The Tanakh often promotes a distrust of gentiles. Fears about “Jew-hate” from non-Jews and fears about non-Jews conspiring together to destroy all Jews can be found in the Tanakh. For example:
O God, do not keep silence;
do not hold thy peace or be still, O God!
For lo, thy enemies are in tumult;
those who hate thee have raised their heads.
They lay crafty plans against thy people;
they consult together against thy protected ones.
They say, “Come, let us wipe them out as a nation;
let the name of Israel be remembered no more!”
Yea, they conspire with one accord;
against thee they make a covenant—
the tents of Edom and the Ish′maelites,
Moab and the Hagrites,
Gebal and Ammon and Am′alek,
Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre;
Assyria also has joined them;
they are the strong arm of the children of Lot. -Psalm 83
And even though it is true that there have been groups that have desired to destroy all Jews, such as Nazis, the Nazis were ultimately defeated by other nations. And Nazis now face cooperative effort for their elimination. Nazism is one of the most hated ideologies in the world and Nazis today are a common symbol of evil (and I have no desire to dispute it). Public displays of Nazi symbols are banned in many countries, including Germany, China, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, and Israel. And Nazi’s didn’t desire to only massacre Jews, they also carried out genocides against Roma and Slavs, and crafted eliminationist laws against homosexuals and people with various disabilities. There are unfortunately people from many demographic groups who can lay claim to being genocidally hated by Nazis.
While Zionists incessantly preach about the historical persecution of Jews as if it’s exceptional, the persecution of religious groups is not a historical oddity. Christians were, after all, persecuted by some Jews and Romans when they first came about. Allegedly their founder, Jesus, was crucified by some Jewish and Roman authorities for blasphemy and sedition (a more modern example is Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, who was lynched by Christians who hated the growing power of Mormons). Jesus may have been raised Jewish but he was arguably as much a Jew when he died as Joseph Smith was a Christian. Following his death, Jesus’ followers were then persecuted by the same authorities. Those followers were not only ex-Jews, but people who had once followed Greco-Roman religions. During the 20th century, Christians, and many other religious groups faced brutal persecution by various Communist regimes, such as the Soviet Union — where millions of people of various religious and political persuasions were systematically tortured or executed for being essentially heretics and insufficiently loyal to the totalitarian ideology.
Some religious groups, furthermore, simply don’t exist anymore because they were completely extinguished by hostile forces. The Tanakh contains passages (some of which I have already quoted) that encouraged the genocide of various groups who practiced various religions in Canaan. Ancient Israelites, according to the mythology of Judaism, were commanded to extinguish those groups and Zionists today proclaim it was justified — Netanyahu, as mentioned earlier, expressed reverence for Joshua who supposedly committed genocide in the past.
The genocide of Jews by Nazis was used by Zionists to lobby the U.N. for partition in 1947 of Palestine, which is still today used to legitimize the Nakba, and the Holocaust continues to be used as a way to justify the existence of an apartheid “Jewish State” and the genocide being carried out by Israel today. Israel has a history of trying to present the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust as an event that should be viewed as uniquely sacred by everyone, to be held apart from the suffering of other humans. For example, in 1982 Israel’s Foreign Ministry set out to curtail an academic conference that was going to cover the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. From Haaretz:
The list of people whom Foreign Ministry emissaries contacted to persuade them not to participate included local officials such as Yad Vashem chairman Yitzhak Arad and Yad Vashem council chairman Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial two decades earlier. The idea was to try to persuade the Holocaust remembrance center of the problematic nature of the conference, which, in dealing with both with the Shoah and the Armenian genocide, would detract from the uniqueness of the former.
To this day, Israel has not officially recognized the Armenian Genocide, as it’s imagined it would possibly damage the public perception of the Holocaust. From Haaretz:
Because there’s a basic, fixed issue, far less influenced by outside parties and events, but one that uniquely influences Israeli policy in regard to recognition of the Armenian genocide: the memory of the Holocaust as "unique."
In Israel, there is a commitment to "never again," a watchword in Israeli society, politics, and diplomacy ever since the birth of the State of Israel. But it has been embraced in its particularist form: "never again" to Jewish vulnerability in the face of murderous antisemitism, rather than the "never again to anyone," the form in which it is widely understood in, for example, the liberal American Jewish community.
