In zijn essay How I Stopped Being A Jew (2014) schrijft de Israëlische historicus Shlomo Sand, met betrekking tot de Israelische Apartheid, dat:
it would be necessary, of course, to have long abandoned tribal hermeticism (geslotenheid. svh), to learn to respect the Other and welcome him or her as an equal, and to change the constitutional laws of Israel to make them compatible with democratic principles.
Most important, if it has been momentarily forgotten: Before we put forward ideas on changing Israel's identity policy, we must first free ourselves from the accursed and interminable occupation that is leading us on the road to hell. In fact, our relation to those who are second-class citizens of Israel is inextricably bound up with our relation to those who live in immense distress at the bottom of the chain of the Zionist rescue operation. That oppressed population, which has lived under the occupation for close to fifty years, deprived of political and civil rights, on land that the 'state of the Jews' considers its own, remains abandoned and ignored by international politics. I recognize today that my dream of an end to the occupation and the creation of a confederation between two republics, Israeli and Palestinian, was a chimera (hersenschim. svh) that underestimated the balance of forces between the two parties.
Increasingly it appears to be already too late; all seems already lost, and any serious approach to a political solution is deadlocked. Israel has grown accustomed to this, and is unable to rid itself of its colonial domination over another people. The world outside, unfortunately, does not do what is needed either. Its remorse and bad conscience prevent it from convincing Israel to withdraw to the frontiers it obtained in 1948.
Grenzen die al meer dan de helft van het grondgebied omvatten dat de Verenigde Naties in 1947 aan de Palestijnse bevolking had toegewezen voor het vormen van een eigen staat. Maar het zionistisch extremisme, van links zowel als rechts, streeft naar een Eretz Israel, een zo groot mogelijk Israel dat als hegemonistische koloniale staat, uitgerust met kernbommen en andere massavernietigingenswapens, over het Midden Oosten kan heersen. De mening een ‘uitverkoren volk’ te zijn is diep geïnternaliseerd in de psyche van zelfs geseculariseerde Joden in Israel, en een aanzienlijk aantal joden in de zogeheten diaspora. Dit laatste blijkt ondermeer wanneer de Nederlandse ‘linkse jodin’ Anet Bleich haar plaats opeist in ‘het beloofde land,’ terwijl haar echtgenoot, Max van Weezel, kort voor zijn dood nog eens liet weten dat hij ervan droomde net als Joodse terroristen in bezet gebied ‘met een kalasjnikov’ Palestijnse burgers te vermoorden ‘als ze met hun poten aan ons lijf of goed komen.’ Dit soort uitspraken weerhield de Tweede Kamerleden niet om zijn dood collectief te herdenken, uit een mengeling van wat professor Sand ‘wroeging en een slecht geweten’ noemt. Als Israelisch intellectueel, die bewust afstand neemt van zijn opgedrongen Joodse identiteit, voegt hieraan toe:
Does this mean I, too, must abandon hope? I inhabit a deep contradiction. I feel like an exile in the face of the growing Jewish ethnicization that surrounds me, while at the same time the language in which I speak, write and dream is overwhelmingly Hebrew,
mede waardoor
[m]y deep attachment to the place serves only to fuel the pessimism I feel towards it. And so I often plunge into a melancholy that is despondent (moedeloos. svh) about the present and fearful for the future. I am tired, and feel that the last leaves of reason are falling from our tree of political action, leaving us barren in the face of the caprices of the sleepwalking sorcerers of he tribe. But I am not a metaphysical philosopher, simply a historian who tries to compare, so I cannot allow myself be completely fatalistic…
As a scion (telg. svh) of the persecuted who emerged from the European hell of the 1940s without having abandoned the hope of a better life, I did not receive permission from the frightened archangel of history to abdicate and despair.
