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 Posted by Aron Trauring on September 01 2002 (Sunday) : 01:08 AMFirst the news, from Friday's Haaretz: "IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon's controversial remarks earlier this week were 'true and correct' and described 'the situation as it is,' Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said yesterday." "Ya'alon, both at a conference organized by the chief rabbis on Sunday and in an interview with Ha'aretz Magazine, described the Palestinian threat as 'cancerous,' said the current Palestinian leadership does not recognize Israel's right to exist, and that a unilateral withdrawal from the territories would constitute giving in to terrorism." "Sharon said the criticism of Ya'alon stems from political considerations, and that had the chief of staff said the opposite, he would undoubtedly have been praised by the left." Indeed. Many years ago, when I was in Columbia College, a friend of mine invited me to hear Meir Kahane talk at the University. Out of curiosity, I decided to go. Kahane was a clever and charismatic speaker, no doubt. I left the speech, profoundly disturbed. If one would substitute the word "Jew" for "German" and "Negro" (the term Kahane used) for "Jew", then Kahane's speach could have come right out of the pages of Goebbels' racist propaganda. The Nazi's were fond of comparing the Jews to parasites, viruses, and cancers. As such, the proper and moral action was to excise the disease before the body became infected and died. Kahane used similar metaphors when talking about black Americans. In the mid to late '70s, American Jewry was still a very liberal and open community, so Kahane's brand of racism didn't take root. In fact, Kahane got in trouble with the law here, so he decided to uproot and move to Israel. There he founded a political party, which rapidly grew in popularity. In 1983, right when we had moved to Israel, I was walking down the streets of Rehovot, and I encountered a poster placed by Kahane's party. Once again the language was chilling: "Daughter of Israel! There is a danger amongst us. Arab men are trying to seduce innocent young Jewish girls, and defile the purity of Jewish women." On and on it went. A shiver went down my spine when I read it. At the time, I comforted myself and said that Kahane and his party were a marginal group, and very few Israelis believed in his racialist theories. In fact, Kahane's party was banned, Kahane himself spent most of his time in the U.S. until he was killed by an Arab. Unfortunately Kahanist racial theories took root in the settler movement. I remember visiting Jerusalem just a few months prior to Rabin's assassination. There were stickers all over the bus station comparing the Arabs to "cancer" and crude caricatures of Rabin were posted around town, which look as if they had been copied right out of Julius Streicher's Der Strummer. Not too long ago Akiva Eldar wrote a piece about some Israeli leftists who had signed a joint "covenant" with Effi Eitam. The latter, who is now the head of the National Religious Party in Israel, also commonly compares the Palestinians to "a cancer in our midst." Eldar comments on how apalling it is that these so-called liberals could find common cause with a man who uses Nazi language. But still, Eitam does not represent the whole of Israeli society. But then, along comes this interview with Ya'alon, the head of the "pillar of Israeli democracy," the IDF. Just for context, here is Goebbels, in a piece written in 1941: "...For their [the Jews ed.] sake alone we must win the war. If we lose it, these harmless-looking Jewish chaps would suddenly become raging wolves. They would attack our women and children to carry out revenge...There is no turning back in our battle against the Jews—even if we wanted to, which we do not. The Jews must be removed from the German community, for they endanger our national unity." "That is an elementary principle of racial, national and social hygiene. They will never give us rest. If they could, they would drive one nation after another into war against us. Who cares about their difficulties, they who only want to force the world to accept their bloody financial domination? The Jews are a parasitic race that feeds like a foul fungus on the cultures of healthy but ignorant peoples. There is only one effective measure: cut them out." Now here is Lieutenant General Moshe ("Bogey") Ya'alon, in his own words, as reported in an interview in the weekend magazine of Ha'aretz: Haaretz: "There is something surprising in the fact that you see the Palestinian threat as an existential threat." Ya'alon: "The characteristics of that threat are invisible, like cancer. When you are attacked externally, you see the attack, you are wounded. Cancer, on the other hand, is something internal. Therefore, I find it more disturbing, because here the diagnosis is critical. If the diagnosis is wrong and people say it's not cancer but a headache, then the response is irrelevant. But I maintain that it is cancer. My professional diagnosis is that there is a phenomenon here that constitutes an existential threat." Haaretz: "Does that mean that what you are doing now, as chief of staff, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is applying chemotherapy?" Ya'alon:"There are all kinds of solutions to cancerous manifestations. Some will say it is necessary to amputate organs. But at the moment, I am applying chemotherapy, yes." Once again Goebbels: "If we Germans have a fateful flaw in our national character, it is forgetfulness. This failing speaks well of our human decency and generosity, but not always for our political wisdom or intelligence. We think everyone else as is good natured as we are. The French threatened to dismember the Reich during the winter of 1939/40, saying that we and our families would have to stand in lines before their field kitchens to get something warm to eat. Our army defeated France in six weeks, after which we saw German soldiers giving bread and sausages to hungry French women and children, and gasoline to refugees from Paris to enable them to