The New York Sun
November 30, 2004 Tuesday
Off-Key Comparison
by Hillel Halkin
An American friend just sent me an e-mail containing an article that
appeared yesterday, in the November 29 British daily the Guardian.
Written by the Guardian’s Israel correspondent Chris McGreal, the
article deals with an incident that took place on November 9 and was
widely reported last week in the Israeli and international press. In
this incident, Israeli soldiers at a West Bank check post near Nablus
made a Palestinian violinist play his instrument in front of them
before giving him permission to pass.
Of all the recent revelations of the “routine dehumanizing treatment”
of Palestinians by the Israeli military, Mr. McGreal wrote, including
an Israeli officer’s “pumping the body of a 13-yearold girl with
bullets” in the Gaza Strip, “none so disturbed” Israelis as this one,
because of its associations with the Holocaust. As an example, the
Guardian cited the Hebrew writer Yoram Kaniuk, the author of a novel
about a Jewish violinist forced by the Nazis to play marches in
Auschwitz as Jews were taken to the gas chambers. Mr. Kaniuk was
quoted as saying:
“This story….negates the possibility of the existence of a Jewish
state. If the military does not put these soldiers on trial, we will
have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from
the Holocaust.”
My concerned friend asked for my opinion.
It’s a bit complicated, my opinion. It’s actually several opinions.
There is no doubt that the phenomenon of Israeli soldiers brutalizing
and humiliating Palestinian civilians, let alone killing them without
justification, is shameful. What is even more shameful, as Mr.
McGreal rightly points out, is that in the vast majority of these
cases the perpetrators have either been lightly punished or have gone
scot-free Although, in the situation of extreme animosity that
currently exists between Israeli and Palestinian societies it is
impossible to avoid such incidents entirely, they could certainly be
decreased if the higher echelons of the Israeli army were determined
to prevent them. It is reprehensible that they do not seem to be.
At the same time, not every incident that is reported as a case of
brutality or humiliation is one, as we know from the infamous story
of Mohammed Durra, the Palestinian child whose supposed martyrdom at
the hands an Israeli sniper in the year 2000 turned him into an
international icon even after clear evidence showed that he was
killed by Palestinians. In itself, after all, there is nothing wrong
with Israel soldiers at a checkpoint asking a young Palestinian to
play his violin as a way of making sure it is not stuffed with
explosives. Palestinians have been caught in the past with explosives
in bags, in belts, in knapsacks, briefcases, in underwear, in what
appeared to be the pregnant stomachs of women. What makes a violin
above suspicion?
Nor, studying the photograph of the incident published in the Israeli
press, can one identify any would-be humiliators. Neither of the two
soldiers directly in front of the violinist, one talking on a cell
phone and the other checking documents, is even looking at him, much
less taking pleasure in the situation. Whoever it was who ordered the
young man to play his instrument certainly didn’t do it as a show for
their benefit.
Yet the facts of this specific case are perhaps beside the point. Are
Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints often treated badly? The answer
is yes. Should everything possible be done to stop this? Yes, again.
Are the checkpoints nevertheless necessary? Yes, once more. (They
have saved many Israeli lives, and Israelis will have to be excused
for thinking that a humiliated Palestinian is better than a dead
Israeli.) Is it legitimate to compare such incidents, or any other
aspect of the Israeli presence in the occupied territories, to the
Holocaust? Absolutely not. Under no conceivable circumstances.
Imagine, if you will, the following dispatch in The Guardian in 1943:
“As the German dehumanization of Eastern- 846 1078 919 1090European
Jews grows worse, a new height of sadism has been reached: Jewish
violinists have been forced to play their violins in front of jeering
German soldiers.”
Would that the Holocaust had been a matter of humiliated violinists.
Would that it had been a matter of humiliated Jews. Would that it had
been a matter of the occasional killing of innocent Jews by German
soldiers.
But of course, it was none of these things. It was the successfully
systematic murder of the Jewish people. Which is why, whenever
anyone, Jew or Gentile, Israeli author or English journalist,
compares Israeli actions in the occupied territories to those of the
Germans or their allies in the Holocaust, something vile and
intolerable has been done. The descendants of the victims of the
Holocaust have been turned into the perpetrators of another one.
In order to make such a comparison, one has to be either (1) totally
ignorant of what happened in the Holocaust; (2) totally ignorant of
what is happening in the occupied territories; (3) totally
indifferent, in one’s eagerness to bash Israel and Jews, to the
historical facts in either case. Compare Israeli actions, if you
will, to those of the French in Algeria. (The French were in reality
a hundred times worse.) Compare them, if you must, to those of the
Americans in Vietnam. (The Americans were incredibly more brutal.)
Compare them to anything you want – except the Holocaust.
This isn’t because the Holocaust isn’t comparable to other things. It
is. But it is comparable only to other mass exterminations: That of
the Armenians by the Turks in World War I, that of Cambodians by the
Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, that of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda in 1995.
It is not comparable, ever, to anything Israel has done or is doing
in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Any such an analogy should
automatically be beyond the pale of acceptable human discourse.
That’s my opinion.
From: Baghdasarian