Israel's Most Powerful Weapon--The Holocaust

OK back to an interesting discussion.

The thing is that I agree with some of Finkelstein’s ideas. His argument seems to be that it is wrong to use the tragic events of the ‘holocaust’ to further personal or political agendas.

I agree, I think it morally repugnant.

But I also live in the real world and it is incredibly naive to think that people or governments or political factions wouldn’t try and use such events.

You just have to look at the way such events as ‘the black hole of Calcutta’, ‘Custer’s last stand’ and ‘9/11’ have been used by political and commercial factions to further their own agendas to understand how such things work.

You don’t need to degrade or deny the holocaust in order to be annoyed with it’s use by some people and those that do often have their own political agendas and so are falling into the same trap.

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The fact is that many events shape peoples and nations, the events leading up to and including the War of Independence turned what was once one of the loyalist parts of the British Empire into a new country, being one example. The way the black people were forcibly moved to America and that so many were denied of their rights for so many years is another. The way the Kurds have been treated in the Middle East is another.

These all have helped shape the views of these groups.

The holocaust is another of these events and it has shaped many peoples views (and not just those of the Jews).

For many that idea is ‘never again’.

For some this meant bringing legal protections, economic equalisation, racial understanding, and peaceful conflict resolutions, for others it meant getting armed.

Many right wing Americans believe that the best way to fight crime is to just arm everyone, and don’t seem to care that this means that more innocent deaths are likely and the logical conclusion is that might is right and the one with the biggest gun and the leased disinclination to use it wins. The fact is that in many areas of US domestic law enforcement and government foreign policies are based on intimidation and threat, it is not about resolving situations but about suppressing it. So many right wingers can accept police or prison brutality, can accept gitmo and torture, can accept bigoted police officers and soldiers.

So we come to Israel, they have responded to ‘never again’ by getting armed and they are using the same tactics of their greatest supporters the American right.

They have the biggest guns and a willingness to use them and they intimidate and suppress those that they think are against them. So they accept the police brutality against Palestinians, they accept torture, and they accept bigotry and they accept wars.

And what do the other side do?

One side uses their batons they get a knife, they get a gun the other side gets a tank, one side uses F-16’s the other side uses suicide bombers and so on.

And more innocent civilians die.