Questions that must be faced
Published
by
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi
JVL Introduction
Earlier this month Jonathan Cook posed six penetrating questions about attitudes to Israel and its drive to destroy Palestine, its people and culture.
Those questions remain intensely appropriate now, with world leaders continuing to treat Israel as an essential ally, even as it escalates its criminal behaviour with potentially terrifying consequences.
NWI
This article was originally published by Jonathan Cook on Mon 9 Sep 2024. Read the original here.
At what point are we permitted to...?
Five questions, plus a sixth
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The answer to point 3 is not yet. You do not have to have read many books written the 1930s to realise that verbal antisemitism was a feature of life in ‘respectable’ circles. Only when the war was almost over and the death camps were liberated did war correspondents and their film crews reveal the full the deliberate and systematic cruelty inflicted upon their inmates. Antisemitism was no longer acceptable and the impact of the 1960 film Exodus should not be underestimated. It steered my sympathies towards Israel.
Today the only information not controlled by the Israeli military which is coming out of Gaza is from Al Jazeera. Western news outlets wanting to report from Gaza have to have correspondents ‘embedded’ with the IDF which means they see, hear and report on only what the Israeli army wants them to know.
Only when the destruction of Gaza comes to an end and there is unfettered access to this part of Palestine will we see a change in attitudes as the deliberate and systematic cruelty being inflicted upon the people of Gaza is revealed, and what Al Jazeera is reporting ever day will be recognised as the truth.
Ukraine has already prepared impressive administrative and legal systems for making the aggressors (in their case Russia) pay war reparations for what they’ve done (the maiming and killing of Ukrainians and the ruination of Ukraine’s infrastructure, farmlands and the environment). I think the Palestinians would benefit from using Ukraine’s model and approach for getting reparations from Israel and possibly from the states arming Israel.
Perhaps the job of researching, drafting and publicising the Palestinians’ claims for reparations and then enlisting the support of countries prepared to be helpful is something that US student groups and others could help the Palestinians with? The UN has already stated Israel must pay full reparations.
If Israelis and Russians fear they’ll be made to pay reparations for what they’re doing then they might become more hesitant about increasing the size of the bills. Reparations to the Gazans for the harm done to them in the last year is likely to be more than £40 billion. How long would it take Israel to pay THAT bill?
The Israel experiment is clearly an abject failure, as was the Nazification of Germany.
Germany recovered and became a civilised and humanitarian state surprisingly quickly.
Palestine/Israel could recover too.
There is no alternative.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov
These questions. as with all your comments are piercingly well informed and relevant.You have your finger on the pulse of world opinion but not on the pulse of world leaders or at least those empowered to stop the ongoing evil and their cowered compliance is a matter of shame to the country and people they are paid to serve.I commented to an elderly cleric how one hoped that those who reached the top in.government , the judiciary,the military, to name but three. should possess an accompanying moral code Dear Lady, was his disarming reply ‘the scum always rises to the surface’indeed!!
Thank you for asking the right questions, Jonathan Cook. My answer is the same to all your questions: “from the day it started happening” and “no matter who the perpetrators and their apologists are”. This started happening decades ago. Everyone who could have taken action to stop Israel, from Biden on down, and hasn’t, is complicit. The failure to stop them threatens the ability to make sure international humanitarian and human rights law are respected and implemented every time they are violated. There is no greater crime than genocide. Stopping it is obviously easier said than done and in fact it has mostly failed, but it is essential to continue to insist and try nonetheless.
The late Uri Avnery published a column comparing Israel at the time, not to Nazi Germany, but to the final years of the Weimar Republic. It’s here http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1463759865
He’s commenting on the ‘uproar … all hell broke loose’ following remarks by General Ya’ir Golan, then deputy Chief of Staff, IDF: ‘If there is something that frightens me about the memories of the Holocaust, it is the knowledge of the awful processes which happened in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 70, 80, 90 years ago, and finding traces of them here in our midst, today, in 2016.’
Avnery recalled his childhood during the last years of the Weimar Republic and witnessing the Nazi seizure of power, and recalled a book he’d written many years previously, the last chapter of which he’d titled ‘It can happen here!’, suggesting, ‘the possibility of a Jewish Nazi-like party coming to power in Israel. My conclusion was that a Nazi party can come to power in any country on earth, if the conditions are right. Yes, in Israel, too.’
He continues: ‘A careful reading of his text shows that he compared developments in Israel to the events that led to the disintegration of the Weimar Republic. And that is a valid comparison.’
I was inclined to accept — as applying to Israel — Avnery’s distinction between early and later Nazism, the collapsing Weimar, not the later horrors. In 2024 that’s just not possible.
I also used to think (based on my family’s Zionism in my childhood) that Zionism was one of those cases where people set out to oppose an evil by doing good, but end up doing even worse evil. I do know the reasons for thinking it wicked from the start.
It’s human to compare.But if something is evil, why need we compare? We know why, don’t we.
Yes, Germany did recover from Nazification. but it took a deliberate programme of denazifaction in which its people were essentially forced to confront what the Nazis had done in their name. This required outside intervention, including the Nuremburg trials, followed by the hand of friendship. Will the people of the state of Israel ever be confronted with what Zionism has done to both Palestine and Israel: will the many people in the wider diaspora who give their unquestioning support to the state of Israel?