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| The entrance to the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp |
Matthew
Tree (author of the remarkable novel SNUG)
writing
in Catalan for nuvol.com with his usual clear sight and
bravery...
"Before World War II ,
anti-Semitism - a toxic hybrid
of anti-Judaism and Christian
European pseudo-
scientific racism - was fashionable
throughout
Europe, especially among young
people. From 1945,
when everyone realized that some 5.8
million people
had been executed, starved, beaten,
gassed or - in
the case of many babies- impaled on
bayonets or
smashed against walls, simply for
having non-Gentile
surnames, anti-Semitism began to lose
popularity.
According to Labour MP Denis MacShane
('The New
Anti-Semitism', 2008) during the 60s
and 70s certain
European intellectuals helped to make
anti-Semitism
a socially acceptable prejudice once
again thanks to
the concept (also a hybrid) of
“anti-Zionism”, which
denies the right of Israel to exist
as a state (on the
grounds that it is fascist and
colonialist) while hinting
that all Israelis (or all Jews, even)
manipulate
international opinion (especially
U.S. opinion) in favor
of the said state of Israel by means
of powerful
lobbies.
In other words, rather than
make specific
criticisms of certain undeniable
crimes committed by
the Israeli state, anti-Zionists
treat this country as if it
were the only beneficiary of a
powerful and diabolical
conspiracy, against which everything
from boycotts
to physical elimination is therefore
justifiable.
In Catalonia this discourse has enjoyed
huge success,
partly because it is often
accompanied by an equally
huge ignorance of history: just look
at the
incredulous face of almost any
Catalan 'anti-Zionist' if
you tell him, for example, that in
1947, the
Palestinian Arabs were offered their
own state, twice
as large as the current Occupied
Territories; or that
the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were
occupied
from 1948 up to Six Day War [in 1967]
by Egypt and
Jordan respectively (though these
states did not treat
the Palestinians any better than the
Israelis have
done).
And perhaps our anti-Zionist
may not know –
accustomed as he is to qualifying the
Israelis as Nazis
–that an important part of the
Palestinian national
movement had genuinely Hitlerian
roots, having been
founded by Yasser Arafat 's mentor,
Haj Amin el-
Husseini, a personal friend of
Himmler and the
architect of a plan to exterminate
all the Jews of
North Africa and the Middle East with
an
einsatzkommando led by Walter Rauff,
the inventor
of the gas trucks used in Chelmno.
What is more, after centuries of
relative tolerance
by Muslims towards Jews, European
anti-Semitism,
imported directly from the Third
Reich by el-Husseini,
has thoroughly infected the doctrines
of radical
Islamist organizations such as
Hezbollah or Allah
Hamas, both funded by Iran, a country
that denies
the Holocaust, and has repeated again
and again
hat Israel should be wiped off the
face of the planet.
Yet when these same countries and
organizations do
things that are somewhat worse than
anything Israel
has done (such as now sending
military support to
the current Syrian regime, which is
responsible for
more deaths of Arab civilians in the
last three years
than in Israel in it's entire
history) the Catalan anti-
Zionists don't mutter so much as a
word of protest.
In a nutshell, anti-Semitism has
taken on many
different guises over the years, and
the Catalan
variety - a generic anti-Zionism,
often poorly informed
and pseudo-progressive (because it
implicitly supports
regimes that are homophobic, sexist
and, of course,
anti-Semitic) - is yet another
variation on an old
European theme. Having said which,
that does
not deny anybody the right to
crticise a cruel and
unjustifiable occupation on the part
of the state of
Israel. But of course, that's so
obvious it doesn't need
to be stressed. Or maybe it does."
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