Odeh Bisharat Opinion Palestinians Are Today’s Jews
The words spoken by Mahmoud Abbas
at a meeting of the Palestinian National Council were exasperating not
only due to his embrace of the racist European narrative about Jews and
other nations, but also due to the fact that he represents a nation
which throughout its history was among the most wronged ones and the
constant target of incitement.
Let
me tell you, Abbas, what they say about your people now, not 100 years
ago. Ayelet Shaked, the minister of justice, published a forgotten
article by Uri Elitzur on her Facebook page, in which Palestinian
children are likened to snakes that need to be killed before growing
up; Bezalel Smotrich, a Knesset member who is part of the ruling
coalition, does not want his wife to lie next to an Arab woman in a
maternity ward for reasons of racial purity; Roni Alsheikh, the police
commissioner, says that while Jews choose to sanctify life, their
enemies choose to sanctify death. Among the inflammatory remarks of Yair Lapid,
a prime ministerial contender, he suggests Israeli troops “shoot and
kill anyone pulling out a knife or screwdriver, or whatever.” Avigdor
Lieberman, the defense minister, goes even further, wishing to
decapitate with an axe his Arab opponents, citizens of Israel.
Along
with declarations by leaders of this state there is a benighted
atmosphere leading to a constant demeaning of Arabs – sometimes as
backstabbers, other times as savages, sometimes as lazy, loafers,
stupid, or on occasion as invaders or tax evaders. For dessert one can
quote the poet Mordechai Horowitz, who said “Arabs like their murders
hot, humid and steaming.” Incidentally, his wife, Naomi Shemer, the
quasi-national poet, never uttered a peep of objection to her husband’s
chilling words.
I
hear all this and my thoughts and heart wander to places in which, in
the distant past as well as today, ordinary people were and are exposed
to evil assaults. I think of their feelings of helplessness in front of
their children asking for succor; I think of the Jews in the books of
Sholem Aleichem, whose town was their whole world, suddenly saddled with
all the wrongs of the country they lived in. In my thoughts I also
reach the Jews of Iraq who loved their country until in one moment their
criminal government, supported by British imperialism, passed some
draconian rules that dispossessed them of all their assets, thus
contributing, along with Zionist activists, to their departing their country of birth.
Do you hear, Abbas, what they say of your people?
Isn’t their standing today similar to where the Jews were a century
ago? Therefore your words, which blamed the Jews, the targets of
anti-Semitism in those dark days, serve in today’s context to similarly
place the blame on Palestinian victims, while embracing the racist
Israeli narrative. What do I, as a Palestinian, have to do with tyrants
to whose side you drag us? In the chain of human pain I’m a link on the
side of the oppressed, I’m the legitimate son of Jews who were oppressed in Europe and of all the sufferers of this world.
Here you have Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
who only yesterday made political mileage on the backs of nine Jewish
girls and one boy who died in a flood, falsely casting horrible
accusations at Arab citizens as if they whistled during a moment’s
silence in honor of the victims. Is the voice of this pathetic man the
voice of the Jews in the ghetto or the suffering towns of Eastern
Europe? No! We Palestinians are the contemporary voices of those
oppressed people.
Palestinians
everywhere are the followers of the path of the oppressed Jews of
Europe. In besieged and bombarded Gaza, in the barbed-wire-enclosed West
Bank, in refugee camps, in the shadow of their Arab brethren who don’t
stop abusing them, and in Israel, where they serve as the punching bag
of every racist.
It’s
true – Netanyahu and Smotrich, Shaked and Alsheikh are Jewish, but they
don’t represent Jews. They represent their oppressors.
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