By Khalid Amayreh
In the early months of the Aqsa intifada against the
Israeli occupation, an Israeli officer in the Nablus region
told dozens of handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian
detainees that “we are treating you like the Nazis treated
us, and maybe when you are free from our grip,
you will find another people whom you will treat the
same way we are treating you.”
These were not facetious remarks. That officer was actually
displaying definitive symptoms of a chronic collective
psychosis permeating through the Israeli Jewish society.
It is this collective mental sickness that make Israelis
commit the most heinous crimes without feeling
the slightest shred of guilt.
Didn’t Dan Halutz, the former Israeli air-force commander
and later chief of staff boast that he slept well at night
and felt no compunctions after he ordered an F-16 fighter
warplane to drop a one-ton bomb on a residential
apartment building in downtown Gaza , killing sixteen
sleeping people, including 11 children.
In truth, there is an umbilical relationship between
the holocaust and Israel’s nefarious behavior toward
the Palestinians. In the final analysis, the Palestinians
are the victims’ victims as the late Palestinian
intellectual Edward Said put it.
In fact, one would not cross into the realm of the absurd
by arguing that had Jews not been victims of the holocaust,
the Palestinians would most likely have not been victimized
by Jews in such a diabolical manner and for that long.
In a certain sense, one can say with very little exaggeration
that it was Nazi Germany that created Israel. Yes, Zionism
predated the holocaust; but it was the holocaust that gave
Zionism the ultimate argument for Jewish statehood.
Not only that, the holocaust proved to be, even today,
the ultimate blocker of any meaningful objections to Israeli
criminality against the peoples of the Middle East. This
explains why and how Israel, which can be viewed, more
or less, as an incarnation of Nazi Germany, is treated by
the world community as above the laws governing the
rest of the world.
Moreover, Israelis continue to evoke the holocaust
to justify their harsh repression of Palestinians.
Even calls by Jewish settlers for “sending the Arabs
to the oven” (which any visitor to Hebron can see
scrawled on the walls at the Jewish settler enclave
in the city) are justified by the holocaust. Every criticism
of Israeli criminality and supremacy, every legitimate
objection to the wanton repression meted out to the
Palestinian, every criticism of the marauding settlers
is always met with the holocaust mantra.! In short,
every Palestinian, man, woman, and child, is made to
suffer and die because of the holocaust.
Today, every conscripted Israeli soldier, especially
those serving in the West Bank, is made to visit the
Yad va Chem holocaust museum in Jerusalem right
before he or she is deployed to Palestinian population
centers to repress and torment these helpless people
who had nothing to do with the holocaust.
And one doesn’t have to be a great psychologist
to connect the dots and understand the real ghoulish
implications of associating the Nazis, the tormentors of
the Jews, with the Palestinian, the victims of Zionism
For most Israeli soldiers, the mental message is
unmistakable. The Palestinians are today’s Nazis…and
by killing and brutalizing them in the harshest of manners,
the Jews are only preventing the recurrence of another
holocaust. Some Israelis feel that by savaging the Palestinians
they are actually avenging the holocaust vicariously, which
gives them immense psychological satisfaction.
In their subconscious thinking, many Israeli Jews actually
admire the Nazis and their brutality. This is why some of
these soldiers and officers often seek to emulate Nazi brutality
and project it on Palestinians, since for them might is always right.
Moral blindness
This brings us to post-war Germany and its moral surrender
to Zionist blackmail. For nearly sixty years now, Germany
has been trying to atone for the holocaust by enabling Israel
to commit another holocaust against the Palestinians, never
mind that it is a holocaust without gas chambers.
Germany from Konrad Adnauer to Angel Merkel behaved
toward Israel in a manner that callously and completely
disregarded the monumental oppression meted out by
Israel to the Palestinian people.
Germans in general and the German political elite in
particular passively watched Israel commit every conceivable
crime against the helpless Palestinians, but turned their
faces away for fear of displeasing their powerful former
victims who came to be in control of powerful nations,
such the United States.
Germany was always afraid and reluctant to call the
spade a spade, especially when the spade happened to be in
Jewish hands, lest it be reminded of the brutal ugliness
of its recent past.
Germany, an economic and political giant, but obviously a
moral dwarf, actually not only kept silent in the face of Israeli
crimes all these years. Germany gave Israel the technical
wherewithal to murder Palestinian children. Germany also
gave Israel, reportedly free of charge, state-of-the art submarines
capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
I don’t know when Germany will wake up from its long moral
slumber and deliver itself from the sinister
stranglehold of Zionism.
Is it not the time Germany realizes that the holocaust
was diabolical in itself, , not necessarily because its
victims were primarily Jewish? Would a holocaust
against any other ethnic or religious group have been less
diabolical? Would Germany have behaved differently had
the holocaust targeted non-Jews? Are Germans absorbed
so much in the holocaust because of its moral enormity or
just because of the post-war Jewish power?
Such questions are vital and relevant since they can
eventually contribute to liberating Germans from this
haunting moral dilemma whereby they are morally
bound to help their former victims savage, murder
and brutalize another helpless people that had nothing
to do with the holocaust, a people whose sole crime is
their weakness and helplessness and determination
to be free.
It is probably useless to appeal to the political
establishment in Germany, which like its equally
evil sister in the United States, is not based on morality
but sheer immediate political expediency.
Non the less, one is encouraged by certain recent
indications that Germany might finally be getting sober
from decades of moral blindness and criminal indifference
toward the Palestinians, its ultimate victims.
According to media report, a group of German intellectuals
have called on Berlin to change the holocaust-rooted blind
support of Israel, arguing correctly that the creation of the
Jewish state turned the Palestinians into victims of the
Nazi holocaust as well.
The intellectuals, who include 25 prominent figures,
argued that it was the holocaust which Germany perpetrated
that brought about the suffering that has persisted in the
Middle East for the last six decades and has at the present
become unbearable.
Furthermore, these intellectuals argued that “without the
holocaust of the Jews, Israel wouldn’t see itself as entitled,
or forced to ride over the human rights of the Palestinians
and the inhabitants of Lebanon.
Of course, the language used here is extremely mild
since what Israel has been doing in Palestine and Lebanon
goes far beyond merely riding over Palestinian and
Lebanese human rights.
Israel is effectively committing genocide. For example,
the dropping of 2-3 million cluster bomblets over populated
areas in southern Lebanon is par excellance a genocidal
act of the highest order since 2-3 cluster bomblets are
sufficient to kill 2-3 million children. The same can be
said about the ongoing blockade of Gaza which is killing
innocent Palestinians in the hundreds.
Reparations
In light of the proven umbilical relationship between the
holocaust and the ongoing Palestinian plight, one can say
that the Palestinian people have a legitimate moral right
to demand holocaust reparations from Germany.
The Palestinians nearly lost everything. And every
Palestinian under the sun has a story of suffering. This writer
for example lost three paternal uncles to Zionist bullets on
a single day. And up to this day, there has been no
acknowledgment of guilt, no compensation, nothing!
from Israe.
I know such talk is likely to raise many eyebrows in
Germany. However, if Germans have the moral
courage to look deep into their souls, they undoubtedly
will discover that the Palestinians are more than justified
in seeking adequate and just reparations from Germany
for the enormous calamities Nazi Germany had inflicted on us.
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