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April 12, 2002/Nisan 30, 5762, Vol. 54, No. 30
Blurring line between anti-Israel and anti-Jewish
MICHAEL J. JORDAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - It was on full display last year at the global anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, but the "demonization" of Israel has reached a fever pitch during the past month with the surging death toll in the Middle East, say Jewish observers.
Even as Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked this week, anti-Israel critics worldwide increasingly are employing Nazi and Holocaust imagery and analogies to describe the Jewish state's behavior toward the Palestinians.
At the same time, Western Europe - particularly France - has seen a rash of attacks on synagogues and other Jewish institutions, prompting one French Jewish leader to compare the current situation to Kristallnacht, the night in November 1938 when Nazi thugs destroyed Jewish homes and synagogues across Austria and Germany.
Pro-Israel advocates say they accept the fallibility of Israel and the right to criticize it. However the line between anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Semitism blurs when the world seems to hold Israel to a higher standard than all other countries.
"I wouldn't have a problem if the Fourth Geneva Convention were convened to discuss Rwanda and Northern Ireland and Kashmir and the Middle East, but why is it that it's been convened only twice in its 53-year history - both times to discuss Israel? That's anti-Semitism," Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said, referring to a set of human rights guidelines passed after World War II.
"How many times did the U.N. Security Council meet to discuss and pass resolutions about Rwanda or Northern Ireland? You have to ask the question: Why only Israel? The whole world is entitled to their nationalism, their right to self-determination, their independence movement, but Jewish nationalism - Zionism - is treated differently."
Veiled beneath today's vitriol for Israel, Jewish observers detect a form of anti-Semitism of the we-don't-hate-Jews-just-the-Jewish-state variety, which was first formally enshrined when the United Nations equated Zionism with racism in 1975.
Likening Israelis to Nazis is particularly nefarious, advocates say, and goes hand in hand with the Holocaust denial pervasive in the Arab world.
"To open the world for new crimes against Jews, you either have to say the Holocaust did not exist, or to minimize or trivialize it by saying that the victims are really the victimizers," Rabbi Michael Melchior, Israel's deputy foreign minister, told JTA.
In Western Europe it is a way to ease the conscience, said Holocaust historian Michael Berenbaum.
"It's some measure of solace for Europeans that Israel seems to be in the morally compromised position, because it relieves them of the residual guilt they have for the Holocaust," said Berenbaum, a professor at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles and the former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Research Institute.
"It's a way of getting even with Jews, whom they think have lorded the moral depravity of the Europeans over their heads."
With Israel's siege of Palestinian cities, refugee camps and the Ramallah headquarters of Yasser Arafat, Israel has been barraged with Holocaust denials, Nazi comparisons and blood libels that circulate globally via the Internet.
Not many are speaking out against the incendiary rhetoric.
One notable exception, though, was the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger.
On March 26, in his address to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Kellenberger said: "Does anyone really believe that the suffering caused by current conflicts around the globe surpasses the ravages of World War II and the atrocities that accompanied it?"
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