Originally posted by
tarka the duck
It is perfectly possible to have a discussion about the issue of Israel’s self-determination
without entering the territory of anti-Semitism.
The line between criticism of Israel, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are - like Israel’s borders -
disputed. But one doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know how to criticise the actions of
a right-wing extremist government that is guilty of treating a group of people - in this case,
the Palestinians - appallingly, without resorting to the propaganda of poisonous, inciteful
rhetoric. The moment you do that, you’ve constructed a barrier to further dialogue.
And that barrier increases in size the moment you mention the Nazis or Hitler in this context:
all that does is deliberately causes pain, inflaming wounds that have not yet healed in a bid
to win argumentative points. The vast majority of Jews in the world have relatives who were killed
in the Holocaust: for them, this is not some abstract talking point or rhetorical crutch.
You are using a strategy that’s known as “Holocaust Inversion”: comparing the actions of Israel
to Nazi Germany isn’t only deliberately hurtful, it’s factually inaccurate. Choosing to link Zionism
to the Nazi party when there are so many far more appropriate historical and contemporary
comparators shows a reluctance to engage in a rational and civil interchange.
To pretend an equivalence does two things: it exaggerates Israel’s guilt grotesquely, while
at the same time, absolving the Nazis of their crimes of attempting ethnic annihilation on an
industrial scale. Your claim is based on false moral equivalence: you are saying that there
is no difference between two greatly dissimilar actions.
What Israel has done/is doing to the Palestinians does not remotely resemble what the Nazis
did to Jews and others. The scale and purpose are completely different, in ways so glaring
that they really shouldn’t have to spelt out. If the Israelis treated Palestinians in the way that
they were treated by the Nazis, two thirds of the Palestinian population would have been
murdered by now.
Between 1965 and 2013, there have been 21,500 casualties in the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
In 1941, up to 20,000 people a day were murdered at Auschwitz alone.
There are no gas chambers, no mobile killing units, no crematoria, no death squads, no lime pits,
no massacre sites such as Babi Yar, no slave labour camps and concentration camps, no suppression
of religious freedom, and no campaigns to hunt down and eliminate particular ethnic, religious
and social groups.
Such a demonisation of Israel - while ignoring genocide and mass killings that are happening
in the world right now (think Myanmar, Mali, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, CAR, Democratic
Republic of Congo, Yemen …) could be an indication of deep seated bigotry.
Which other countries with appalling human rights have their very existence questioned?