Vandaar ook het belang om de stempel, die joden hebben gedrukt op de geschiedenis van zowel Israel als de Sovjet Unie, nauwkeurig te bestuderen. In beide gevallen is hun oorspronkelijk idealisme uiteindelijk op terreur uitgelopen. Blijft over de rol van de joden in de Verenigde Staten. De Russische hoogleraar Geschiedenis aan de Universiteit van Californië, Yuri Slezkine, concludeert in zijn alom geprezen studie The Jewish Century (2004) dat ‘van de drie beschikbare opties,’ (Israel, Rusland, de Verenigde Staten) aan het eind van de twintigste eeuw, ‘the Jewish Century, the least revolutionary one proved the most successful.’ Hij wijst erop dat ‘the place that had attracted the least educated and the least idealistic,’ te weten de Verenigde Staten, de ‘optie’ is geweest ‘that ended up on top,’ aangezien:
[i]t represented Mercurianism in power, service nomadism without strangeness, full freedom of both wealth and learning.
Het gevolg is geweest dat:
[t]he Jews are the wealthiest of all religious groups in the United States (including such traditionally prosperous denominations as the Unitarians and Episcopalians). They have the highest household incomes (72 percent higher than the national average), the highest rate of self-employment (three times as high as the national average), and the highest representation among the richest individual Americans (about 40 percent of the wealthiest forty, as reported by the Forbes magazine in 1982). Even the new immigrant households from the former Soviet Union begin to earn more than the national average within a few years of arrival.
The Jews are the most educated of all Americans (almost all college-age Jews are in college, and the concentration of Jews in professional occupations is double that of non-Jews). They are also the best educated: the more prestigious the university as a general rule, the higher the percentage of Jewish students and professors. According to a 1970 study, 50 percent of the most influential American intellectuals (published and reviewed most widely in the top twenty intellectual journals) were Jews. Among the academic elite (identified in the same fashion), Jews made up 56 percent of those in the social sciences and 61 percent in the humanities. Of the twenty most influential American intellectuals, as ranked by other intellectuals, fifteen (75 percent) were Jews. The overall Jewish share of the American population is less than 3 percent. Wealth and learning come in due course, but Mercury’s original job was that of a messenger. According to studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, Jews made up between one-quarter and one-third of the ‘media elite’ (the news divisions of the three television networks and PBS, the three leading news magazines, and the four top newspapers). More than one-third of the most ‘influential’ critics of film, literature, radio, and television were of Jewish background, as were almost half of the Hollywood producers of prime-time television shows and about two-thirds of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing movies between 1965 and 1982. In October 1994, Vanity Fair profiled twenty-three media moguls who made up what the magazine called ‘the new establishment’: ‘men and women from the entertainment, communications, and computer industries, whose ambitions and influence have made America the true superpower of the Information Age.’ Eleven of them (48 percent) were Jews.
‘Establishments’ and superpowers may change, but the degree of congruence between posttraditional economies and traditional Mercurian skills remains very high. The American Jews are successful in the same occupations as the European and Soviet Jews — which are, essentially, the same occupations that have always been pursued by literate Mercurians (and are being pursued in today’s United States by the Lebanese Christians and Overseas Indians and Chinese, among others). ‘Doctors and lawyers’ are both the oldest Jewish professions in Europe and the badge of middle-class accomplishment (and Jewish upward mobility) in the United States. In the mid-1980s, the concentration of Jews in elite positions and the occupational and educational gap between Jews and non-Jews were still growing.
