Melding fra Hagai El-Ad:
"Opinion |
What Will Happen When the Holocaust No Longer Prevents the World From Seeing Israel as It Is?
Strerk melding om "det virkelige Israel, slik Hagai El-Ad ser det.
HELE artikklen nederst under Kilde
Skudeneshavn 14. mai 2024
Jan Marton Jensen
Kilde:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagai_El-Ad
HELE artikkelen i Haaretz 13. mai 2024
 |
A displaced Palestinian woman dresses a child at a camp in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday.Credit: AFP |
For anyone who wanted to see, the truth was already abundantly clear in
1955: "They treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself
would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel," wrote Hannah
Arendt.
But that was 1955, barely a decade after the Holocaust – our great catastrophe, and at the same time, Zionism's protective suit. So no, what Arendt saw in Jerusalem didn't suffice at the time to rally the world against Israel.
Almost 70 years have passed since then. Meanwhile, Israel has become addicted to both the regime of Jewish supremacy over the Palestinians and its ability to leverage the memory of the Holocaust so that the crimes it commits against them won't mobilize the world against it.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu isn't inventing a thing: not the crimes, and not the exploitation of the Holocaust to silence the world's conscience. But he's been the prime minister for almost a generation. During this period, Israel, under his leadership, took another big step toward a future in which the Palestinian people are erased from the stage of history – certainly if the stage in question is Palestine, their historical homeland.
All this was not only carried out gradually – another dunam and another goat, another outpost and another farm – but in the end it was also declared publicly, from the 2018 Basic Law on Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish people, to the basic policy of the current government, and first and foremost the statement: "The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel." And the truth is that the consensus is far broader and more sweeping than support for Netanyahu himself. After all, who in Israel didn't like the brilliant move, on the eve of October 7, 2023, of normalization with Saudi Arabia, in order to etch into the awareness of the Palestinians the fact that they're a defeated nation?
 |
Charred
cars sit at the entrance of the occupied West Bank village of Duma, in
the aftermath of an Israeli settler attack, in April.Credit: Zain JAAFAR / AFP |
But the Palestinians, those stubborn people, didn't leave the stage.
Somehow, through all the years and the oppression and the settlements
and the pogroms in the West Bank, and the "rounds" of conflict with Gaza
and the violence of the army and the absence of accountability and the
expropriation in Jerusalem and the Negev and the Jordan Valley, and in
effect wherever a Palestinian tries to hold onto his land, after many
years and a lot of blood and a lot of crimes, the recycled trick of Israeli hasbara, or
public diplomacy, has begun to lose its sting, since the trivial truth
is that no, not everyone who sees the Palestinians as human beings with
rights is an antisemite.
Meanwhile, came the war in Gaza, with the destruction of biblical proportions
that we have brought upon the Strip and upon the tens of thousands of
dead Palestinian. There has been so much blood and destruction that the
question of whether this is genocide began to be seriously discussed at
the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
In Arendt's words, what we're doing to the Palestinians – those who are still in Gaza – is still not rallying the world against Israel. But the world is already permitting itself to think about it aloud.
All this still isn't making us rethink the way we "treat the Arabs." Instead, we are once again trying to breathe new life into the used hasbara balloon. If in 2019 Netanyahu declared that the investigation at the International Criminal Court is an "antisemitic decree" (that didn't stop the investigation) and in 2021 he asserted that this was "pure antisemitism" (and that didn't stop the investigation), then a week ago he started to shout about an "antisemitic hate crime."
 |
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Yad Vashem this week.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi |
Netanyahu, as usual, embeds a few words of truth between one lie and the next. In his speech on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, it was true when he described the International Criminal Court as a body "established in response to the Holocaust and other horrors, to ensure that 'Never Again.'" But with exceptional chutzpah, if you think for a moment about the setting and the timing, everything Netanyahu said surrounding this statement was a lie, especially when he asserted that if an arrest warrant is issued against him, "This step would put an indelible stain on the very idea of justice and international law."
The truth is that the stain that is shaking the foundations of
international law is the fact that even after years of investigation, as
far as we know, there has yet to be an arrest warrant issued against
Netanyahu or other Israeli war criminals. That's in spite of the fact
that for decades, Israel has been perpetrating, in broad daylight,
crimes against the Palestinians, crimes that are government policy,
crimes that are approved by the High Court of Justice, which are
protected by the opinions of attorney generals and whitewashed by
military advocate generals – although all that is overt and known,
reported and published, nobody is being held to account for it, neither
in Israel nor abroad, at least so far.
We're approaching the moment, and perhaps it's already here, when the
memory of the Holocaust won't stop the world from seeing Israel as it
is. The moment when the historic crimes committed against our people
will stop serving as our Iron Dome, protecting us from being held to
account for crimes we are committing in the present against the nation
with which we share the historical homeland.
Even if that moment is delayed, it's time for it to arrive. Israel will be without the Holocaust, but its image will be protected by the Arab Israeli hasbara genius Yoseph Haddad and the content creator Ella Travels.
Come on. Maybe we would do better to open our eyes and adopt a different attitude toward the Palestinians: to see them as equal human beings. That certainly a far better lesson for the Holocaust. Arendt would probably agree.
Ingen kommentarer:
Legg inn en kommentar