The occupiers and torturers of a whole nation have argued themselves into the position of victims. How, asks Haim Bresheeth A new paradigm seems to have been recently established, and like so many of the new paradigms it arrived from the United States. It is no longer feasible to criticise and attack in the press and media the murderous and short-sighted policies and actions of the current Israeli regime without immediately facing the accusation of anti- Semitism. And who in his right mind would like to face this charge, however unjustified? Jews writing in this vein, trying to open a clear distance between themselves and the barbarities enacted in their name, get a reduced sentence: they are only accused of self-hatred! And that is when what they might feel hate towards is never themselves or their deeds, but the deeds of those who take it upon themselves to speak for all Jews elsewhere, dead or alive, and to use this multitude of disparate people as an automatic backup for any atrocity they may commit. This form of cultural terrorism against the critics of rampant Zionism, its continued, inhuman occupation, has been most effective and frightening: not only has it worked well with many liberal Jews, who are now reluctant to voice their deeply-held revulsion with the developments in the Middle East, it has silenced most of the Left in Britain. Few liberals are prepared to face the ferocity of the Jewish community on this issue, and to be smeared as racists and anti-Semites. This is an infuriating development -- the occupiers and torturers of a whole nation have managed to argue themselves into the position of the victim. This is even more marked in the US, where the Jewish minority, one of the smallest ethnic groups in the country, is also the richest and most influential. This powerful group seems to have forgotten the lesson of its past, even of physical extermination. Those who cannot see, hear and feel the other are doomed to become the ultimate other: racism is based on the denial of the other, its point of view, its rights, its pain, its humanity. This is what Europe and its many societies have done to the Jews for centuries, and the whole world was to suffer the consequences of such blindness. Now it seems Jewish communities in the West have internalised their newly-acquired power, as if it were a god-given right allowing them to override basic human and social criteria, and to act on the strength of power, and of the (justly) guilt-ridden Western society. Some Jewish interlocutors talk of the Palestinians as if they were the new Nazis when it is the armed might of the Zionist state that has ruled the Middle East for decades. But this armed might has failed in one significant respect -- it cannot guarantee security. Is this something we should be surprised by, in this day and age? Has any military occupation, however oppressive, succeeded in winning the occupied over, or in totally quenching their thirst for freedom? Surely even the deluded Israeli leadership is not assuming such a development is in the offing. Yet they seem to believe that they can break the Palestinian will by a combination of measures ranging from brutal occupation, illegal settlements, collective punishment of every kind, wide-spread starvation and water-shortages, expulsion and ethnic cleansing. These are the means posited for resolving the 'Palestinian problem', and summary solutions of this kind are naturally reminiscent of other final solutions. And such solutions are now bandied about, discussed in seminars, weighed-up by US Congress and Senate representatives, not to mention Jewish and other pro- Israeli pressure groups such as the messianic Christian right in the US. From the power-crazed Right, spurred on by the rise of the Bush dynasty, to the liberal Jewish Left, all partake in the debate, drawing parallels between the Palestinian suicide bombers and 11 September 2001, as if the two could be at all compared. The argument places Israel, whatever it does, on the side of the angels, awarded the War on Terror seal of approval. Most of the Western media has bought into this crude conflict model -- Palestinian forces are gunmen, militants, and extremist factions, while the IDF is referred to by the same terminology used to describe the military exploits of the Western allies in Afghanistan. The liberal wing meanwhile draws another set of parallels -- a description of the conflict based on equating the deeds of both sides. The personal and political desperation fuelling the suicide bombings is compared to the violence meted out daily by the IDF, a formula confusing cause and effect, occupier and occupied, the mighty and the pathetically weak. We have to be quite clear about this, there is no good occupation, no just occupation, no necessary occupation. There is and has been only one type of military occupation, the kind that Saddam had to pay for in 1991, and Milosevic is now facing trial about. Until this simple truth is grasped there cannot be peace of any kind in the Middle East, for either side. Anyone, Jew or Gentile, who wishes to skirt around this, to leave it for later, to tell us how complex the situation is, may succeed in blinding the public for a while but not in changing the nature of reality. Anyone spending time in worthless arguments about comparisons between South Africa and Israel and their respective treatment of the indigenous populations, is deluding only themselves. Anyone who is deeply shocked by the sacking of two Israeli academics, unjustified as it might have been, but stays blind to the daily, continued suffering of a whole nation, is prolonging the agony of both sides. Two thousand years of Jewish history in Europe have taught us all we need to know about racism and anti- Semitism -- they taught us to be alert to the voice of the minority, of those without rights, of those under the power and occupation of the mighty. This is a lesson we should never forget, never misinterpret nor abandon. Jews, liberals, democrats, egalitarians -- in other words, the majority of society -- must remember this painful lesson and unite in voicing the demand for an immediate end to occupation, to illegal settlement, to the barbarism of military rule, and for the establishment of full rights for Palestine as a member of the international community. To say this loudly and clearly is not anti-Semitic, but the duty of conscientious people everywhere, Jews and non-Jews; it is the supporters of the status quo who may be the real anti-Semites. The whole of Jewish history tells us so. The writer, an Israeli academic and peace activist living in London, is co-editor of The Gulf War and the New World Order, and co-author of Introduction to the Holocaust.