In the nation-states (or would-be nation-states) of Europe, Asia, and Africa, similar triumphs of strangers over the natives have led to discrimination and violence. But the United States — rhetorically — has no state-bearing natives and therefore no permanent strangers. What makes the United States different is that Mercurianism, including meritocracy, is the official ideology of the state; that traditional Mercurians, including the Jews, have no legal handicaps; and that nativist tribalism, including anti-Semitism, plays a relatively minor role in political life. American Jews are free to succeed because they are Americans — the way Soviet Jews of the 1920s and 1930s were free to succeed because they were Soviets. Of all the non-Jewish polities in the history of the world, the postwar United States is second only to the prewar Soviet Union in the importance of Jewish participation in the political process. Jews are strongly over-represented in both houses of Congress (three to four times their percentage of the general population), and they are extremely prominent among political consultants, staffers, funders, and volunteers. Jews provide between one-fourth and one-half of all Democratic Party campaign funds, and, according to Ze’ev Chafets (joods-Amerikaanse auteur. svh), in twenty-seven out of thirty-six senatorial races of 1986, ‘at least one of the candidates (and often both) had a Jewish campaign manager or finance chairman.’ A 1982 study of the American economic, cultural, and political elite found that most Protestants included in this category owed their rise to business and electoral politics; most Catholics, to trade union and party activism; and most Jews, to work in the media, public-interest organizations, and civil service. There is little doubt that the Jewish strategy is the most effective of the three because of its high degree of compatibility with the modern postindustrial state. Indeed, the Jewish prominence in the American political elite began to grow perceptibly in the 1970s, during the ascendance of nonprofit organizations, political foundations, regulatory agencies, new information technologies, and public-interest law firms. There was no single ‘Jewish interest,’ of course (other than the tendency to support the continued growth of those same institutions), but there was one question on which most of Beilke’s grandchildren agreed and around which their considerable wealth, education, and political influence could be organized: the welfare of their overseas cousins,
te weten Israel als de ‘Joodse staat.’ Slezkine’s boek, winnaar van de National Jewish Book Awards, eindigt met het hoofdstuk ‘Hodl’s Choice: The Jews and Three Promised Lands,’ te weten: de Sovjet Unie, de Verenigde Staten en Israel.
Ter verduidelijking: de titel ‘Hodl’s Choice’ is gebaseerd op de roman Tevye the Dairyman (1894), van de Jiddische auteur Sjolem Aleichem, waaruit later de musicalversie Anatevka ontstond. Maar in ‘de theaterproductie bleven Tevjes bespiegelingen over het menselijk bestaan en zijn humanistische kijk op de wereld achterwege, en dat is nu juist wat de roman zo bijzonder maakt.’ Professor Slezkine schrijft over vijf dochters van Tevje:
Tsaytl rejected a wealthy suitor to marry a poor tailor, who died of consumption (tuberculoze. svh). Hodl followed her revolutionary husband, Perchik, into Siberian exile. Shprintze was abandoned by her empty-headed groom and drowned herself. Beilke married a crooked war contractor and fled with him to America. Chava eloped (weglopen. svh) with a non-Jewish autodidact (‘a second Gorky’) and was mourned as dead, only to return, repentant, at the end of Sholem Aleichem's book.
Slezkine stelt dat ‘[i]t seems fair to propose,’ met betrekking tot Chava dat haar ‘homecoming stands for her emigration to the Land of Israel.’ Welnu, Slezkine constateert:
The American Jewish mobilization on behalf of the Soviet Jewish exodus from the USSR ended — as abruptly as it had begun — with the demise of the USSR and the emigration of all the ethnic Jews who wished to leave. The American Jewish identification with Israel proved more durable because it transformed America’s ethnic Jews into the most accomplished and the most beleaguered of all American ethnics. But it was the identification of both Beilke’s America and Chava’s Israel with Tsaytl’s martyrdom that became the true source of late twentieth-century Jewishness. In a world without God, evil and victimhood are the only absolutes. The rise of the Holocaust as a transcendental concept has led to the emergence of the Jews as the Chosen People for the new age.
In the competitive world of American ethnic communities, there are two paths to success: upward mobility defined according to wealth, education, and political power, and downward mobility measured by degrees of victimhood. Beilke’s descendants are among the leaders on both counts: at the very top by dint of their own efforts along traditional Mercurian lines, and at the very bottom because of their association with Tsaytl, the universal victim. Once again, the majority of the world’s Jews combine economic achievement with the status of a punished nation. But the world has changed: at the end of the Jewish Century, both titles are in universal demand. Economic achievement is an inescapable standard of worth, and victimhood is a common sign of virtue (especially for those who lack economic achievement). Jealousy of the Jews may remain both a fact of life and an ineradicable Jewish expectation.
But then again, it may not. The majority of the world’s Jews live in a society that is Mercurian both by official faith and — increasingly — by membership, a society without acknowledged natives, a society of service nomads destined to redeem humanity. As the historian Joseph R. Levenson put it, ‘a Jewish style of life… may be more endangered when everyone eats bagels than when Jews eat hot cross buns.’ In 1940, the rate of outmarriage for American Jews was about 3 percent; by 1990, it had exceeded 50 percent. The American pastoral that eluded Swede Levov and his ‘gruesomely misbegotten’ daughter may yet work for his son, Chris. Hodl’s choice may still be available, for better or worse, in Beilke’s America.
