I have lately been speaking about two kinds of Nazi -- the kind that murdered my aunt, all my Jewish classmates, and would have murdered me had I not had the good fortune to be given an American visa in time to leave Germany in April 1941. And the even worse kind, which is spelled "NOT SEE" (and pronounced the same as "Nazi" in American English). The very recent case of an apparently randomly selected Palestinian teenager severely beaten up by a gang of Israeli youths, then had gasoline poured down his throat and lit on fire and burned to death was, of course, terrible and reminded me of the many lynchings of Black people in the United States, especially of fourteen year old Emmett Till. What was even worse was that both the Israeli public and the American public did not erupt in outraged anguish, that they willfully did NOT SEE it as a reflection of a loss of soul of a society whose founders intended it to be a "light unto the nations." Or that Israelis -- and most American Jews and ALL American mainstream media -- do NOT SEE the humanity in (and the diversity among) Palestinians but lump them all as (at best) "terrorists" or even as people who deserve to be killed (as in "the only good Indian is a dead Indian").
At least when the legendary Hebrews were led to the "promised land" by Moses (who was not permitted to live to enter it, but ceded that task to Joshua) and proceeded to slaughter the male inhabitants of that land, they had enough sense of guilt about that slaughter that they attributed it to orders from "God." The current leaders of Israel (with the unanimous support of ALL Representatives and Senators in the U.S. Congress) attribute the slaughter of men, women, and children and the bombings of hospitals and homes in Gaza to "legitimate defense" against random, supposedly HAMAS-led, rocket attacks. There would be far more effective and defensible ways to end such occasional acts of piracy as the rocket attacks and the rare kidnapping of three Israeli children: end the occupation of Palestine and the blockading of Gaza. If preventing rocket attacks is indeed the intention of the current war on Gaza. But realistically, the attack on Gaza (and the ending of "Peace Talks" as soon as Palestinians effected a merger of Fatah and Hamas, thus creating the ONLY body conceivably able to speak for Palestinians as a whole) is far more likely a part of the strategy of ethnic cleansing widely proclaimed by the right in Israeli politics. The political class in Israel wants to free that nation (and the parts conquered in 1963) of Arabs, much as Hitler wanted a Germany that was "Judenrein" and saw to it in the early years that life for Jews in Germany was getting worse and worse, that they could not practice certain professions, their synagogues were set on fire, their homes invaded and destroyed, so that they would want to leave; only later was there a mass extermination of those who had not or could not leave. Nor is Israel free of the sin of collective punishment, if not at the level of totality as in Lidice or on Kristallnacht -- or, in Yugoslavia, Screbenica(?), and, in the American context, at the Battle of Wounded Knee. As Hitler had his concentration camps, at first mainly for political opponents and individual leaders among Jews (including my distant cousin Otto Hirsch, dead in Mauthausen in summer 1941), Israel has hundreds of Palestinians languishing untried, uncharged, in renewable 6-month "administrative detention" many of them children.
I am intensely grateful for the existence of a large and growing group of American Jews, "Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)," who recognize a historical and biblical and talmudic tradition of justice and of holding the "stranger" in equal or greater esteem than the neighbor and the self. In the light of the hateful chants about killing Arabs and willful NOT SEEing by so many Jews, it is groups like JVP that make me willing still to claim my Jewish heritage.
Michael, an American Jewish physisist and lawyer whose origins are in Stuttgart, Germany
At least when the legendary Hebrews were led to the "promised land" by Moses (who was not permitted to live to enter it, but ceded that task to Joshua) and proceeded to slaughter the male inhabitants of that land, they had enough sense of guilt about that slaughter that they attributed it to orders from "God." The current leaders of Israel (with the unanimous support of ALL Representatives and Senators in the U.S. Congress) attribute the slaughter of men, women, and children and the bombings of hospitals and homes in Gaza to "legitimate defense" against random, supposedly HAMAS-led, rocket attacks. There would be far more effective and defensible ways to end such occasional acts of piracy as the rocket attacks and the rare kidnapping of three Israeli children: end the occupation of Palestine and the blockading of Gaza. If preventing rocket attacks is indeed the intention of the current war on Gaza. But realistically, the attack on Gaza (and the ending of "Peace Talks" as soon as Palestinians effected a merger of Fatah and Hamas, thus creating the ONLY body conceivably able to speak for Palestinians as a whole) is far more likely a part of the strategy of ethnic cleansing widely proclaimed by the right in Israeli politics. The political class in Israel wants to free that nation (and the parts conquered in 1963) of Arabs, much as Hitler wanted a Germany that was "Judenrein" and saw to it in the early years that life for Jews in Germany was getting worse and worse, that they could not practice certain professions, their synagogues were set on fire, their homes invaded and destroyed, so that they would want to leave; only later was there a mass extermination of those who had not or could not leave. Nor is Israel free of the sin of collective punishment, if not at the level of totality as in Lidice or on Kristallnacht -- or, in Yugoslavia, Screbenica(?), and, in the American context, at the Battle of Wounded Knee. As Hitler had his concentration camps, at first mainly for political opponents and individual leaders among Jews (including my distant cousin Otto Hirsch, dead in Mauthausen in summer 1941), Israel has hundreds of Palestinians languishing untried, uncharged, in renewable 6-month "administrative detention" many of them children.
I am intensely grateful for the existence of a large and growing group of American Jews, "Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)," who recognize a historical and biblical and talmudic tradition of justice and of holding the "stranger" in equal or greater esteem than the neighbor and the self. In the light of the hateful chants about killing Arabs and willful NOT SEEing by so many Jews, it is groups like JVP that make me willing still to claim my Jewish heritage.
Michael, an American Jewish physisist and lawyer whose origins are in Stuttgart, Germany
{Study group} Albany Protest of the attack on GazaDatum: 25. Juli 2014 05:58:34 MESZFotos of US citizens protest against support of Israels war policies: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/115535821288160866267/albums/6039788322195266033
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