While we often hear about the 6 million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust, we seldom hear about the over 20 million citizens of the Soviet Union, military and civilian, who died during WWII,7 and we hear even less about the atrocities committed by the Japanese allies of the Nazis in the Philippines, Korea, China, Indonesia and other places in Asia.
And, of course, in 1938, Hitler felt confident that he could eliminate the Jews because "no one remembers the Armenians" who, to this day, are seeking recognition for their genocide in waning days of the Ottoman Empire.
US Presidents of both parties, and their advisers, for too long have acted as if the Jewish people were the only ones ever to be victims of genocide. But if humanity is to learn the true lesson of the Holocaust, we must remember that other peoples were genocided before WWII, and have been genocided since WWII, and that others besides the Jews were genocided during WWII. The true lesson is that "Never again" must be "Never Again" for everybody, or else it will be "here we go again" for somebody. The goal should be to eliminate genocide from human behavior, not to guarantee of survival of one set of genocide victims above all others.
For "Never Again" to be realized, the dominator paradigm of human relations must be overthrown in favor of a system in which the rights of all people, as individuals and as group members, are respected. There are at least two competing ways of achieving this outcome. One way is through true democracy in which there is a "one person-one vote" principle and where various groups can speak, publish and educate in their own languages, worship, or not, as they please, band together in whatever political parties they wish, and engage in economic activity without discrimination.
The other, which seems to be the way the world is going, is for each people to have its own land. But the struggle for independence or autonomy is a bloody one, full of ethnic cleansing (e.g. Serbia) or acts of repression by the dominant culture over the minority (e.g. Tibet and China). Israel is but one famous example of this "one people on its own land" approach, which, frankly, is outdated in places where colonial powers have redrawn borders to weaken the power of local ethnic groups to resist. (This includes the United States in its treatment of Native American nations). And that "to each his own" solution is never equally applied. The United States, whichever party is in power, has an overweening concern for the survival of Israel as a Jewish state; the Palestinians are an afterthought, the Kurds, who are the largest ethnic group in the world to not have its own state, are hardly thought of at all. And a worldwide list of peoples with their own nationalistic aspirations, ignored or trampled on by larger powers, is fairly long, indeed.
Why is Israel so special to the United States? For some it may be the idea that the establishment of Greater Israel fulfills a biblical prophecy, for others it may be guilt over the Holocaust and the US failure to help Jews trying to escape the Nazis. But I think a large part of it may be that Israel gives the United States a firm pied-a-terre in the oil-rich Middle East. The worldwide search for resources we can control is at the heart of US foreign policy. Or to put it simply, "what's our oil doing under their sand?" Our hunt for resources helps make the world a dangerous place, especially for the people who live with those resources, whatever their religion or ethnicity.
If we really want to end genocide in the world, we should debate which approach will best achieve that goal: True democracy within existing borders, (e.g. with respect to Israel and Palestine, a one-state approach), or nationalism, with its penchant for ethnic cleansing. How many of you know that in the days before the State of Israel was founded, the Arabs were driven off land that was to become Israel. How do we know all this? From the Hebrew press. In an article published 13 August 1993 in the Israeli daily Hadashot, writer Sarah Laybobis-Dar interviewed a number of Israelis who knew of the use of bacteriological weapons in 1948. One of those interviewed, Uri Mileshtin, an official historian for the Israeli Defense Forces, said that bacteria was used to poison the wells of every village emptied of its Arab inhabitants. According to Mileshtin, it was former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan who gave the order in 1948 to remove Arabs from their villages, bulldoze their homes, and render their water wells unusable with typhus and dysentery bacteria.8 As I said in an earlier article, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
The preservation of Israel as a Jewish state seems racist to me. And in some other context with some other people it might be openly called racist. Ethnic separatism is racist and a poor substitute for what we really need to finally eliminate genocide, ie. universal recognition of human rights. And in the end, what does Israel as a Jewish state say about the ability of the Jewish people to live and thrive in the world? The world is big; Israel is very small. If Israel is the only place where Jews can feel safe, albeit with a sense of safety derived from being armed to the teeth, including with the bomb, and with the US at its back, the Jews will have been ghettoized on the planet, only this time by their own hand. They will have created the very thing they fought to escape during the Nazi era.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
