It amazes me that just as the dust settles from Nazi jackboots marching through Charlottesville Virginia articles about Israel keep popping up. From New York’s Jewish Daily Forward to the UK’s Guardian articles have appeared that start off talking about the Far Right going after the Jews of American and then veer off course to talk about Israel.
Weird?
Well not especially, everything seems to be about Israel, whether you’re on the extreme right wing fringe of the United States or on the centre left website The Guardian. Over in the USA I would have expected Naomi Dann who works for Jewish Voice for Peace to be writing about the need for her fellow Americans to band together with the Jewish community to fight the threat posed to all of them by domestic fascism. Instead she looks at the situation and decides to write a scathing article about Israel. She writes that;
The most promising solution to anti-Semitism lies in building relationships and coalitions, recognizing how our freedoms are bound up together with those of people who have fewer rights than us, and having those difficult conversations when conflicts arise.
The ignorance as to the challenges Nazism posed to Jews in Germany in the 1930s is staggering. According to a study published in the American Economic Review in 2013 intermarriage between Jews and non Jews in Germany in 1932 stood at 65.1%. German Jews were certainly “building relationships”. It didn’t help much when the time came. What did help stamp out fascism, at least in the USA at the time, were Jewish criminals armed with baseball bats attending rallies of the German American Bund.
Most bizarrely Dann’s comment about unity comes at the end of an article she must know will cause fissures among the very Jews currently reeling from the attack on them. Way to go.
Over the pond in the United Kingdom Giles Frazer writes in the Guardian that;
“Barak is right, the parallels with Charlottesville are sometimes difficult to avoid. And the problem everywhere with these outer fringes is that they are getting less and less outer. Frightening, isn’t it?”
Actually they’re really easy to avoid when you’re the one who’s making them. Just don’t make them. I hear there are some big parallels with the Far Right in Italy also but no one seems to be talking about that… I shouldn’t be surprised much less hurt that when Nazis march in Virginia people feel the need to talk about Israel’s far right in Israel. But I am. Particularly when I read this from Dann;
A few months ago, Spencer stunned a rabbi at an event in Texas when he said: “Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel? And by that I mean radical inclusion. Maybe all of the Middle East could go move into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?”
The rabbi didn’t have an answer and he’s not the only one.
Again Dann might need to check her history. Not only would we want to live happily with our Arab neighbours, bring down the borders of statehood and forego sovereignty entirely but our grandfathers and great grandfathers didn’t bother with a state for a couple of thousand years. The result was a couple of thousand years of living at the mercy of whatever group happened to be in charge at the time.
My own country the UK has just voted to commit economic suicide to avoid having Europeans (mostly white I might add) coming and living in its neighbourhoods. The Scots were a whisker away from ruining their own economy by voting to leave the United Kingdom. The desire for homeland is a strong one among all peoples. Some need a home more than others. Tell the Kurds they shouldn’t have a country of their own right now, tell the Yazidis that having a country based on ethnicity is racist and offensive to your moral code and see what they have say about it.
Again though I can’t say I’m surprised. Ever since the British parliament decided it was too moral to prevent genocide in Syria by bombing the people carrying it out the writing’s been on the wall for the morality of the so called ‘left’. This is the wonder brought to us by a generation that has been brought up to think that whoever their enemies are there must be a moral equivalence involved. If someone wants to kill Jews then Jews must have done something to make them angry, if someone is attacking Americans then Americans must have bought oil or supplied arms to the wrong people. this kind of thinking is precisely the reason our societies stand so deflated, demoralised and uncertain.
The truth is that Spencer compared himself to a Zionist because he knew people like Dann and Frazer would jump all over it and start blaming Israel for something…anything. His own people hate the Jews regardless of anything he says and Dann and Frazer and too many others will look for any fodder allowing them to write something critical of the Jewish state.
To them I say simply that Nazis marching in Charlottesville has nothing to do with Israel.
Deal with it.
