Conscientious Jews condemn Israeli Nazism

 

It is true that the vast majority of world Jewry have been duped into almost blindly supporting the evil and idolatrous state of Israel, thinking, wrongly, of course, that it serves as a guarantee for Jewish continuity, stature and survival.

It is also true that many conscientious Jews have rejected this blind tribal loyalty and preferred to stand firm against the evils of Zionism, especially its Nazi-like approach toward the Palestinian people.

We all remember the courageous Jewish voices of the past few decades who spoke up, despite overwhelming odds, against Israel’s systematic and institutionalized oppression, persecution and discrimination against the Palestinians.

Now, the brutal ugliness and nefariousness of Israeli atrocities in the West Bank, especially the genocidal massacres at the Jenin refugee camp, have prompted new Jewish voices to speak up and call the spade a spade.

Yes, these voices, may not be as strong and numerous as one might wish, but they do serve to refute the Zionists’ arrogant claims that they alone represent and have the right to speak on behalf of the Jews of the world.

In fact, it is those courageous Jews, people of rectitude, moral honesty, and human conscience, who truly represent the enduring spirit of the Jewish people, not Sharon and his cohorts of war criminals, or the junkyard dogs of American Zionism, the evil hamans of our time.

Take, for example, Alex Hershaft, of Bethseda, MD. This holocaust survivor couldn’t just ignore the striking similarity between what the Nazis did at the Warsaw Ghetto more than half a century ago and what the Zionists did at the Jenin refugee camp earlier this month.

Here is an excerpt of what he wrote recently following the massacres at the Jenin camp:

“Photos of the devastation in Jenin, West Bank, remind me of my childhood years in the Warsaw Ghetto. There, too, innocent civilians were shot on sight, houses were blown up indiscriminately, and humanitarian aid was blocked. At the end of that horrendous holocaust, we said ‘Never Again.’ But Now, it is we who are doing it again. Shame.” (Washington Post, letter to the editor, April 16, 2002).

Here is another Jew, a journalist by profession named Lynn Cohen, who preferred to be faithful to her conscience than be intoxicated by the morbidity of Zionist jingoism.

Cohen wrote recently a moving personal testimony in the Los Angeles Times titled “Memory and Destiny” in which she courageously blamed Israel’s humiliating treatment and oppression of the Palestinians for desperate Palestinian reactions such as “suicide bombers.”

“Who better than Jews should know what such systematic humiliation does to a people? Who better than Jews should understand the reasons for not targeting people based on ethnicity?”

Then Cohen, apparently fed up and disgusted by the gruesome scenes from Jenin and other parts of the west Bank, didn’t hesitate to describe the behaviors of the Israeli army as they should be.

“These days I listen all day long to the radio, bracing myself for news of another Gestapo-style rampage by Ariel Sharon’s military, of another self-defeating bombing by the desperate Palestinians. I listen, horrified, to tales of Israeli soldiers executing Palestinian policemen, shooting them at point-blank range, to news of Israeli soldiers pounding on doors, rounding up whole families.”

“Never forget? Clearly, we’ve forgotten.”

These voices, one must emphasize, come from people who traditionally supported Israel. So the Zionists and Israel apologists can’t claim that it is only “self-hated Jews” that dare criticize Israel’s Nazi behavior.

Indeed, the Zionists can’t possibly describe people like veteran British Labor MP and prominent Jewish parliamentarian Gerald Kaufman “a self-hated Jew” or “a misguided voice swayed by Arab propaganda.”

Kaufman, in a speech on 16 April in which he described himself as a lifelong friend of Israel labeled sharon as a “blustering bully” and ” a war criminal.”

“Sharon has ordered his troops to use methods of barbarism against the Palestiniansé It is time to remind Sharon that the Star of David belongs to all Jews and to his repulsive government. His actions are staining the Star of David with blood. The Jewish people, whose gifts to civilized discourse include Einstein and Epstein are now symbolized throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians in the Sabra-Shatilla camp and now involved in killing Palestinians again.”

As a Palestinian, a Muslim and a human being, I can only salute these courageous Jewish voices for their rectitude and courage to speak up against the crimes which the certified war criminal Sharon, and his equally criminal colleagues are perpetrating in the Jewish people’s name.

I hope and pray that such voices will grow and evolve into a clarion outcry against Israel’s genocidal repression of the Palestinian people.

Needless to say, a vigorous Jewish opposition to Sharon’s criminal policies of mass murder, state terror, coercion, territorial aggrandizement and, ultimately, mass expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral homeland, is in everybody’s interest.