Germany Created Anti-Germanism Japan Anti-Japanism. The British Anti-UKism. In the past, Britain was Anti- Papist which for some has lasted until today
But as Chris Hedges often says, ‘Israel lies.’ And in the present climate the lies are not only bellicose and incendiary, but galling to a Jew like me who grew up in a time of intense antisemitism. Even after the second world war, when we were learning more and more about the horrors of the Holocaust, antisemitism in all its guises was rampant. Yes, from 1948, when Israel was declared (and Palestinians suffered their Nakba), many European Jews who survived the Holocaust found refuge there. But that was because that Israel was now there to take them, after many Western countries had effectively closed their doors to them.
Here, in my experience, are some examples of what genuine antisemitism is. It isn’t criticising Israel. It isn’t mere ‘discomfort’ on seeing a Palestinian flag, or hearing certain words expressed at a pro-Palestinian rally. It’s limiting the number of Jews admitted to prestige universities with ‘quotas’. It’s marking off certain neighbourhoods as Jew-free in so-called ‘gentleman’s agreements’. It’s closing membership of clubs to Jews. At UCLA, where I went before coming to Australia, university campus student housing was segregated along Gentile/Jewish lines. Jews had been lynched in the American south. In the depths of the Depression, my grandfather, a grocer in Council Bluffs, Iowa, was set upon by the Ku Klux Klan, when the groceries he was giving away to the town’s unemployed ran out. Many prominent Americans such as Charles Lindbergh, or Henry Ford, or Henry Luce, were known antisemites. Authors too could be unthinkingly antisemitic: Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway to name just two.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has figures for an exponential rise in antisemitic incidents over the past months. I’m not examining the figures – numbers aren’t exactly my forte. But it’s curious that so little attempt is made by them, or pro-Zionist organisations like them, to correlate this rise with Israel’s ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people and its culmination in one of history’s most horrific human tragedies.
One thing is certain, none of us can expect to be ‘safe’ now. Because of Israel.
Source: Because of Israel, Jewish people are no longer ‘safe’ – Pearls and Irritations
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