Monday, February 10, 2014

Cohen's Nazi-Comparison Spin

According to Roger Cohen in the NYTimes today, he is


a strong supporter of a two-state peace. The messianic idea of Greater Israel, occupying all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, must wither. Jews, having suffered for most of their history as a minority, cannot, as a majority now in their state, keep their boots on the heads of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank any longer.


Well, I humbly suggest to Mr. Cohen that he is in error.

First off, we are in Judea and Samaria as a result of the situation before 1967. The Arabs then, before any "occupation" and any "settlement construction", were terrorizing the Jewish state within the 1949 Armistice  Lines, having failed in their previous fedayeen terror campaign, their previous launcing of a war of aggression in 1947, their previous 1936-1939 First Intifada, their previous 1929 riots, their previous 1921 riots, their previous 1920 riots and their earlier sporadic anti-Jewish attacks.  Dismantling communities and withdrawing is a solution which does not apply to the problem.

Secondly, "Greater Israel" or more properly, the Land of Israel in its historic boundaries, was already recognized by formal international organizations and institutions.  Whether or not we have these or that borders is a matter of politics, military results and exigencies.  But in principle, those borders are not "messianic".  

Thirdly, Zionism did not come into being to facilitate the establishment of an Arab state in our homeland.  "Palestinians" are a political fiction.  If there is to be a "Palestine", it cannot exist without Jordan being part of the resolution.

Fourth, I consider your use of "boots on their heads" as a spin of Nazi-comparison.  Shame on you.

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Just saw this now:

Holocaust Inversion
By Lesley Klaff

In 2013 the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East, David Ward, after signing the Book of Remembrance in the Houses of Parliament on Holocaust Memorial Day, made use of the Holocaust to criticise Israel and ‘the Jews’ by equating Israel with Nazi Germany, and to characterise the Holocaust as a moral lesson from which ‘the Jews’ have failed to learn.

What has been called ‘Holocaust Inversion’ involves an inversion of reality (the Israelis are cast as the ‘new’ Nazis and the Palestinians as the ‘new’ Jews), and an inversion of morality (the Holocaust is presented as a moral lesson for, or even a moral indictment of ‘the Jews’)...as a means to express animosity towards the homeland of the Jews. ‘The victims have become perpetrators’ is being heard more and more. That is Holocaust Inversion.

Clemens Heni, the German political scientist and director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA), believes that the equation of Israel/the Jews/Zionism with Nazism amounts to an ‘inversion of truth’ which is used today as a form of ‘extremely aggressive anti-Jewish propaganda.’ Anthony Julius, author of a landmark study of British antisemitism, notes that Holocaust Inversion is becoming part of the iconography of a new antisemitism. Headlines such as ‘The Final Solution to the Palestine Question,’ references to the ‘Holocaust in Gaza,’ images of IDF soldiers morphing into jackbooted storm troopers, Israeli politicians morphing into Hitler, and the Star of David morphing into the Swastika, are all increasingly common.


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