Israel’s Dark Times Are Already With Us, Mr. President
JVL Introduction
Israeli journalist and activist Ilana Hammerman responds to Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin, who called the publication of the UN list of businesses with ties to West Bank settlements “reminiscent of dark periods in our history.
For Hammerman the dark periods are now, here, in Jerusalem and elsewhere under occupation.
And for her there is also a duty to compare with the “dark periods of our history”.
It is a cry to her fellow Israelis not to be bystanders. The comparison with the thirties is necessary, she feels: not with “the concentration and extermination camps but what preceded them and occurred right before the eyes of Germans who, if they hadn’t stood by and gone along, these things wouldn’t have happened. The Jews wouldn’t have been ostracized, made invisible and been abandoned, and the camps wouldn’t have come into existence.
And Hammerman draws from it “our Jewish lesson”: Don’t let racism and fascism win in Israel.
It is hard to envisage such an article being published in Britain today – certainly not written by a member of the Labour Party – without outraged accusations of antisemitism and demands for expulsion.
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Fri 21 Feb 2020. Read the original here.
Israel’s Dark Times Are Already With Us, Mr. President
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“… dark periods of our history … happened in a modern society in the heart of supposedly enlightened Europe, whose countries closed themselves off to Jews”
Exactly. Never forget that the roots of the present conflict in Palestine had – in major part – its historical roots in the efforts of the UK and the US to avoid accepting refugees : ‘Disappear to Palestine – but NIMBY’.
[This comment has been removed:
Most of it makes prefectly reasonable points but there is an unnecessary undertone of hostility in it.
We could simply edit it out, but this is not the first occasion. We have emailed the author twice at the email address provided about earlier comments which we wish to discuss before approving. We have had no response and will not approve any further commenets from Jaye until we are in dialogue and the issues resolved.
– JVL ed]
I’ve written a political poem called ‘If’, which I have just published in a chap book for our local Foodbank, which imagines the occupation that is happening in Palestine happening in Britain today and asks how you would feel if “someone knocked on your front door and said you had to leave”. And yet in what we like to think of as an enlightened society Labour Party members are being suspended and expelled for fighting against the Israeli Government. Yet again it’s ‘if we don’t stand up for these people who will?’
For The Editor: point taken and I shouldn’t write hostile comments because of my perceived view of someone’s agenda, however riled up and righteous I might feel. However I have to say that I see some very nasty accusations and insinuations in many posts albeit not directed towards other posters.
Thank you for your two emails. They landed in my junk folder which won’t happen in the future. Meantime, as you requested, I will start researching “unacceptable posts particularly on our website – but also “worse posts” on others”. I think I spotted the others on someone’s twitter or Facebook.