return home as soon as possible, there to spread at least some of their hatred against the Reich." "That's how we Germans are. Our national virtue is our national weakness. We do not want to change all that much, and as long as our world-famed good nature does no great harm, why should we? Klopstock gave us some good advice, however: Don't be too good natured, since our enemies are not noble enough to overlook our mistakes." "If this advice applies anywhere, it applies to our relations with the Jews. Carelessness here is not only a weakness, it is disregard of duty and a crime against the security of the state. The Jews long for one thing: to reward or foolishness with bloodshed and terror. It must never come to that. One of the most effective defenses is an unforgiving, cold hardness against the destroyers of our people, against the instigators of the war, against those who would benefit if we lose, and therefore also against the victims, if we win." And once again, Ya'alon: Haaretz: "Do you not see the war of the Palestinians against us as a campaign to end the occupation?" Ya'alon:"If the term 'occupation' had any relevance at all, it lost it, as far as I am concerned, in the year 2000, when the State of Israel put a certain proposal on the table that was supposed to resolve the problem. That proposal was supposed to get the Palestinians off our back, but instead they started to stab us. They stayed on our back, attached to us and stabbing us. That is the reality. Therefore, without getting into a political discussion of what the solution should be, I maintain that the story is not occupation. The story is non-recognition of the right of the State of Israel to exist as a Jewish state." Haaretz:"Are you saying unequivocally that the Palestinian struggle is not aimed at liberating the territories that were conquered in 1967?" Ya'alon:"Of course not. Of course not. The Palestinians have three stories. Their narrative in Arabic is one of mobilization for a war of jihad and non-recognition of Israel's right to exist. That narrative rejects any attachment between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, and it mobilizes the Palestinian people for a war with the goal of bringing about Israel's collapse. In English, the story is different: occupation, colonialism, apartheid. Those are completely irrelevant terms, which are intended to furnish the Western world with familiar terminology that clarifies who the good guys are here and who the bad guys are. "In Hebrew, they have a third story: the peace of the brave. But I know the details and I say that [Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser] Arafat is taking the name of Yitzhak Rabin, of blessed memory, in vain. He saw Oslo as a Trojan horse that would enable the Palestinians to enter Israel, and September 2000 as the moment of emerging from the belly of the horse. Today, too, the ideology of Fatah is to bring about Israel's disintegration from within. What they are after is not to arrive at the end of the conflict, but to turn Israel into a Palestinian state." Of course, many will say the comparison of Ya'alon words to Goebbels is totally unfair and uncalled for. The Jews did nothing against the Germans, while the Palestinians are conducting terrorists attacks against the Israelis. Moreover, whatever the Israelis have done to the Palestinians is worlds away from the horrors the Nazis inflicted on the Jews. The IDF is an occupying army, not the SS, and the comparison is horribly off base. So why did I make the comparison, which I realize is like waiving a red flag in a bull's face? Because the language Ya'alon is using is precisely the language which paved the way to the Jewish Holocaust. For the Chief of Staff to be speaking this way is both dangerous and frightening. While Israelis have not perpetrated a holocaust against the Palestinians, Ya'alon's language and attitudes is paving the way for further war crimes against the Palestinians. Another argument is often used against the comparison of Israelis to Nazis. The Jewish Holocaust is seen as something unique - something outside of history, which is incomparable to anything that came before and anything that may come after. I strongly object to this argument. Those who make it, remove the Jewish Holocaust from the realm of human activity. The danger in so doing is to lull us into complacency - to make us think it could never happen again. It also creates a permanent wall between the Nazis and the rest of humanity, particularly "us". As if to say, we are incapable of perpretating unspeakable horrors. But the Nazis were people like us. They had the same genetic makeup, the same biology, and similar culture, religion, and values. Goebbels sounds just like us. And if the Nazis were capable of doing the unthinkable, so are we. The dehumanization of the "enemy" has already allowed the IDF to perpetrate acts of great inhumanity against all Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are innocent of any crimes. Even the worst Palestinian terrorist is, in his own eyes, fighting for honor, dignity, freedom and land - values we claim we are fighting for as well. To call them back-stabbing, deceitful, vermin, to compare them to cancer, is to see them as totally other, to see their extermination as both practical and moral. No, the IDF is not the SS - not yet. But Ya'alon's easy use of racialist language, the language of Kahane and the Nazis, and the endorsement of this language by the Prime Minister of Israel, should be setting off alarms in Israel and the Jewish community worldwide. < | >
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"Entre los individuos, como entre las naciones, el respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz -- Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace" -Benito Juárez
"It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it." -Eleanor Roosevelt "Let them call me a rebel and welcome. I feel no concern from it. But should I suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul" -Thomas Paine | |
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Feature: A cancer in our midst
