mind that Israel would have exterminated, or at least tried to exterminate, the Palestinian people a long time ago had the ‘objective circumstances’ been available. Needless to say ‘objective circumstances’ here could mean a huge international event (for example, a nuclear war, a global national disaster, or a gigantic event of some sort) that would divert or shift international attention from such a genocidal feat.

It is true that Israel would prefer to ‘solve the problem’ without a campaign of mass murder and mass terror, like bullying and terrorizing the Palestinians, or the vast majority of them, into leaving their ancestral homeland.

However, there is no doubt that Israel would contemplate resorting to the ‘worst scenario’ in case the Palestinians clung to their homeland and remained steadfast in their homes and towns and villages.

In 2001, a few days after the 9/11 events in the US , then Israeli Defence Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer bragged about how the international media’s preoccupation with events in the US enabled Israel to kill more Palestinians in the West Bank without being censured by the international community.

Similarly, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told students at Bar Ilan University in 1989 that “ Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstration in China (the Tiananmen Square events) where world attention was focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsion among the Arabs of the territories.”

Even today, Israeli leaders say brazenly that they wish to wake up to see all of us dead.

Indeed, the Palestinian national demise has always been and continues to be Zionism’s ultimate goal, this is why Zionism doesn’t really recognize our very existence as a people, and when it does or is forced to do so under the pressure of reality, it insists that Palestine is Jordan and that Amman , not Jerusalem , is the capital of Palestine .

In addition, there is no doubt that the daily acts of murder, terror, humiliation and savagery which ordinary Palestinians are routinely subjected to at the hands of trigger-happy Israeli soldiers manning checkpoints and roadblocks throughout the occupied territories are comparable in many aspects to the same acts of humiliation and terror Jews and non-Jews had to endure in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Nazis imprinted serial numbers on the forearms of Jewish internees, and the Israelis have done the same to the Palestinians.

The Nazis treated Jews as mere numbers rather than human beings, and the Israelis have done the same with the Palestinians.

The Gestapo savaged, brutalized and starved Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to break their collective will, and Israel has been doing the same to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank .

The Nazis practiced all kinds of sadistic behavior with Jews, like for example, forcing Jewish musicians to play music for Gestapo and Wehrmacht soldiers, and the Israelis have done the same in the West Bank at the checkpoints.

I don’t know if Jews were forced to drink German soldiers’ urine as Israeli border policemen on several occasions have forced their Palestinian victims to do.

During the years of the two Intifadas (uprisings), I travelled throughout the West Bank , passing through Israeli army checkpoints and roadblocks. There, I saw the extent to which Israeli soldiers, many of them grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, behave bestially towards helpless Palestinians.

I saw soldiers murder innocent people on the spot for no genuine reason. I saw soldiers force young Palestinians to strip naked and stand for hours under heavy rain. I saw soldiers relaxed and enjoying the pain and suffering inflicted on thousands of Palestinians, passengers and motorists, whose only ‘fault’ was that of being Palestinian and weak.

I saw face to face the obscene sadistic acts practiced by Jews against their helpless victims. This behavior is not played out in isolated incidents. This is the norm, not the exception.

The Nazi-like occupation of Palestine by Israel is not the act of a few Israeli Jews. It is not even the act of the military establishment alone. It is the collective act of a morally desensitized society that has nearly lost its humanity and succumbed to a collective psychosis that is not unlike the moral blindness that struck the German people more than sixty years ago.

Today, most Jews are more or less either enthusiastically supportive or silent and apathetic about the atrocities being perpetrated in their name in Gaza , the West Bank and Lebanon .

In fact, I would exaggerate little by saying that many, probably a majority, of Israeli Jews are even enjoying and benefiting from the occupation.

In some ways, Palestinians have fared far worse than Hitler’s victims; for the Palestinian tragedy is ongoing and Palestinians, unlike Jews, who still receive compensation for losses dating back sixty years, receive no reparations for lost personal property, not even an acknowledgment from their tormenters of any responsibility for their dispossession.

Sixty years ago Zionists demolished 438 Palestinian villages and poisoned or destroyed wells to ensure that their rightful owners would not return. Today, Zionists keep on behaving more or less along the same traditions, demolishing homes, destroying farms, and narrowing people’s horizons, all with the goal of making them emigrate.

