Reply #44: The world is nothing at all like it was in 1948

[Ken Burch]

There aren't any Hitlers, now. There aren't any death camps. We've learned, for God's sake. And people all over the world are on the watch for any signs of any recurrence of that madness. The world's Jewish communities are no longer alone and are not in danger of extinction-and certainly not at the hands of those who support self-determination for Palestine.

And the only Hitler there was was in EUROPE, not in the Middle East.

Please stop acting as if nothing has changed since that horrible era.

That is one of the main injustices in all of this:

Yes, European Christians were horrific to Jews...and that must still be addressed(including the question of Anglo-American corporate support for the Third Reich).

But it was never fair for Palestinians to have to suffer in the name of redressing an injustice they played no role in. The Holocaust was solely the work of Europeans-Arabs weren't responsible for it.

Besides which, Israel's survival will never seriously be in question. It has the fourth-largest war machine in the world. You can't have that big of a military force and STILL be in an "existential crisis".

And even if it were in an "existential crisis"(which makes it sound like this is all something out of Sartre or Camus, btw)continuing the Occupation and insisting on preserving the settlements are the worst possible ways to address that. The way to address it seriously would be to stop doing the things that are the most provocative and inflammatory in Palestinian eyes...not to insist on continuing to do those things and to do even more of them.

The settlements really are a major part of the problem...and Palestinians having to live surrounded by armed troops from another country really is another. It's absurd that you keep pretending that neither of those things have any real role in the perpetuation of this conflict.

The way to protect Jews from danger is the same way to protect everyone else: the creation of a world without injustice, and the struggle to make that world come into being. Telling everyone that they have no right to criticize the Israeli government(or that criticism must be limited and restricted in ways that criticism of no other country on the planet must be) does nothing at all to protect the population of Israel, or those outside of it that Israel purports to defend and speak in the name of. It simply encourages the most arrogant and intransigent forces in Israeli politics -Beitenyu, Likud, and Kadima- in their refusal to ever change anything. Bibi and Tzipi and Lieberman are arrogant enough and blind to reality enough without being given a blank check from anybody.