Fascist  trends in Israel  becoming more pronounced

By Khalid Amayreh
 
Occupied Jerusalem, October 15, 2008
 
 
Whenever comparisons between the Nazi treatment of Jews prior to and during World War II  and Israeli treatment of Palestinians (and other peoples of the Middle East)  are made, Zionist apologists hasten  to dismiss the analogies as unjustified and corrupt. They correctly but misleadingly argue that Palestinians are not being shipped to gas chambers and are actually allowed  by Israel to maintain a semblance of normal life despite the often draconian  restrictions imposed on them.
 
It is of course  true that Palestinians are not being shipped to concentration camps; it is also true that many Palestinians, and despite all the evils of the occupation, are still maintaining a semblance of normal life, although such “normality”  is likely to be viewed by many people, including Jews, as utterly abnormal, even unbearable.
 
The catastrophic situation in the Gaza Strip remains a damning proof of the moral callousness and utter criminality characterizing Israeli treatment of Palestinians.
 
Prior to the Egyptian-mediated truce between Hamas and Israel several months ago, Israeli officials never stopped blaming Palestinian rocket attacks on Sderot and other Israeli settlements in the region for the hermetic blockade of Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.
 
However, while  calm and tranquility are prevailing  in Sderot, Gaza is still very much a virtual concentration camp, with innocent people dying on a daily basis because they are not allowed access to hospitals outside the Gaza Strip. Moreover, consumer products allowed into Gaza by the Israeli occupation army are still very limited in both quality and quantity.
 
In addition, the enduring  blockade of the coastal enclave is forcing  many Gazan breadwinners  to risk their lives by digging  dangerous  tunnels beneath the Egyptian-Gaza borders in order to obtain food, fuel, medicine,  and other badly needed consumer items.
 
According to reliable sources, as many as 29 young Gazans have so far  lost their lives, venturing to make a living by smuggling consumer commodities into Gaza from Egypt.
 
Doesn’t this remind us of how  blockaded Jews were forced to smuggle food into Ghetto Warsaw in 1943?
 
In fact, the Israeli moral callousness toward Gaza is only a reflection of  a  malicious collective mindset which  doesn’t differs much  in its essence from the Nazi mindset against Jews.
 
 Yes, the scope of oppression and death is not the same; but the hatefulness, the vindictiveness and maliciousness are certainly the same. Moreover, what makes the Nazi analogy  especially relevant and inescapable  is the fact that Israel would embark on the unthinkable if “the international situation” was conducive to carrying out the  contemplated task!!!
 
Today, there are truly Nazi  perceptions and trends permeating through the Israeli Jewish society with regard to the Palestinians.  Needless to say, these perceptions and trends are  strikingly similar to the anti-Jewish discourse that  prevailed in Germany prior to the holocaust, especially between 1920-1939.
 
Take, for example, the virtual pogrom being carried out against the native Palestinian community in the coastal city of Akka at the hands of Jewish thugs.
 
The failure, or perhaps unwillingness,  of the Israeli government  to stop the rampant incitement against Israel’s Arab citizens, which inevitably led to current anti-Arab hysteria in Akka, can be compared with  the failure of the German authorities to suppress the anti-Jewish wave of hatred  throughout Germany  prior to the Second World War.
 
Indeed, one is always prompted to ask what kind of state would allow the followers of  Meir Kahana, the Nazi-like Rabbi who called for a genocidal ethnic cleansing of native Arabs from Palestine-Israel, to shout ad nauseam “mavet le Arabim” (death to the Arabs)  and “Arabs out”?
 
One is equally compelled to wonder what kind of educational system and what kind of culture would produce people who keep repeating  hate-filled mottos such as “a Jew is the son of a king, an Arab is the son of a dog.”!!
 
Okay, suppose an Arab resident   violated the calm of Yom Kippur by driving his car near a Jewish neighborhood. Does this manifestly  innocuous miscalculation, if indeed it was, justify this wild hysteria? Does it justify the attempted lynching of that person and his family? Does it justify all the incitement and the “death-to-the-Arabs” slogans now being heard in many parts of Israel?
 
Yom Kippur we are told is about attaining soul-purification and spiritual enrichment. However, in light of  the horrific images from Akka and the West Bank we have been watching on our TV screens,  one wonders whether these thugs can see any difference between being religious and being criminal.
 
Unfortunately, the hateful uprising by Jews against native Palestinians in Akka is only the tip of the iceberg. I am saying this because there seem to be this layers upon thick layers of racism among many Israeli Jews against non-Jews in Palestine-Israel.
 
 In recent weeks, Israeli officials, including army commanders and defense establishment figures have made extremely serious statements, warning that Israel would annihilate hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians in any prospective  fresh hostilities.
 
One army commander said “there will be a vast amount of collateral damage.” Needless to say, the reference to collateral damage here is only a euphemism for wide-scale massacres. Another Israel figure said Israel would resort to  “the Dresden scenario,” an allusion to the holocaustic destruction by the British and American air forces of the German town in the closing months of the  Second World War.
 
A few days ago, one Israeli right-winger said he would recommend that the Israeli government create a separate water-carrier  system for non-Jews in Israel in order to be able to add special chemicals to the water for the purpose of  making the Arabs sterile and  consequently reduce their birth rate..
 
People in Europe, North America and the rest of the world might think that such voices are marginal and isolated and don’t represent mainstream thinking in Israel. Well, I wish this were true.

But it is not.
 
The Israeli society today is drifting  toward full-fledged fascism as many courageous Israelis would readily admit. The nearly daily pogrom-like attacks  perpetrated by Nazi-minded   settlers in the West Bank against helpless Palestinian  villagers and farmers  as well as the recent assassination attempt on the life of an Israeli professor who calls for ending the occupation are just preliminary pretenders for things to come.
 
Interestingly, until fairly recently,  brazenly racist behaviors in Israel  drew  some denunciations, however half-hearted and disingenuous,  from western capitals. Now, however,  unprincipled western, especially American politicians, would think twice before denouncing Israeli crimes, let alone Israeli racism.
 
The deep fear of  the Jewish  pressure groups has morally blinded American politicians  and generally corrupted the moral discourse in north American and much of Europe.
 
This means that Palestinians can’t really count on the west to  forestall possible genocidal designs by Israel. Hence, alternatives must be sought to make sure that Israel is not allowed to transform her  criminal urges into actions.
 
This paramount goal can be achieved by way of building a worldwide movement whose main task will be  to closely monitor Israeli behavior against non-Jews in Israel-Palestine.
 
In short, Israel must not be allowed to desensitize the conscience of the world as Germany did more than six decades ago.

Because the outcome would be catastrophic at all levels.