[Peace-discuss] Complete letter to N-G

[David Green]

This is the unedited version of the letter that was
printed Monday in the News-Gazette:

Editor:
 
     Fred Jaher (11/29) asks the reader to trust
him—after years of research and tortured reasoning, he
knows an anti-Semite when he smells one. The fact
remains that criticism of U.S. support for Israel’s
criminality is all that matters to Jaher and other
critics of Carl Estabrook. They don’t have a word in
response to the millions of openly anti-Semitic
Christian Americans who support Israel’s military
occupation while forecasting the eternal condemnation
of unconverted Jews. When confronted with this stink,
their sense of smell mysteriously abandons them.
 
      But this is no aberration; there has always been
a complex, largely unconscious dynamic between Zionism
and anti-Semitism. Early Zionists rejected Judaism or
subordinated it to Jewish nationalism,
while accepting anti-Semitic concepts of Jews as
inherently incapable of integrating into Western
nations as full citizens. Moses Hess described the
economic structure of East European Jewry as
“parasitic,” and the future Jewish state as “the basis
on which European Jewry will be able to climb
out of their dustbins.” Zionism incorporated
anti-Semitic myths of Jews as defined by race or
language, and turned these into counter-myths defining
the Jewish nation that needed to be built. Within this
framework, racist distinctions among Jews extended
into Palestine, as the Zionist movement denigrated and
sought to replace immigrants’ Yiddish or Arab culture
with a literally fabricated one. Arab Jews were
routinely described as savages, superstitious, and
diseased.
 
     The racialist thinking that Zionism has
engendered among Jews has obviously been applied to
Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims with a vengeance,
serving to obscure the intra-Jewish aspect of the
conflict while pathologically projecting the label
of victimizer onto our primary victims. Charges of
anti-Semitism against critics of Israeli policies
serve only to bury these poorly understood conflicts
and to ensure that they will continue to find
“expression” in pathological and violent forms. Fred
Jaher can hardly claim innocence in such matters. Nor
can any of us.


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com