For better or for worse? Tevye was not sure. Why raise Jewish daughters if they were going ‘to break away in the end like the leaves that fall from a tree and are carried off by the wind?’ But then again, ‘what did being a Jew or not a Jew matter? Why did God have to create both?’
Maar die vraag is alleen terecht wanneer men in de Joodse God gelooft. Gelooft men daar evenwel niet in, dan maakt het joods zijn volstrekt niets uit. Tenzij men, zoals Anet Bleich en een niet gering aantal zich joods voelende burgers die buiten Israel leven, zich vastklampt aan het joods gecultiveerd slachtofferschap. Alleen op die manier kan Bleich een plaats opeisen in Israel, ten koste van de Palestijnse bevolking, en tegelijkertijd zich zo Nederlands voelen dat zij de herdenking bijwoonde in het Nederlands parlement van haar echtgenoot Max van Weezel. Beiden waren volledig geïntegreerd en geassimileerd in Nederland, en werden op geen enkele manier in dit land antisemitisch bejegend. Dus: ‘what did being a Jew or not a Jew matter?’ Op een bepaalde manier waren zij anachronismen, als het ware relikwieën uit een voorbije tijd, hun blik was voor eeuwig gericht op het verleden. Maar opmerkelijk genoeg kijkt hun dochter, Natascha, ondanks alles, met voldoende hoop naar de toekomst, en lijkt zij afstand te hebben gedaan van het joods slachtofferisme, dat voor de generatie van haar ouders zowel politiek als in carrière-opzicht zo opportuun is geweest.
Het zionistisch echtpaar met dochter Natascha.
De vraag is nu of ‘All's Well That Ends Well’? Ik vrees van niet, alles laat een afdruk achter, of een angel. November 2013 signaleerde Sigal Samuel, an award-winning novelist, journalist, essayist, and playwright,’ in een recensie van de speelfilm Hannah Arendt:
how well the film reflects today’s often-hysterical discourse surrounding anti-Semitism, Israel, and the Holocaust.
Zij stelde:
Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta and starring Barbara Sukowa as the German-Jewish philosopher, feels strikingly contemporary despite being set against the backdrop of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial. By showing the harsh attacks Arendt endured for daring to portray the Nazi as anything other than the devil incarnate, this film reflects today’s often-hysterical discourse surrounding anti-Semitism, Israel, and the Holocaust.
In the film, we see Arendt — trained in philosophy (among other things) by Martin Heidegger, and herself a victim of Nazism — desperately seeking to understand the nature of the evil embodied by Eichmann. After the Mossad captures him in Argentina and brings him to Israel to stand trial, Arendt travels to Jerusalem to cover the event for the New Yorker. Stunned by Eichmann’s insistence that he personally has nothing against Jews and that he was just following orders, she concludes that ‘he’s a terrifyingly normal human being.’ He’s not a criminal mastermind or a hate-filled fanatic, but a bureaucrat, ‘a nobody.’
New Yorker editor William Shawn (Nicholas Woodeson) hesitates to publish her report, afraid that her now-famous ‘banality of evil’ theory — along with her criticism of the Nazi-appointed Jewish Councils’ role in the Holocaust — will get both her and the magazine crucified by American Jews. His fears are borne out when Arendt’s five articles are finally published months after Eichmann’s execution, and she and the magazine get buried in angry phone calls and hate mail. Commentary, Partisan Review, and The Daily News all attack her in print, with the latter accusing her of mounting a ‘bizarre defense of Eichmann.’ Her friends turn on her, accusing her of being a self-hating Jew, and Israeli officials waylay her on a rural road to demand that she not publish her book and to tell her that it will never be allowed in Israel. Even her old friend Kurt Blumenfeld, who’s portrayed as a reasonable Zionist, thinks she’s gone too far this time. ‘You have no love for Israel?’ he asks. ‘No love for your own people?’
