Tuesday 8 June 2010

Genocide

This falling out between Israel and Turkey is very interesting. Their strange alliance had the unspoken basis that each wanted for different reasons to maintain that Hitler's mass murder of Jews was without parallel. Zionists want to use the Holocaust to demonstrate that Jews are a unique people, always and everywhere in danger and therefore needing to live in a fortress. Turks want to maintain that Hitler's genocide was a one-off and that there was no comparable Armenian genocide.

Netanyahu has shown himself completely out of touch by suggesting that the violence on the first boat resulted from it being full of Muslims, i.e. "terrorists", while the peaceful seizure of the Rachel Corrie was possible because it was full of reasonable Europeans. His readiness to infuriate Turks, and indeed Egyptians and Jordanians, shows that he does not feel any need for any Middle Eastern friends.

The great irony is that the more extreme the nationalism of Israel, the more it demonstrates that Jews are not a peculiar 'race' but very ordinary human beings, as capable as anybody else of blindness and brutality in a futile cause.

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