Tuesday, April 16, 2019
Elder of Ziyon
The following is an excerpt from the article in the official PA daily:
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs emphasized that hostility towards the Palestinian people is Antisemitism, and that the ugly, recurring, and deliberate Antisemitism that [US President] Trump's administration is committing against Semitic Palestine is also Antisemitism. In addition, the American administration has no right to ignore the fact that Semitism is not exclusive to the original Jews, but also includes the Arab Palestinians, and therefore any manifestation of hostility towards Palestinians is an explicit manifestation of Antisemitism. Moreover, since Zionism is hostile to Palestine, its people, and the establishment of a national homeland for the Palestinian people on the land of its homeland, this makes Zionism itself antisemitic.
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, March 29, 2019]
At first, this seems to be a variant of the old Arab argument that "we can't be antisemitic because we are semites ourselves," ignoring the fact that antisemitism, no matter what its etymology, exclusively means hatred of and discrimination against Jews.
But the official Palestinian Authority media is going beyond that absurd argument in two important - and ultimately, dangerous - ways.
It is trying to hijack the word "antisemitism" to apply to Palestinians more than it applies to Jews. If there is a category of victimhood, Palestinians must be considered members of that group or allied to members of that group, and the accusation of antisemitism is still emotionally charged, enough so that Palestinians want to make sure that they are much bigger victims of antisemitism than Jews themselves are. This is a deliberate attempt to water down the definition of the term so that hatred of Jews is not a unique hatred, but a generalized hatred of all people who can claim to be Semitic - and Palestinians "look" more Semitic than Jews do.
When antisemitism no longer refers to Jews exclusively, it means that there is no longer a commonly accepted term for Jew-hatred. By denying Jews their history of victimhood, the PA/PLO is paving the way for the next round of Jew-hatred.
The second, and crucial, point made by the PLO here is not only that Palestinians are the major victims of antisemitism - but that Jews themselves are not!
The are saying that most Jews are not Semites. Notice their use of the phrase "original Jews." Palestinians have long appropriated the discredited argument that Ashkenazic Jews are not Jews at all, but descended from Khazars, and have no Semitic blood.
The Palestinian leadership is saying not only that they are the major victims of antisemitism, but that they are virtually the only victims of antisemitism. They are saying that the Holocaust and the Khmelnytsky massacre and scores of pogroms, blood libels and expulsions of Jews throughout the ages were not antisemitic - since the victims were not Mizrahi Jews!
In other contexts they falsely say that Jews in the Arab world were never persecuted and they lived in harmony with Arab Muslims and Christians. Therefore, Jews have hardly been the victims of antisemitism at all - and only Arabs have!
The only reason to want to strip victimhood from Jews is to pave the way for the next chapter of massacres of Jews, since according to the Palestinians Jews are not a people nor legitimate victim group to begin with.
Like Holocaust denial, denial of antisemitism is itself antisemitic. The "State of Palestine" is now explicitly antisemitic.
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