That this question is illogical — it assumes that criticism of some Jews’ actions precludes love for Jews as a whole, or, even more tenuously, for the state of Israel — does not stop it from being echoed in all the ‘hysterical reactions to [her] report.’ A philosopher, Arendt tries to defend herself by explaining that her goal was to understand, and ‘understanding is not the same as forgiveness.’ It’s a gesture that proves futile in a way that will be painfully familiar to many contemporary liberal Israeli and Diaspora Jews, who — though they count themselves in the pro-Israel camp — are critical of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian people and so find themselves accused of anti-Zionism and even anti-Semitism by an increasingly shrill pro-Israel right.
The film’s greatest accomplishment lies in its ability to show how both Israeli and American Jews sought to eliminate moral complexity in the wake of the Eichmann trial, promoting clear — though, when it comes to the question of the Jewish Councils, opposite — extremes, and leaving Arendt to fall through the gap in between.
On the one hand, we see American Jews eager to perpetuate the narrative of Jewish victimhood—the lamb-to-the-slaughter version of history. Viewing European Jews in the Holocaust era as bereft of agency, they’re inclined (contra Arendt) to absolve the Nazi-appointed Jewish Councils of guilt.
On the other hand, we see Israeli Jews eager to reject the narrative of Jewish victimhood in favor of the culture of the Sabra — the strong, tanned, militaristic Jew brimming with power and agency. The film points this up in subtle ways — Israeli soldiers are often visible in the frame when Arendt is in Israel — and in not-so-subtle ways — during the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust-surviving witnesses are ordered not to publicly detail all the demeaning experiences they endured. Seeking to promote an idea of Jews as masters of their own destinies, Israel is more inclined to seek out and punish those Jewish leaders who collaborated with the Nazis.
Hannah Arendt is particularly timely because this debate over Jewish identity did not die with Eichmann — it’s alive and well in Israel today. In her inaugural speech to the Knesset, MK Merav Michaeli recently spoke about her grandfather Rudolf Israel Kastner, who negotiated with Eichmann to save Jewish lives and was later assassinated after an Israeli court condemned his actions. She points out that the Israeli attitude that lent itself to such assassinations has been on the wane for some time now; by and large, Israelis have come to adopt the same lamb-to-the-slaughter narrative favored by American Jews. This narrative of perpetual victimhood, Michaeli suggests, is every bit as damaging as the other extreme — the narrative of Sabra machismo.
Arendt’s thinking sought to circumvent such extremes. She refused to see Eichmann as pure evil and refused to see Jews as pure victims. For this crime, she was persecuted by both American and Israeli Jews. As the film shows, the Jewish discourse of her day had a low threshold for nuance when it came to anti-Semitism, Israel, and the Holocaust. Unfortunately, that’s just as true now as it was then. Holding a mirror up to today’s discourse, Hannah Arendt is a perfect reflection of our times.
Maar aan de andere kant van het spectrum waren Max van Weezel en Anet Bleich een weerspiegeling van de naoorlogse tijd. In het reactionaire weekblad Niew Israëlitisch Weekblad verklaarde de voormalige CIDI-propagandiste Esther Voet in een interview met Max van Weezel:
De Joodse stem is weg in de PvdA. Dan laten we GroenLinks en de SP even buiten beschouwing.
Van Weezel: ‘Nou, de PvdA heeft nu al weer voor de tweede keer een Joodse partijleider, hè?’
Lodewijk Asscher noemt zich niet Joods.
‘Maar hij voelt zich wel Joods hoor, hij zit nu in Israël.’
Ben je nog lid van die partij?
‘Dat is een goede vraag, ik weet het niet eens. Ik zal het even checken. Ja, ze schrijven nog steeds contributie af.’
Stem je nog op de PvdA?
