Fascist or Arpartheid State?

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis Friday August 29, 2003 14:56 by Eilis Ni Thuama West Cork

Vilification of a People

CRITICS of Israel writing in to your colums seem unable to agree whether Israel is more akin to Hitler's Germany or apartheid South Africa.

Without any of them coming out and explicitly stating it, there does however seem to be a common thread to the logic of their case: Israel is so uniquely horrible that the world would be a better place without it. If that is indeed their opinion, it would be interesting to know where exactly they would like the five million Israeli Jews to go.



Israel, in the 55 years of its existence, has fought four major wars in defence of its very survival. It has also suffered countless other attacks on its soldiers and civilians at home and overseas: the Munich Olympics, Entebbe, and the recent attempt to shoot down a civilian plane in Kenya, to name but a few. Notwithstanding the enormous drain on its resources caused by these wars, Israel has absorbed millions of refugees and asylum seekers from around the world, many of whom came from Arab lands.



Perhaps it is because it challenges the view that all the refugees in the region are Palestinian Arabs, and that Israel is a foreign power alien to the Middle East, that the story of how Israel absorbed the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Iraq, Yemen and Syria is not often told.



At the same time as re-establishing an ancient nation, dispersed and persecuted for centuries in its own state, an achievement which Irish nationalists should recognise more than most, Israel has succeeded in reviving Hebrew as its national tongue, a feat which many of the readers of this web site might be interested to know something about.



Notwithstanding the external pressures working for its destruction, Israel has managed to maintain a parliamentary democracy, an independent judiciary and freedom of the press. It is this accomplishment, totally unique to the entire Middle East region, that makes it possible for the 'human rights' groups quoted in these pages to freely criticise the actions of the current government with such ferocity, and seek to replace it at the next general election. It is Israel which offered the world the working model of the 'kibbutz' as an alternative form of socialist collective society.



Everything is Israel's fault: from the continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, to Israel as the only state in the Middle East that doesn't treat its minority populations fairly.



The enlightened would do well to take a brief look at how some of the other minorities in the region have been treated by Israel's Arab neighbours, including the Kurds, Iraqi Shi'ites and Egyptian Copts in order to improve his vision. He may then notice that the continuing occupation and all the tragedies that flow from it is the direct result of Arafat's spurning of the Oslo peace accords, with its offer of Palestinian statehood. Both main political parties in Israel advocate withdrawal and the establishment of a Palestinian state.



Hamas and Islamic Jihad are are in the vanguard of the intifada which most in these columns wholeheartedly support. Presumably they believe these organisations share their abhorrence of racial discrimination, and could be relied upon to treat their Christian and Jewish neighbours with equal fairness, once they have imposed their perversion of Islam on the region.



Perhaps Indy Media subscribers would like to give an account of why these supremacist organisations view both Christianity and Judaism with utter disdain, and what their wider aspirations are regarding the Muslim and non-Muslim world.



It is indeed sad to see representatives of one of the most misunderstood and vilified communities in the world, Irish nationalists from looking at the tragic problems of another part of the world, in order to vilify one of the parties.



EILIS NI THUAMA West Cork