POINTS OF VIEW
8042 Social Theory 7 - Israel
I have never been anti-Jewish. Some of my friends, my very best friends, have been Jewish. Moreover, I have not even known they were Jewish for most of the time I have known them; nor have I cared. At London university one argument I lost was that we should have had an organization which was not just anti-apartheid but one which was an anti-discrimination in general.
On the other hand, I guess I am anti-Zionist. The creation of the State of Israel, ultimately condoned because of the collective guilt about the Holocaust, was one of the worst things that has happened to the Middle East. The Middle East was already a cockpit of competing powers and peoples. But, until 1948 when Jews were granted a homeland, the Jews were never part of this -- or at least they had not been for 1,000 years.
By inserting Israel into this pot of boiling emotions the West created a cancer which was bound to grow. It was made even worse by the fact that - by its very nature -- Israel attracted the most extreme of Zionists. Indeed, Israel soon became the homeland as of right - for Jews at large, and its other citizens most notably the Palestinians who were the original inhabitants were denied their rights.
As it currently stands, Israel - supported by the United States (whose Jewish population has been immensely successful in its manipulation of power there) - is in large degree as fascist as the countries that perpetrated the Holocaust. Indeed, the greatest paradox is that the population of Israel are -- by definition -- those who escaped the Holocaust. It is, therefore, the ultimate cynicism that the same people use the history of Holocaust to justify actions which are almost as bad as anything that was inflicted on their relatives in the Holocaust. They terrorise their neighbours and their own Arab citizens, and when even mildly criticised they scream -- in their defence -- Holocaust!
The Holocaust was a terrible thing. There can be no doubt of that. However, it has only come to real prominence overwhelming every other example of mans inhumanity to man - since the territorial ambitions of Israel expanded from the late 1960s onwards. In the days of my youth, immediately after the Second World War, all who died - and especially those who died in the death camps were remembered equally. Now it is just the Jews.
The reality was that in the Second World War perhaps as many as 100 million people died in total. It is true that something like 8 million of these were Jews, there can be no denying that, and in the countries most affected the exterminations were applied to much larger proportion of the population than the other groups.
To get things in proportion, however, the other 90 million who died, and in particular the 20 million Russians who died, must also be recognized as they once were. Even in the concentration camps the number of other victims equalled that of the Jews; and if we add on those who were brutally killed elsewhere there are many more non-Jews to be taken into account. It's not even as if the Jews were the only population exterminated. The gypsies and homosexuals, and even Slavs, suffered almost as much in terms of the share of population; when they too were subjected to the final solution. Yet, now, the Holocaust is only about the Jews - and the Israelis are the worst perpetrators of this cynical manipulation of their own history.
The danger, of course, is that there is no exit strategy. It simply would not be possible any longer to remove the Jews from Israel, even if we were to give them another new homeland. This means they must come to terms with their neighbours, rather than brutally repressing them, and if there is to be peace the West specially the US must eventually bring home to the Zionists the real facts of life.
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