Today in every junior high school in America , students read Anne Frank, while in every high school Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ is requisite reading. This is the man who says brazenly that he readily identifies with Israeli crimes and that he couldn’t bring himself to say bad things about Israel .

The victims of the first Kristallnacht enjoy the world’s approbation and sympathy, while at the same time having succeeded in demonizing an entire people, for whom Kristallnacht still remains a night without end.

But, unlike the German national socialists, Jewish national socialists are falsifying history and reality to justify their crimes against humanity. The Holocaust narrative, which has been elevated to the status of a religion, allows Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, to invoke the mantra ‘Never Again’ while it sits on Arab lands stolen from Ein Karem and overlooking the unmarked graves of Palestinians massacred by Judeo-Nazi terrorists at Deir Yassin.

It is sad, really sad, that most Jews are now finding themselves in the shoes of their former oppressors, knowingly and consciously.

On August 23, 1947 , nearly one year before Israel’s birth, Harry Truman wrote the following to Eleanor Roosevelt, apparently in the wake of another Jewish atrocity in Palestine :

“I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on the top they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.”

Today, in light of Israel ’s Nazi-like behavior in Palestine , it is difficult to view Truman’s prophetic words with indifference. In fact, it is a moral obligation of the first order to oppose Zionism with the same vigour and same determination the world demonstrated in the face of Nazism.

Some Jews, out of ignorance or tribal loyalty or both, insist that opposition to Zionism is anti-Semitism. Well, if oppression and racism are consistent with being Jewish, then, yes, the world will be obliged to be anti-Jewish in a certain sense. Indeed, if anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, then anti-Semitism itself becomes a moral obligation upon all conscientious people, as Michael Neumann, Professor of Philosophy at Trent University in Ontario , Canada , so eloquently argues.

“Today, when Israel could have peace for the taking, it conducts another round of dispossession, slowly, deliberately, making Palestine unliveable for Palestinians, and liveable for Jews. And the purpose here is not to attain security, as Israeli propagandists and hasbara spinners would want us to believe. The real purpose is the extinction of a people, the Palestinian people.

“And Israel has enough PR-savvy to eliminate the Palestinians with an American rather than a Hitlerian level of violence. This is a kinder, gentler (creeping) genocide that portrays the perpetrators as victims and the victims as terrorists.”

“It is amply clearly that Israel is building a racial state, not a religious one. Like my parents, I have always been an atheist. I am entitled by the biology of my birth to Israeli citizenship; you, perhaps, are the most fervent believer in Judaism, but are not. Palestinians are being squeezed and killed for me, not for you. They are to be forced into Jordan , to perish in civil war. So no, shooting Palestinian civilians is not like shooting Vietnamese or Chechen civilians. The Palestinians aren’t ‘collateral damage’ in a war against a well-armed Communist or separatist forces. They are being shot because Israel thinks all Palestinians should vanish or die, so people with one Jewish grandparent can build subdivisions on the rubble of their homes. This is not the bloody mistake of a blundering but an emerging evil, the deliberate strategy of a state conceived in and dedicated to an increasingly vicious ethnic nationalism. It has relatively few corpses to its credit so far, but its nuclear weapons can kill perhaps 25 million people in a few hours.”

I frankly don’t believe that the Zionists are morally fit to lecture the world even on the evils of Nazism, and the reason for this lies not only in Zionism’s Nazi-like crimes against the Palestinian people and other peoples in the Middle East . It goes much further than that.

Zionism cooperated and collaborated with Nazism, not necessarily to save Jews, as the paragons of lies would claim, but rather to fulfil Zionism and Zionist statehood. And in order to expedite the evil goal, the Zionists quietly consented to the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews who could have been saved and sent to other parts of the world, especially North America .

In 1949, the Israeli intelligence employed Walter Rauff, an SS officer who is believed to have been responsible for the murder of at least 100,000 people and was wanted by the Allies as a war criminal. Israel, instead of bringing him to justice it paid him for his services and helped him escape to South America . Rauff, who had devised a plan to destroy Jews in Palestine, was by no means the only Nazi criminal employed by Israel.

Yes, it is wrong to blame each and every Jew on earth for the crimes of Israel . However, Jews can make a difference if they wish to, by speaking up against Israeli criminality and racism.""