Moira Levy’s article of 8-11-2011 in the CapeTimes headed “Never again can we allow persecution” refers.
Your article saddens me. You write that you knew nothing about what happened in Israel post 1948. If you were to delve a little further you will find that you have many family connections that played their part in building the state of Israel.
Many emanated from the ghettos and suffered the discrimination and pogroms of Eastern European Jewry.
You state that this made you question everything that you had understood about being Jewish. And what did you understand about being Jewish? And all that your child was taught about Israel was the assumed expulsion of Palestinians?
If so, I suggest that you explain to your children that in revenge for their defeat, the surrounding Arab countries attacked, dispossessed and expelled more than 600,000 of their Jewish citizens, many of whom had lived there since the time of Nebuchadnezzar.
And to where could the majority of these expelled Jews flee? What was the only country prepared to accept them, in spite of its own ghastly losses during the unprovoked Palestinian and Arab attack? Israel.
Do you now see what role Israel is forced to play since the Holocaust? Do you and your children know of the rescue by Israel of the Yemenite and Ethiopian Jews, of it providing a safe haven for the tiny remnant of Poland’s Jews who found they again faced anti-Semitism and massacre after the war? Or the approximately one million Russian Jews that were able to depart from the land of their birth and Stalin’s Gulag. Have your children been informed of the world-renowned Israeli rescue of hostages at Entebbe?
The Russell Tribunal produced witnesses who testified to the Palestinians having been driven from their homes, presumably in 1948. Did these witnesses also testify to the attacks by these Palestinians as well as the armies of seven Arab states on Israel one day after its founding?
Did they mention the declaration of Assam Pasha, the secretary of the Arab League:
“This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of
like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades?”
Did the Tribunal produce evidence that in 1948 the Jewish population of Palestine numbered about 600,000 men, women and children of which 6,000 (1%) were killed or massacred in the Arab/Palestinian onslaught? That is equivalent to South Africa losing 500,000 of its citizens. And if the South Africans then said: “Never Again!” would you blame them?
Was evidence led of the flight of the majority of Palestinians who feared that the Jews would inflict the same slaughter and atrocities on them as they had perpetrated and prepared for the Jews? That was how most of the Palestinian refugee problem arose!
You have devoted much space to lauding the Russell Tribunal and its members.
I regret that you did not include the highly qualified Justice Richard Goldstone’s opinion as published in the New York Times on 1-11-2011:
“One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues “apartheid” policies. In Cape Town starting on Saturday, a London-based NGO called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will hold a “hearing” on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. It is not a “tribunal.” The “evidence” is going to be one-sided and the members of the “jury” are critics whose harsh views of Israel are well known.
While “apartheid” can have broader meaning, its use is meant to evoke the situation in pre-1994 South Africa. It is an unfair and inaccurate slander against Israel, calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations.”
Thanks for reminding your readership about Kristall Nacht. I hope that it was not your intention to equate that atrocity with what you suggest is happening in Palestine. The Jews of Germany did not attack and plunder their neighbours nor did they kill one percent of all Christians in Europe.
The Holocaust was the result of a systematic and meticulous plan to murder eleven million Jewish men, women and children. The situation in Palestine has been described by some very strange individuals as a Holocaust. Can you present one shred of evidence that this was intended or inflicted on the Palestinians?
Next we are confronted by his eminence Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who expressed “anguish” at the sight of security walls and checkpoints. Would it not have lessened the poor old man’s suffering if the Tribunal had been told that said security walls had lived up to their name by reducing the incidence of suicide bombing against Israeli civilians to
ten percent ?
Or that the searches at the highly inconvenient checkpoints had largely stopped the smuggling into Israel of terrorists, explosives and weapons?
Or that the separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians are not intended as proofs of apartheid, but have practically eliminated the horror of drive-by shootings of civilians of all ages and genders?
Justice Richard Goldstone made some interesting comments in his NYT article. He stated:
“In Israel there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute:
“Inhumane acts…committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
One must remember that Israel is dealing with adherents to Jihad, where the end justifies the means, all for the greater glory of God. That is probably the only way in which we can come to terms with a person murdering a Jewish family of parents and three children, cutting the throat of a three-month old baby and then expressing no remorse. Even more horrifying is to learn that when this news reaches the streets of Gaza, it is celebrated by dancing in the streets and the distributing of sweets.
We have been told about the Holocaust which was meticulously planned by Nazism’s top functionaries at the Wannsee Conference and then celebrated over cognac and cigars. I have no doubt that these planners did not have one good thing to say about Jewish men, women and children. And I am sure that the members of this Tribunal that were listed by Moira Levy would have the same attitude to Israelis.
Their hatred of Israel blinds them and makes them incapable of understanding the background, despair and pain that gives rise to the phrase “Never Again!”
For years the world watched as Jews were being persecuted and murdered. At the Evian Conference of 1938 representatives of the civilised nations of the world discussed the plight of the Jews. Only the Dominican Republic was then prepared to open its doors to the refugees.
Israel has learned its lesson – it cannot rely on anyone else but its own. If it does, then the circumstances that led to the phrase Never Again may repeat themselves. Its priority must be the safety of its Jews. It is the only country in the world that can be relied upon to ensure this safety, even if that inconveniences those that could pose a threat to it.
Media Team Israel 