Israel's hypocrisy

It is a special calling for all the victims of the Holocaust to heal the world and ensure that a new holocaust never happens to any people, wherever they are. Israel has made a mockery of this commitment.

In a comically immature letter in response to the activist “Welcome to Palestine” campaign, Israel “welcomed” activists to Ben-Gurion Airport by telling them, “You could have chosen to protest the Syrian regime’s daily savagery against its own people, which has claimed thousands of lives,” but instead you chose Israel, “the Middle East’s sole democracy,” since obviously democracies never do anything wrong.

This ridiculous piece of hasbarah begs the question: Rather than nagging and refusing entry to people who might disagree with Israeli policy, why hasn’t Israel sought to make Syria the “object of its humanitarian concerns”?

Where was the Israeli support for the Arab peoples fighting for their independence last year? And why does Israel continue to barrel toward a war with Iran that will kill innocent civilians by the thousands?

This last point is especially relevant. In his Yom HaShoah speech this year, Binyamin Netanyahu departed from tradition to beat the drum about Iran, saying he will never let Jewish children face the peril of another Holocaust.

At the American Israel Public Affairs Committee this year, Netanyahu waved the 1944 letter in which the United States war department rejected a request by Jewish leaders to bomb Auschwitz.

Netanyahu has raised the spectre of Auschwitz to further his own trigger-happy tendencies, turning the Israeli military doctrine of ein breira — there is no other choice — into the Bush 1 percent doctrine.

Netanyahu’s willingness to rain a series of bombs upon the innocent Iranian civilian population proves he has learned exactly the wrong lesson about the Holocaust.

In his doctrinaire Zionism and his aversion to humanitarian concern, Prime Minister Netanyahu insults the memory of all those who died in the death camps and the ghettos, spitting on the disintegrated bones in the mass graves of Dachau.

We must oppose this with open hearts and memories, so that we are not doomed to repeat history.

We must stand up defiantly and shout “never again!”, so that the memories of all who lost their lives are a blessing to the living.

­— sidfletc@indiana.edu