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Letters
Vol. 30 No. 6 · Cover date: 20 March 2008
A Bigger Shoah
From Amos Halevy
Yonatan Mendel suggests that the realities of the Occupation are concealed in Israeli press accounts by the euphemisms and subterfuges that characterise ‘military discourse’ (LRB, 6 March). But those realities – and even more disturbing potential scenarios – are laid bare by that discourse when it’s spoken by politicians and army officers with fewer inhibitions. While Israeli journalists avoid the words ‘apartheid’ and ‘racism’ for fear of insulting the army (or offending their readers’ sensibilities), Effi Eitam, a right-wing member of the Knesset who served as Sharon’s minister of housing, recently told a group of Arab lawmakers: ‘one day we will expel you from this house, and from the national home of the Jewish people.’ While Israeli journalists speak blandly of ‘clearing’ areas being used by militants, an Israeli officer recommended that soldiers invading Nablus study the German army’s methods in the Warsaw ghetto. During the most recent siege of Gaza, Matan Vilnai, the deputy defence minister, declared that if Palestinians continue to fire Qassam rockets into Israel they ‘will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah’. The Israeli government issued a ‘clarification’ to the effect that Vilnai did not mean ‘genocide’, just a disaster: in this case, more than one hundred Palestinians killed, many of them civilians, in revenge for the killing of an Israeli in the town of Sderot. Any measure can be justified in the name of the Shoah – even, it seems, another shoah.
Amos Halevy
Brooklyn
at 11:43 AM
Israeli soldiers shoot another peaceful protestor in head