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- cross-posted to:
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Less than 10 years ago, Germany, and especially Berlin, was held up as a beacon of openness and inclusivity in a western world rocked by Brexit and Donald Trump. Angela Merkel’s decision to take in thousands of refugees displaced by the war in Syria boosted her country’s reputation in progressive circles, with many international artists and academics choosing to make the German capital their new home.
Yet the conflict in the Middle East is showing Germany in a new light, highlighting fissures in society and the arts world that until now had been easier to ignore.
For centuries, the Jews in the Middle East had lived in peace with their Muslim, Christian, Druze or Yazidi neighbors.
Many of them had sought refuge in that region many generations earlier at the invitation of Turkish and Arab rulers after being brutally expelled from the Iberian peninsula by Christians.
But strangely, as soon as a small minority of European Jews with typical European arrogance, ignorance and zero respect for the local culture began to present themselves as the only legitimate representatives of worldwide Jewry and to expel (almost) all Arabs (except the Jewish ones) from Palestine with brutal violence, tensions arose between the resident Jews and the non-Jewish majority society in the neighboring Arab states.
Who could have guessed something like this? BOO! Ugh! Evil, barbaric, backward, anti-Semitic Arabs!
But simultaneously it was a big relief for the Zionist government of early Israel. Even if it was only backward Arab Jews who came, second-choice Jews so to speak, they were urgently needed to get the new state up and running without Palestinians.
There simply weren’t enough European Jews left to replace the attainted and expelled native Arabs. But remembering their own expulsion plus the corresponding brainwashing and birth rate, the Arab Jews actually became the spearhead of aggressive Zionism.
There are many peoples on earth who don’t have their own state. Regardless of religion, however, no one would come up with the idea of supporting one of these peoples in its attempt to choose a country, expel the native people and establish its own state on their land.
The idea per se is only not totally ridiculous for those being stuck in the racist European ideology of the 18th or 19th century.
Apart from that, people have always persecuted, fought and massacred each other, completely independent of religion.
Zionists began immigrating to Palestine over 100 years ago. They did NOT do ANYTHING of what we rightly expect of immigrants today. That is to say, they did not adapt to the culture of the locals or at least learn the local language any more than other European immigrants to other countries in the world have ever done. The Europeans in general still do not do it up to this day, to be honest, we only demand it of those who want to immigrate to our countries.
Since 1967, Israel, as an occupying power, has been the government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in practice and under international law. This means that all the duties that a government has, you know, increasing the benefits and preventing harm, etc., are the duties of the State of Israel towards the people of the occupied territories.
In the 67 years since the Six-Day War, has Israel done anything to fulfill these duties? What did Israel do during this time to avert harm to the population of the occupied territories and, for example, to improve the prosperity, security, freedom, health care and educational opportunities of the people living there?
In fact, it was the changed awareness and the changed policy in those states where Jews had been particularly intensely persecuted that significantly improved the security of Jews worldwide after the Second World War. And it was (and is) the racist expansionist policy of the Zionists and the State of Israel that reduces this increase in security, both in the State of Israel and for Jews worldwide.