every aspect of the illegal occupation of the palestinian territories have been learnt from the culture of nationalm socialism – what paul celan called – death is a german
everything from the ghettoisation, the passes, the collective punishment, the ‘targeted’ murders & of course the wall – the israelis learnt directly from the nazis
there is no aspect of the oppression of the palestinians that does not mirror what the german nation did to the jewish & gypsy people
& there was the terrible & impressionant silence of the world before the destruction of european jewry
& that silence again is repeated in the instance of the palestinians – as the demographic pulse heightens – then so does the ferocity of israel
i imagine we will see benny boy really up the ante in terms of direct violence, & of the violence they sow amongst the palestinians themselves
& this has its resonances – the germans often used – formations of the judenrat (especially in holland & poland) where the jewish people were charged literally with their own slaughter
since 1948 – the world has tried in many many ways to hide from the most evident of facts – that the fight for palestine is a just cause – a just cause that has been troubled by all the elements one would expect in the resistance
among them israel & america’s creation of hamas & islamic jihad to destroy the secular pflp & pdflp & other sectarian socialist or nationalist formations
as i have sd over & over again for the empire unless you are a vassal or a valet – you are nothing & if you are an arab or african – you are less than that – untermenschen
the wars of anhilation are carried out differently from that of 1939-1945 but the intention is exactly the same & what both israel & america have learnt from that time is to create the enormous beauracracies of death

Posted by: r’giap | May 17 2007 18:28 utc | 3

everything from the ghettoisation, the passes, the collective punishment, the ‘targeted’ murders & of course the wall – the israelis learnt directly from the nazis
All this existed before the nazis, nothing need have been directly learnt. I was reading, for example, about South Africa. It is common sense – the common sense of oppression, murder, slow genocide. OK, the Nazis refined ..
But the silence, cliché-d, is deafening.
I know ppl who moan about the Holocaust and its horror (most of them discovered it in the past 10 years and did not bother their heads about it before) and so on and say that the Palestinians are evil and deserve to die, yes die, they say that openly, they are savages, etc etc.
I also know Holocaust deniers who support the Palestinians only because the Pals are ‘resisting’ ‘Zionism’, but after all, they are muslims and disorganized, not our kind of ppl really.
And proper bourgeois ppl who have piles of U degrees and sigh about how sad it all is and why can’t ppl just get on, a two-state solution and all that.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose.
In fact, it is far worse today. The information is out there – in Europe, even in schools, and on the tee-vee, and on the library display as you come in; all the stereotypical figures I sketched above have the facts, or enough of them.
I take it back. Ppl know, in their heart of hearts. They always do. And if the good Germans did not have the internet, and we today do, it changes nothing.

Posted by: Noirette | May 17 2007 21:17 utc | 5

Indeed, no other ethnic group has been allowed to exert any historic rights to any territory to the extent the Israelis have.
If the same rights were granted to the native american indians … we would all have to pack and go … some on board the Mayflower, others on a raft back to Mariel … and so forth.
For … the entire State of Florida would have to go back to the indians. Texas, and all the southwestern states through California, would have to go back to Mexico … but, let us for a moment drop that scary thought.
America is perceived not as a powerful friend willing to mediate and help but, as the bully siding with the Zionist forces and determined to suck all their mineral wealth.
Israel is perceived equally determined to reconstitute — The Kingdom of Israel — as it existed 2,500 years ago… and, in the process — exterminate or deport all non-jews from the hinterland.
And here we are … the most powerful and rich Nation on earth with barely a handful of citizens capable of pinpointing on a map Croatia, Sudan, Estonia or Albania…
And here we are … the largest and far reaching military empire the world has ever seen, with an electorate ready to chose idiotic leaders — without understanding the forces and interest behind the scene … ready to repeat and forward, just like parrots, all they hear …
And here we are … a nation highly critical of those who bother to read or study history, branding professors and students alike — ‘liberal lefties’ — ‘communist trash’ … ‘unpatriotics’…

Posted by: dolce | May 17 2007 21:53 utc | 7

b
i don’t know if aljazeera is available in germany but there has been a very instructive film in two parts on the merkva (?) tank – & its rise & downfall as a means of israel’s armed force

Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 18 2007 0:16 utc | 9

WaPo: Fatah Troops Enter Gaza With Israeli Assent

Israel this week allowed the Palestinian party Fatah to bring into the Gaza Strip as many as 500 fresh troops trained under a U.S.-coordinated program to counter Hamas, the radical Islamic movement that won Palestinian parliamentary elections last year. Fighting between Hamas and Fatah has left about 45 Palestinians dead since Sunday.
The forces belong to units loyal to the elected Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate Fatah leader whom the Bush administration and Israel have sought to strengthen militarily and politically. A spokeswoman for the European Union Border Assistance Mission at Rafah, where the fighters crossed into Gaza from Egypt, said their entry Tuesday was approved by Israel.
The troops’ deployment illustrates the increasingly partisan role that Israel and the Bush administration are taking in the volatile Palestinian political situation.
…
The factional fighting cooled Thursday in the shadow of Israel’s stepped-up military operations. But Fatah gunmen ambushed a Hamas funeral procession in Gaza, killing two men in the crowd.
…
“If you look at exit scenarios for what’s going on there now, you could have a force loyal to Abbas in northern Gaza that could be highly useful to Israel,” one Israeli official said.
…
The troops were trained by Egyptian authorities under a program coordinated by Lt. Gen. Keith W. Dayton, a special U.S. envoy to the region …
…
Although it is under Abbas’s authority, the Presidential Guard is run by Mohammed Dahlan, a Fatah lawmaker who has worked closely with several U.S. administrations. Abbas named Dahlan his national security adviser after Hamas and Fatah agreed in February to establish a power-sharing government.
The appointment infuriated Hamas leaders, who despise Dahlan for the crackdown he carried out against them as head of the Preventive Security branch following the 1993 Oslo accords. Hamas opposed the agreement, which created the Palestinian Authority.
…
Maria Telleria, spokeswoman for the E.U. Border Assistance Mission deployed at Rafah as part of the turnover agreement, said the men arrived in several buses. “We had been informed they were arriving,” Telleria said. “But this was coordinated between Israel and the Palestinian government. All we did was monitor the crossing.“

Posted by: b | May 18 2007 7:27 utc | 11

Is The New Palestinian Pinochet Making His Move?

But while the hapless Abbas is little more than a reluctant passenger in Washington’s strategy — and will, I still believe, repair to his former exile lodgings in Qatar in the not too distant future — Mohammed Dahlan is its point man, the warlord who commands the troops and who has been spoiling for a fight with Hamas since they had the temerity to trounce his organization at the polls on home turf.
Dahlan’s ambitions clearly coincided with plans drawn up by White House Middle East policy chief, Elliot Abrams — a veteran of the Reagan Administration’s Central American dirty wars — to arm and train Fatah loyalists to prepare them to topple the Hamas government. If Mahmoud Abbas has been reluctant to embrace the confrontational policy promoted by the White House, Dahlan has no such qualms. And given that Abbas has no political base of his own, he is dependent entirely on Washington and Dahlan.

Posted by: ww | May 18 2007 11:55 utc | 13

This post seems an appropriate place to post a link to this very moving essay A Jewish Plea by Harvard researcher Sara Roy, a child of Holocaust survivors who has spent much of her professional life studying Gaza. No excerpt can fully do it justice; you need to read the whole thing.

Many of the people, both Jewish and others, who write about Palestinians and Arabs fail to accept the fundamental humanity of the people they are writing about, a failing born of ignorance, fear and racism. Within the organized Jewish community especially, it has always been unacceptable to claim that Arabs, Palestinians especially, are like us, that they, too, possess an essential humanity and must be included within our moral boundaries, ceasing to be “a kind of solution,” a useful, hostile “other” to borrow from Edward Said. That any attempt at separation is artificial, an abstraction.
By refusing to seek proximity over distance, we calmly, even gratefully refuse to see what is right before our eyes. We are no longer compelled, if we ever were, to understand our behavior from positions outside our own, to enter, as Jacqueline Rose has written, into each other’s predicaments and make what is one of the hardest journeys of the mind. Hence, there is no need to maintain a living connection with the people we are oppressing, to humanize them, taking into account the experience of subordination itself, as Said would say. We are not preoccupied by our cruelty nor are we haunted by it. The task, ultimately, is to tribalize pain, narrowing the scope of human suffering to ourselves alone. Such willful blindness leads to the destruction of principle and the destruction of people, eliminating all possibility of embrace, but it gives us solace.
Why is it so difficult, even impossible to incorporate Palestinians and other Arab peoples into the Jewish understanding of history? Why is there so little perceived need to question our own narrative (for want of a better word) and the one we have given others, preferring instead to cherish beliefs and sentiments that remain impenetrable? Why is it virtually mandatory among Jewish intellectuals to oppose racism, repression and injustice almost anywhere in the world and unacceptable — indeed, for some, an act of heresy — to oppose it when Israel is the oppressor, choosing concealment over exposure? For many among us history and memory adhere to preclude reflection and tolerance, where, in the words of Northrop Frye, “the enemy become, not people to be defeated, but embodiments of an idea to be exterminated.”
What happens to the other as we, a broken and weary people, continually abuse him, turning him into the enemy we now want and need, secure in a prophecy that is thankfully self-fulfilling?

Posted by: Bea | May 18 2007 12:57 utc | 15