Melanie Phillips: How the West has created antisemitism denial
Among Democrats, it is commonplace to compare US President Donald Trump to Hitler and the Republicans to Nazis.Caroline Glick: What was Rabin’s legacy?
Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price produced an ad for the mid-term Congressional elections next month in which he compared Trump to Hitler.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Democratic Representative Yvette Clarke stood in front of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Manhattan and declared: “We are standing in front of a building that has become the headquarters for the Gestapo of the United States of America.”
Even Jewish Democrats are guilty of this. Democratic Representative Stephen Cohen was forced to apologize after he likened the Republicans’ promotion of healthcare policy to the propaganda of Hitler’s henchman Joseph Goebbels.
If everyone’s a Nazi, the real Nazis stop being uniquely evil. They become instead Everyman. Thus the Holocaust is traduced, bad people get a free pass and the innocent are demonized.
The impulse behind Holocaust education and memorializing was noble and understandable. But it missed something crucial.
This was the need to teach the world about Jewish history in both the land of Israel and the Diaspora; to teach the world what it has done to the Jews over the course of recorded time; to teach the world how Judaism itself embodies a unique and unbreakable connection between the people, the religion and the land.
Judaism lies at the heart of western values. Yet it has been misrepresented and demonized by Christianity, Islam and secularism. It is that continuing ignorance and bigotry over Judaism itself which fuels the demonization of Israel, the misreading of the Holocaust and the return of open antisemitism.
In a culture framed by Holocaust memorializing, the West has itself become the avatar of antisemitism denial.
In his speech before the Knesset, Rabin detailed his view of where things would lead. He did not believe that the end result of the Oslo process would be the establishment of a Palestinian state, much less a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital in control of all or the vast majority of the land in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
Rabin not only opposed any compromise on sole Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem: He called for extending Israeli sovereignty to Ma’aleh Adumim and Givat Ze’ev, two major Israeli communities in Judea just north of the city.
He also called for extending Israeli sovereignty to Gush Etzion and other major Israeli communities south of Jerusalem, and for building settlement blocs throughout Judea and Samaria. He committed to take no action to curtail the expansion of Israeli communities, and specifically ruled out any construction freeze in those communities throughout the interim period. He also praised the Israeli communities in Gaza, signaling strongly that they would never be forsaken.
Rabin said that Israel’s eastern border would remain the Jordan Valley in perpetuity and defined the frontier in the broadest possible terms.
In short, depending on how you interpret his phrasing, Rabin was either expressing his support for Netanyahu’s vision of a demilitarized Palestinian state, or for Education Minister Naftali Bennett’s plan to apply Israeli sovereignty to all of Area C.
Either way, Rabin’s actual vision tells us something important about how the Left’s draconian restrictions on freedom of speech have harmed Israel. By shunting aside what Rabin actually stood for, and reinventing him as a leftist ideologue, the Left has cheapened and distorted the true significance of what he stood for while preventing Israel from correcting his mistakes and building on his successes.
Liberation, Not Colonization, Motivated the Creation of the Jewish State
If your child came home from college and said she was challenged by a classmate who claimed that Palestine is Arab land stolen by the Jews, could you provide her with a response?
For the 400 years before World War I, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, so it was owned by the Turks, not by the Arabs, let alone by the Arabs of Palestine. There was never a country called Palestine ruled by its own Arab inhabitants.
The original Zionists came to Palestine without the backing of any imperialist or colonialist power. They bought the land on which they settled.
Colonialism didn't bring Britain to Palestine. It conquered the land in World War I not from the Arabs but from Turkey, which had joined Britain's enemies in the war. The Arabs in Palestine fought for Turkey against Britain. The land was enemy territory.
Supporting Zionism appealed to Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Lord Balfour and other officials not just on strategic grounds, but also for moral reasons. They sympathized with the Jewish national cause. Zionism was an answer to the historical Jewish question, a way to remedy some of the harm shamefully done to the Jewish people over history.
And it would give Jews an opportunity to normalize their place in the world, by building up a national center and a refuge, a country in their ancient homeland where they could become the majority and enjoy self-determination as a people.
In 1919, the first Palestinian Congress declared that Palestine had never been divided from Syria and that Palestinians and Syrians were one people. Palestine's Arabs were not viewed by their own leaders as a separate nation.