1948: How Jews brought the Nazis with them to Palestine
Last week I attended an Al Awda conference in Long Beach and (mostly)
had a wonderful time. Rode down there on the MegaBus, stopped in
Burbank to visit Central Casting, was taken to dinner by friends and
toured the historic Queen Mary -- but then, once at the conference itself, we all
got down to the sad business of listening to 70 years' worth of
Palestinian horror stories.
Right off the bat, we were shown a documentary film entitled "1948:
Creation & Catastrophe". It was scary. I'm still in shock. At the
beginning of this film, we watched many happy images of European Jews
arriving in Palestine -- but these joyful scenes were soon followed by
many brutal and horrific images of these same European Jews doing the
exact same thing to Palestinians that the Nazis had done unto them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuLPhGBPq38
"Throw your son into the oven," one Jewish soldier screamed at a Palestinian father, a baker.
"I cannot," said the father. And so the Jewish soldiers threw the son
into the flames themselves -- and then threw the father in after him for
good measure.
Over 500 Palestinian villages were gutted and destroyed -- even worse in scope than the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Jews arrived in overcrowded boats. The Palestinians left on
overcrowded boats. The similarities were not lost on the film's
viewers. And the UN jumped into the mix too. Instead of splitting
Palestine equally between Jews and Palestinians, the UN gave the
European Jews all the good areas and herded Palestinians into the
scrubs. The Jews got Haifa and Tel Aviv. The Palestinians got the
Negev desert.
What else can I say? The documentary showed us the faces of thousands
of Palestinian refugees being driven from their homes (that is, the
Palestinians that were not slaughtered). "Down all the roads they
came..." carrying their babies and owning only the clothes on their backs. And these
roadsides were littered with the corpses of dead babies.
So much for erasing the tainted memories of the Holocaust inflicted on
European Jews by the Nazis. Now these very same Jews were deliberately creating a
Palestinian Holocaust. Watching this film, I suddenly realized that
the Nazis too had come to Palestine. The Jews hadn't escaped the Nazis
after all. The Nazis too had come to Palestine -- hidden in the souls
of the surviving European Jews.
And now, 70 long miserable years later, there seems to be hardly any Jews
left in Israel today. "But how can that be," you might ask. Because
most Israelis appear to have turned into the same fascist types like their leaders Netanyahu
and Lieberman -- who will do anything for power and money. So much for
Moses and the Torah.
Am I being anti-Semitic here? Hell, no. I'm just being pro-justice. Old-school Jewish prophets such as Jeremiah, Amos, Isaiah and even Moses all warned us that justice is really really really important, right? So were all of these great prophets being anti-Semitic when they said this? Hardly. And neither am I.
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