Amira Haas on exploiting the Holocaust

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Amira Hass is the daughter of Holocaust victims and reports on Palestinian affairs for Haaretz. This is the sort of clear-sighted, self-aware commentary that you can easily read in the Israeli press.

Try to imagine this article in the New York Times. Imagine Abe Foxman or Alan Dershowitz reading this article over breakfast coffee, imagine their telephone conversations after reading it... Hey, you've got quite an imagination!

AIPAC is destroying Israel by preventing peace and severely damaging the USA's international position in the effort. With such "Friends of Israel", who needs enemies? DS

Amira Hass: The Holocaust as political asset - Haaretz
Abstract: Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred. The phrase "security for the Jews" has been consecrated as an exclusive synonym for "the lessons of the Holocaust." It is what allows Israel to systematically discriminate against its Arab citizens. For 40 years, "security" has been justifying control of the West Bank and Gaza and of subjects who have been dispossessed of their rights living alongside Jewish residents, Israeli citizens laden with privileges. Security serves the creation of a regime of separation and discrimination on an ethnic basis, Israeli style, under the auspices of "peace talks" that go on forever. Turning the Holocaust into an asset allows Israel to present all the methods of the Palestinian struggle (even the unarmed ones) as another link in the anti-Semitic chain whose culmination is Auschwitz. Israel provides itself with the license to come up with more kinds of fences, walls and military guard towers around Palestinian enclaves.(...) Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers fumble for words when in Hebron the state carries out ethnic cleansing via its emissaries, the settlers, and ignore the enclaves and regime of separation it is setting up. Whoever criticizes Israel's policies toward the Palestinians is denounced as an anti-Semite, if not a Holocaust denier. Absurdly, the delegitimization of any criticism of Israel only makes it harder to refute the futile equations that are being made between the Nazi murder machine and the Israeli regime of discrimination and occupation. READ IT ALL