Sep 29, 2021
‘We are on the road to Nazification, as Israeli society’
The 21st century Nazism no longer requires trains and gas chambers, it has more “civilised” ways to make a people disappear.
Orly Noy *
Is it permissible to compare yet? When reading testimonies about families who fled their homes from the terror of the marauders, or hid small children in the rooms, is it possible to compare now?
The settlers’ pogrom yesterday in the South Hebron Hills should have naturally been the top headline of all the media this morning — and for many mornings to come. The fact that this is not the case, is also part of the “processes” that [former Deputy Chief of Staff] Yair Golan correctly identified. But he wasn’t wise enough to identify his own role and that of his party [Meretz] in these processes. We are on the road to Nazification, as a society. The utter dereliction of the Palestinian lives is so self-evident to us that it is barely newsworthy and only makes it to the margins of the news. This is a Nazification of a society. 21st century Nazism no longer requires trains and gas chambers, it has more “civilised” ways to make a people disappear.
But the deep sentiment is there: demographic engineering of the region through unbridled violence. This is the most basic definition of Israeli policy today in relation to Palestinians in the Territories. Of course, this settler Nazism has its own special character, which in addition to the familiar nationalist kitsch also carries an equally kitschy religious fanaticism. These acts of violence regularly escalate on the Jewish Sabbath and on holidays. And it isn’t just because there is more leisure time on those days. This is the way for those undergoing that process to express the Jewish supremacy which they read into the holidays.
What a bitter incomprehensible symbolism was there yesterday that they carried out the pogrom on Simchat Torah. That is the Rejoicing of Jewish Law, the day when they finish reading the last parashah [Section of the Torah] and start again from the beginning, from Genesis. As they say: This is our Torah, this is what we learned after reading it from beginning to end. Violence that repeats itself in an endless loop, just like the reading of the Torah. Truly, it is possible to die of shame and sorrow over this Nazifying Judaism that has been growing here for years, to the glory of the Jewish state.
I grew up in a community that Zionism contemptuously calls “Diaspora Jewry.” And what shall I tell you, give me another two thousand years of exile and not one day be ashamed of the independence with this as its façade.
*(Translated from Hebrew by Sol Salbe • Middle East News Service)