‘Ik ben een grote twijfelaar. Als je het hebt over klimaatbeleid of sociaaleconomische uitdagingen voel ik me nog steeds aangetrokken tot de linkse partijen, maar als het over Israël gaat sta ik veel meer in de buurt van de ChristenUnie of de VVD. Ik denk dat ik toch nog PvdA of GroenLinks zal stemmen. ChristenUnie is ook een mogelijkheid.’
ik moet ook zeggen dat ik heel geschokt was toen de PvdA in Amsterdam met andere linkse partijen de stedenband met Tel Aviv torpedeerde. Tel Aviv is met z’n homoscene en hightechindustrie een logische partner. Maar ook de PvdA zei: ‘Het ligt wel in een fout land.’ Van der Laan zei toen nog: ‘Dat doen we met geen enkel ander land, zeggen dat het goed of fout is. Het gaat om de stad.’ Maar hij kreeg het er niet door. Ik vond dat heel pijnlijk. Ook de reden die werd gegeven vond ik beangstigend: ‘De kiezer in Amsterdam-West zal dit niet begrijpen en daarmee importeren we buitenlandse conflicten in de stad.’ Wat een electoraal opportunisme…
Wie durft nog als Jood Nieuw-West in? Joden verschansen zich in Zuid, Buitenveldert en Amstelveen.
In Jonet.NL, dat zich afficheert als een website met ‘Onafhankelijk Joods nieuws en achtergronden,’ van 27 november 2015 schreef Max van Weezel dat hij was:
uitgenodigd een inleiding te houden bij de gemeenteraadsfractie van de Amsterdamse PvdA. Aanleiding: een boze tweet die ik deze zomer had rondgestuurd over de stedenband met Tel Aviv en Ramallah die van de linkse partijen in de raad niet mocht doorgaan. ‘Kan een Jood in de hoofdstad nog op de PvdA, de SP of GroenLinks stemmen?’ schreef ik. Even later belde fractieleider Marjolein Moorman om erover te praten. Kon ik haar en haar collega’s een keer komen uitleggen waarom het nee tegen de stedenband me zo had getergd? Het werd een gezellige avond, met drank en hapjes na. Maar het viel me op dat de huidige PvdA-fractie, die voor een deel uit Marokkaanse en Turkse Amsterdammers bestaat, slecht op de hoogte was van de nauwe band die in het verleden tussen de sociaaldemocratie en de Joodse gemeenschap heeft bestaan.
Hier is meer dan één symptoom van de zionistische pathologie te herkennen. Omdat de hoofdstedelijke ‘linkse’ partijen beseften dat Amsterdam geen stedenband kon aangaan met de badplaats en het uitgangscentrum van de ‘Joodse staat,’ die weigert het internationaal recht te respecteren, voelde de Nederlandse parlementaire journalist Max van Weezel zich geroepen de pompeuze vraag te stellen: ‘Kan een Jood in de hoofdstad nog op de PvdA, de SP of GroenLinks stemmen?’ Wat valt hieraan op? Allereerst het begrip ‘Jood’ met een hoofdletter, waarmee Van Weezel bewust aangaf dat hij niet allereerst een Nederlander is, maar een ‘Jood,’ oftewel iemand die zichzelf beschouwt als behorend tot een ander volk. Dat is vanzelfsprekend zijn goed recht, ook al gelooft hij niet in de Joodse God, maar wel in de mening dat deze niet bestaande Joodse God hem en de zijnen het beloofde land heeft geschonken. Ieder mens heeft recht op zijn eigen gekte, zolang dit het recht van anderen maar niet schendt. Indien dit wel gebeurt dan dient deze gekte bestreden te worden, omdat anders de wereld aan krankzinnigheid ten onder gaat. Kortom, de gekte van dit soort joods- en christelijk zionisme moet permanent aan de kaak worden gesteld.
