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The Resemblance Is Becoming Uncanny
The following slideshow presents side-by-side comparisons. The scene to the left in each image is of Nazi soldiers and Jews; the scene to the right in each image is of Israeli soldiers and Palestinians.
Israel is not Nazi Germany. Yet, there are certain similarities. How could any Jew permit it after the Holocaust? What has happened to Israel? From lofty ideals of justice to the systematic oppression and dispossession of the Palestinians. Something has gone terribly wrong and it must be stopped. We must speak up today for justice.
To read more about the issue, please visit my Palestine page. You can also read a discussion of this page.
An article that also expresses what this page is trying to get at is Israel shocked by image of soldiers forcing violinist to play at roadblock. Quote of note from this article:
The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to "play something sad" while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass.
It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint.
But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs.
The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. "What about Majdanek?" he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.
The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem.
Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial "not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust".
"Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust," he wrote.
"If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps."
"The issue isn't whether we are the same as the Nazis. The issue is, we aren't different enough" - Israeli historial Avi Schlaim
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