Progress! Arab Editor Acknowledges Holocaust and Israeli Humanity
This past Tuesday, London’s Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat, published an editorial suggesting that the reason for Israeli behavior in the current crisis is that its leaders are the grandsons of Nazis who posed as Jews to escape Allied retribution and found their way to Israel. You can read the entire article on the MEMRI site. I’ve appended a few highlights.
Ehud Olmert’s government perpetrates definite Nazi practices against the Palestinians and the Lebanese. He is a young Führer [actually, Olmert is 61, an age Hitler never reached] , and his generals, like Dan Halutz and Moshe Kaplinsky, are commando generals. The question now is: Is it logical for the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants to do what the Nazis had done to them?
There is a psychological explanation for this: the victim impersonates the torturer. However, I have another explanation.
Historically, six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and 97.5 percent of the Polish Jews were killed in the gas chambers, and by other means. My explanation is that the number of the Jews who were killed might be higher. All the Polish Jews might have been killed, too, and the Nazi political and military leaders might have realized since 1944 that defeat was imminent and, therefore, assumed the identity of Jews and then fled to Palestine as Jews who had survived the Holocaust.
If this explanation is true, Israel's present political and military leaders are the grandsons of Nazi killers rather than Jews persecuted for centuries at the hands of Western Christendom."I know that my explanation may be implausible, but I cannot find any other logical reason for Israel's Nazi-like practices. The phrase 'Israeli Nazism' is exactly an oxymoron, as if we say, for instance, “Sharon is a man of peace.”
Now, I know at first glance that comments suggesting that leading Israelis are the grandsons of the perpetrators of the Holocaust may seem rather negative and caustic. But that is because you are untrained in the contextualization of things that Arabs and Muslims often say, whereas a trained western analyst of the Middle East would immediately recognize the ground being given here by the writer.
Two points. First, the editorialist did not make the claim that Jews are the descendants of apes and pigs. Nazis were, after all, human beings, albeit nasty human beings. This is a huge admission for an Arab commentator. Second, the author acknowledges that there was a Holocaust and that the Germans made use of gas chambers: “Historically, six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and 97.5 percent of the Polish Jews were killed in the gas chambers, and by other means.” Talk about conceptual breakthroughs!
Now where’s the give on the Israeli side? It's nearly been a week! Given this new and constructive tone, I think that the Al-Hayat comments represent a very real signal that it is an auspicious time for the Israelis to negotiate a comprehensive end to the Middle Eastern crisis.