Een ander punt is dat Max van Weezel kon worden aangesproken op zijn gebrek aan logica, een veel voorkomend verschijnsel bij mensen die vanuit grote onzekerheid op zoek blijven naar een identiteit. Dit gebrek blijkt tevens uit het feit dat hij het deed voorkomen alsof hij sprak namens iedere jood in Amsterdam. Maar ook dit was demagogische nonsens, want lang niet iedere joodse Amsterdammer staat blind achter de terreur van de opeenvolgende zionistische regimes. Wat eveneens tekenend was voor zijn extremistische standpunten, is het feit dat de Joods-Israelische terreur tegen de Palestijnse bevolking, en de onophoudelijke diefstal van Palestijns land, volgens hem, zou moeten worden beloond met een vriendschapsband tussen Amsterdam en Tel Aviv, een stad waar het etnisch gezuiverde Jaffa deel van uitmaakt. Niet lang nadat Van Weezel op demagogische wijze had laten weten voor een vriendschapsband met Tel Aviv te zijn werd bekend dat juist in die stad:
Thousands Of Israelis Take To The Streets Calling For Palestinian Genocide. The Tel Aviv rally — organized to support an Israeli soldier who murdered a wounded Palestinian by shooting him in the head as the victim lay on his back — was marked by chants and banners calling for mass murder.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/thousands-israelis-take-streets-calling-palestinian-genocide/221168/?fbclid=IwAR3Cidzuf1YCAAYciRN2TJNT_HIMtItr-e2VnoH_n2J4INrottQCHSEyYoU#.XNAewp7awnr.faceb
ook
Bovendien leven de nakomelingen van de ruim 70.000 verdreven Palestijnen uit Jaffa/Tel Aviv tegenwoordig, hermetisch afgesloten van de buitenwereld, in de Gaza-Strook, waar zij met de regelmaat van de klok worden gebombardeerd door één van de machtigste strijdkrachten op aarde. Van Weezel’s retoriek was daarom weerzinwekkend. Vooral ook gezien het feit dat de Palestijnse bevolking, net als de joodse bevolking in Warschau, nagenoeg weerloos achter prikkeldraad in een getto leeft. Tijdens de opstand in het getto van Warschau, waarbij in 1943 joodse strijders gewapende aanvallen uitvoerden op de Nazi-bezetters, sneuvelden naar schatting 13.000 van hen, terwijl aan Duitse kant slechts 17 mannen om het leven kwamen. Over het aantal slachtoffers onder de Palestijnen is bekend dat tussen 2000 en 2014 de meesten van hen ongewapende burgers waren. Daar komt nog bij dat:
[i]t's no secret that the death tolls in the Israel-Palestine conflict are lopsided, with Palestinians far more likely to be killed than Israelis. But just how lopsided is driven home by looking at the month-to-month fatality statistics, which the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has been tracking since September 2000. Those numbers also tell some important stories about the conflict, how it's changed, and maybe where it's going.
Here are the monthly, conflict-related deaths of Israelis and Palestinians since September 2000:
You'll notice right away that the overwhelming majority of the deaths are Palestinian, and have been for the almost 14 years since B'Tselem began tracking. Overall, the group has recorded 8,166 conflict-related deaths, of which 7,065 are Palestinian and 1,101 Israeli. That means 87 percent of deaths have been Palestinian and only 13 percent Israeli. Put another way, for every 15 people killed in the conflict, 13 are Palestinian and two are Israeli. (Statistics for the past two months are from United Nations Office for the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs.)
THE DISPARITY HAS WIDENED OVER TIME
That number is even more staggering when you consider that there are about twice as many Israelis as there are Palestinians. This means, very roughly, that a Palestinian person has been 15 times more likely to be killed by the conflict than an Israeli person. Of course the conflict impacts Palestinians and Israelis far beyond just conflict deaths, but these statistics help show how utterly disproportionate the conflict has become in its toll.
The disparity has widened dramatically over time. Since January 2005, when the conflict began to change dramatically, it has killed 4,006 people, of whom 168 have been Israeli and 3,838 Palestinian. That means that, since January 2005, only four percent of those killed have been Israeli, and 96 percent Palestinian. Since January 2005, in other words, the conflict has killed 23 Palestinians for every one Israeli it claims.
Door Joodse kolonisten in bezet gebied op de Westbank verwoeste olijfbomen, de bron van inkomsten van de Palestijnse bewoners.
