Israel/Hamas War Superthread

[Dill]

(12-27-2023, 05:51 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Thank you for the direct answer.  I will ignore the first sentence in the spirit of proceeding amicably.  In regard to your second answer, that finds you in direct contrast to the ADL, who absolutely consider such comparisons to be antisemitic.
https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/allegation-israels-actions-against-palestinians-can-be-compared-nazis
"Moreover, it can be argued that those that make the comparison between the Jewish state and the Nazis and Hitler – who perpetrated the greatest and largest act of antisemitism in world history – have not chosen this comparison innocently or dispassionately. It is a charge that is purposefully directed at Jews in an effort to associate the victims of Nazi crimes with the Nazi perpetrators and serves to diminish the significance and uniqueness of the Holocaust.

To make such a comparison is antisemitic and constitutes blatant hostility toward Jews, Jewish history and the legitimacy of the Jewish State of Israel."

That the ADL considers such comparisons antisemitic doesn't sway me much, especially when they are trying to dissociate such comparison from the context and intent of deployment. I.e., the goal of the bolded is to protect and deflect, not to recognize, analyze and understand. 

In the current context of war in Gaza, and the protestors in your images, the analogy is chosen to drive home the fact and the irony that the current Israeli state is doing things that Jews--along with most of the world--condemned when done by Nazis--e.g., on the West Bank collective punishment (e.g. bulldozing homes with families still inside), summary arrests even of children, and a population held under military terror, without rights, etc. 

Many Jews and Israelis also make such comparisons with the intent of reigning in the human rights violations. E.g. Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen, descendent of Holocaust survivors, was almost denied the Hannah Arendt Prize* this year for her recent New Yorker article which, in one paragraph compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust

Gessen's article is a pretty good example of an effort to "recognize, analyze, and understand," as she explores the limits of Nazi/Israel comparisons, and the difficulty people have recognizing that victims can also be perpetrators, and the consequences of defining the Holocaust as "unique" and "incomparable" to other genocides. 

Early on, her essay addresses two competing definitions of antisemitism, one by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance which does not effectively distinguish between criticism of Israel and antisemitism https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism , and the more rigorous and logically consistent Jerusalem Declaration, which does effectively distinguish between criticisms of Israel which are antisemitic and those which are not. https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/. The former has gotten much traction though, recognized as a standard by 14 countries and in an executive order signed by Trump. 

Gessen notes that in 1948, Hannah Arendt herself flagged a new Israel political party, the "Freedom Party," for its analogous methods of organizing and thinking. That would be "antisemitic" under the IHRA definition.  

Some Germans awarding the Arendt prize objected to her essay because, after noting an important difference between the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza--Jews in the Ghetto were not rocketing people outside it--she went on to say that, nevertheless, in both cases the isolation was/is predicated on a claim that "an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate--and now mortally endanger--an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own." 

So I generally side with Arendt and Gessen here, that critique of any state should not be pre-empted by rules forbidding comparisons even where the facts on the ground establish such.

*Awarded by the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Berlin, for work in defense of human rights.