Page 1 of 2 Was Netanyahu behind Yad Vashem
protest? By Michael Robeson
Why couldn't Neo-Nazis or Arabs have been
the ones to deface Israel's official Holocaust
memorial, Yad Vashem, last June? It would have
been so much easier to condemn the usual suspects
for spewing their undying animus against Jews,
especially during a time in which Israelis were
treated to the first "Miss Holocaust Survivor"
Beauty Pageant, an event that was attended by two
of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's Cabinet
members.
Instead, in an attack described
by Yad Vashem's chairman Avner Shalev as a
"callous expression of burning hatred", the
culprits turned out to be several Israeli Jews and
their hatred was directed instead, in Shalev's
words "against Zionists and Zionism".
The
graffiti included some eyebrow raisers like "If
Hitler hadn't
existed, the Zionists
would have invented him." And, "You (Zionists)
declared war on Hitler in the name of the Jewish
people. You brought about the Shoah!"
And
perhaps most scandalously, "The Zionists wanted
the Holocaust!" Accompanying these statements was
a crude sketch of the iconic entrance to Auschwitz
with a Star of David leading to the gate. Hardly
the script for a Spielberg film.
An attack
on Yad Vashem, the Holy of Holies only after
Auschwitz, would normally be 24/7'd in Israel with
politicians, like Bibi Netanyahu, assuring their
voters that this kind of atrocity would never
occur again, and with Abraham Foxman issuing his
usual warnings about the global rise of
anti-Semitism.
But the Israeli press has
downplayed the attack, and the New York Times has
given it scant attention, and for good reason. The
perpetrators themselves destroy the usual image of
anti-Semites; and their shocking graffiti
statements greatly complicate the issue of how
"hate crimes" and "hate speech" are currently
defined. No Arab or Neo-Nazi could have succeeded,
like this, in putting a couple of specifically
kosher wrenches in the works of wielding
"anti-Semitism" as a weapon.
First,
chairman Avner Shalev himself was forced to make a
distinction between an attack on Zionists and
Zionism and one on Jews and Judaism. This
distinction is one rarely heard from reputable
people in the American media who would wish to
avoid being labeled anti-Semites.
Second,
the content of those graffiti statements, blaming
Zionists equally with Hitler for the destruction
of European Jewry, offers a potentially explosive
glimpse of an alternative history of World War II
and the creation of the Israeli state, damning
both to Zionist and Western leaders whose reliance
on the "Good War" and the "Holocaust" narratives
provide a fundamental basis for their increasingly
doubtful political legitimacy.
The Israeli
Jews and who were arrested and accused of the
"hate crime" are allegedly members of Neturei
Karta, a group that refers to itself as True Torah
Jews. Neturei Karta is an Orthodox Jewish sect,
comprised of several factions that take some
highly unorthodox views on Jewish and Israeli
issues.
The factions differ in their
beliefs, but all of them are utterly opposed to
Zionism and believe that its Jewish state is a sin
against God, even an abomination.
Members
of Neturei Karta are hardly representative of the
kind of Jews that Elie Weisel was thinking of when
he wrote: "Whatever he chooses to do, the Jew
becomes a spokesman for all Jews, dead and yet to
be born."
But then Weisel is hardly
representative of what Neturei Karta members
believe to be a True Torah Jew. As one of Neturei
Karta's leaders, Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, put
it: "The Zionists use the Holocaust issue to their
benefit ... Zionism is not Jewish, but a political
agenda." To be clear, Rabbi Weiss, by making an
unfashionable distinction between politics and
religion, was not referring to the Beauty Pageant.
Attacks, which would normally be
considered acts of anti-Semitism, by Jews against
fellow Jews are not rare. In the past years in
America alone, over a dozen cases of allegedly
anti-Semitic actions against Jewish property were,
upon investigation, discovered to have been
performed by Jews themselves. This includes cases
of Jews claiming to have been victims of hate
crimes attacks that turned out to have been
self-inflicted.
None of these cases
received the media attention given to that of
Tawana Brawley. The media's usual reaction to
these cases is to label such individuals as
disturbed or troubled, while in the Jewish media
the term "self hating" is occasionally used.
Neturei Karta upends these usual equations
because not only are they Jews, but they consider
themselves more Jewish than those who regularly
wield the equations as weapons of self protection
and tools of self empowerment. One of Neturei's
Israeli Rabbis, in fact, was beaten during a 2009
visit to Auschwitz. But not by vicious
anti-Semitic Poles; rather, he was beaten by a
group of visiting Jews - and he refused to press
charges.
The vandalism at Yad Vashem comes
at a time when the US government is being lobbied
by some Jewish groups to classify all anti-Israeli
protests on college campuses as "anti-Semitic" and
to prosecute the demonstrators under "hate crime"
laws. Should Neturei Karta members decide to
vandalize a college Hillel or Chabad office, would
prosecutors be lobbied to go after them with the
same diligence taken against an Arab student
group?
And under the already strict hate
speech law, would, say, a Neturei Karta vandalism
of the US Holocaust museum be prosecuted as
severely as one by David Duke or Louis Farakkahn?
Not likely.
Cultural identifiers and
political beliefs play an unspoken and often
contradictory role in deciding how much "hate" is
in the mind of perpetrator; and that hatred is
often not absent in the mind of the beholder.
If Jewish groups are to be given
protection against criticism of their cultural
identity - Israel - should not patriotic
Evangelical Christians be given protection against
anti-war and anti-US government demonstrations?
After all, they believe that America is a
Christian nation; its wars against Arab countries
obviously give them their cultural and religious
identity as Americans. Should not this minority
group, therefore, be protected from
"anti-Christian" hate crimes?
It would
serve much to improve American political discourse
if discussion were permitted about the "Christian"
nature of those wars, which Evangelicals so
emotionally support. But that should not allow us
to think the same about any "Jewish" nature in
support of those wars.
The second wrench
in the works is the political content of those
graffiti statements - the accusation that wartime
Zionist leaders were responsible for the massacre
of their own people. Most readers would consider
such an idea preposterous and whoever believes it
to be a lunatic. But considering that Israeli
leaders like Bibi Netanyahu have relentlessly
accused Iran of threatening the "existential
destruction" of Israel with nuclear weapons, even
while heads of Israeli Intelligence agencies
contend that Iranian leaders have not even decided
yet whether or not to build them, the question of
who is a lunatic becomes moot. Especially when
Israeli leaders know that they have over 300
nuclear weapons at their disposal, and have
already threatened to use them.
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