Als gevolg van het buitensporig geweld van de ‘Joodse Staat’ tegenover Palestijnse burgers die geen kant opkunnen, is de afkeer tegenover joden in de zogeheten diaspora, die de Israelische terreur blijven verdedigen, almaar toegenomen. Sinds 2000 is voor een doorsnee westerse burger duidelijk geworden dat de ‘Joodse natie’ letterlijk en figuurlijk geen grenzen kent, en de wereld te maken heeft met een ‘schurkenstaat.’ Dit is geen vorm van anti-semitisme, maar terechte walging over de steun aan massale mensenrechtenschendingen. Terwijl het journalisten-echtpaar Anet Bleich en Max van Weezel hun Joodse staat bleven verdedigen, planden sinds midden jaren zeventig de Joodse autoriteiten ondermeer Ma’ale Edummim, ‘the largest Israeli settlement in the West Bank’ die gebouwd werd:
on a hilltop beside Jericho in June 2001. The view from the settlement is breathtaking; one side overlooks the towers of Jerusalem, the other the distant Dead Sea and the Mountains of Edom. This romantic panorama of the Judean Desert was the stage for the Biblical tales we were told as children,
Yet there is a strange paradox built into this view. The very things that render the landscape 'biblical' and pastoral — the traditional habitations, the cultivation in terraces, the olive orchards and low stone buildings — were made by Arabs whom the settlers came to replace.
Nowadays settlements like Ma'ale Edummim are marketed to upwardly mobile social groups who seek a better quality of life in green suburbs. But these real estate clichés disguise a more sinister reality.
After the Six-Day War in 1967, the character of the Zionist movement was permanently altered. While many Israelis questioned the de facto occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, a new breed of Zionists believed that Judea and Samaria as they call it, were not only critical to the survival of Israel, but were also an integral, inseparable part of the Jewish homeland. Waves of immigrants came, some for religious or ideological reasons, others enticed by cheap housing and tax incentives, and some simply by the view.
Built on hilltops, the settlements are strategically positioned to enable visual surveillance of the entire region. They are built like fortresses, internally closed but looking outwards. From their elevated positions the settlers have unwittingly become the eyes and the ears of the State in what has been termed a 'civilian occupation.’
Wie vanuit het Westen komt aanrijden ziet in het schelle zonlicht een gesloten witte burcht, zonder enig leven. Op geen enkele manier zijn de Joodse nederzettingen organisch in het landschap aangelegd, ze houden geen enkele rekening met het eens idyllische landschap. Een beter beeld van de misplaatste, naar binnen gekeerde, zionistische ideologie is ondenkbaar. De nederzettingen symboliseren de Joodse vervreemding. Net als de shtetl’s van hun voorouders zijn de nederzettingen geen integraal onderdeel van het geheel. Zij demonstreren hoe weinig de Joden van het beloofde land houden. Overal hebben bulldozers en draglines het landschap verwoest. Niets is er nog harmonisch, in evenwicht, lieflijk; de Joodse nederzettingen zijn een vloek, een verkrachting, een schreeuw tegen de omgeving. Nooit zullen Joden zich hier geworteld voelen. Elke rots, elke olijfboom, elke windvlaag, de geur van kruiden, het geluid van een ezel of een geit, alles verwijst naar de Ander die met geweld werd verdreven. Al ruim een eeuw geleden zette Chief Seattle uiteen:
This we know — the Earth does not belong to man — man belongs to the Earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.
Whatever befalls the Earth — befalls the sons of the Earth. Man did not weave the web of life — he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
Hij waarwschuwde de witte kolonisten die met hun genocidaal geweld zijn land stalen, inclusief alles dat zich erop en eronder bevond. In een beroemd geworden toespraak zei hij:
Your time of decay may be distant, but it surely will come. For even the white man, whose God talked with him as friend with friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see... Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as they swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people. And the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch... And when the last red man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe. And when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages are silent, and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with my people. For the dead are not powerless. Dead, did I say? There is no death. Only a change of worlds.
Ook voor de Joden in Israel geldt dat wanneer de laatsten van de oorspronkelijke bewoners ‘shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth’ Palestine ‘will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe.’ Maar dit zal een bejaarde ‘linkse jodin’ als Anet Bleich met haar onverzadigbaar slachtofferisme en zonder een greintje gevoel voor metafysica, nooit kunnen begrijpen. Meer Later.