That same particularism works retroactively, too. Analogies to the Holocaust are often slammed as the "trivialization" of Jewish suffering. That anathema to "sharing" the idea of being genocide victims, or the fear of competing genocide commemorations, has a specific locus.
A man who was specifically asked in 1982 to pull out of the conference and agreed was Zionist and author Elie Wiesel. Not only did he pull out, he shared internal documents with the Israeli government and tried to convince others who were attending the conference to back out as well by concocting lies about it. Elie Wiesel was a prolific author and survived imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps himself. His parents died at the hands of Nazis. And after he was rescued by Allied troops he went on to be one of the most prominent marketers of the Holocaust for the sake of Israeli state and Zionist interests. He actually received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, about 4 years after he chose to work with the Israeli state to “reduce and diminish” the death marches and killing fields of the Armenian Genocide.
It is the Committee's opinion that Elie Wiesel has emerged as one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterise the world.
It is my opinion that Elie Wiesel didn’t deserve any Peace Prize. Giving him that prize was a travesty. But he may deserve a prize for living out the time-honored Zionist canard of using the suffering of Jews during World War 2 as an excuse for the atrocities of Israel. After being saved from the concentration camp he was inspired by Irgun’s terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, shortly prior to the Zionist racial cleansing of Palestinians, and wanted to join the Zionist militants:
Interviewer: "Why after the war did you not go on to Palestine from France?
Wiesel: I had no certificate. In 1946 when the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel, I decided I would like to join the underground. Very naively I went to the Jewish Agency in Paris. I got no further than the janitor who asked: "What do you want?" I said, "I would like to join the underground." He threw me out. About 1948 I was a journalist and helped one of the Yiddish underground papers with articles, but I was never a member of the underground."
Interviewer: I am surprised to hear you say you wanted to join since the notion of killing is so foreign to you.
Wiesel: Still, at that point, I felt I had to do something. I could only hope that if I had become a member I would not have had to kill. In 1946 I wanted to to do something. The Jewish people were awakening, and my place was with the Jewish people. Whatever the Jews were doing, I had to be with them. Everything about the underground was alien to me. I was against killing, against violence.
Interviewer: A Christian friend of mine recently told me that being in Israel in the wars of 1967 and 1973, I was indirectly helping to kill...
Wiesel. I was there in 1967 and in 1973 too. But I didn't have a gun I came to help the Israelis. To say that they were killers is not true. They were being killed as well. They were fighting. It's a paradox. I don't pretend to be able to solve the paradoxes in me. There are many paradoxes which are part of my life. I am absolutely a pacifist, against violence, surely against killing, and yet I am totally for Israel. Maybe because I believe that they really don't want to fight. And whenever they do, they don't fight as others do. They never celebrate their military heroes. In 1967, when they won, and it was a just war, they were sad. All the generals were sad. In 1973, they were so sad they didn't talk. I remember that when I came back from a one-day visit to the Golan Heights, I couldn't talk.
He wasn’t part of the underground he said, he was just writing their propaganda. I have often detected a level of reflexive respect or deference given to people who survive horrific events like concentration camps, as if suffering has an automatic ennobling effect. I can understand a reflexive compassion, but I do not understand the deference. Sometimes suffering doesn’t affect a person’s character at all, and unfortunately sometimes it can even degrade their character, or simply reveal the true depravity of it.
Seemingly Elie came out of that event with a heightened sense of tribal devotion to his “people” and an absolute callousness toward any people who Israel needed to destroy to establish and maintain itself as a pseudo ethno-theocratic state. He went through his life fanatically devoted to Israel, even to the point of delusion — thinking that “they don’t fight as others do.” Or was he just lying? Did he really think the “generals” were “sad” about the Americans who were napalmed by Israeli fighter jets in 1967 in a war, which Elie thinks of as a “just war”, that expanded the territory occupied by the state of Israel? Did he really think he was a “pacifist” when he was “totally for Israel?” That’s not a paradox, that is a hypocrisy; a contradiction; a falsehood. Was his belief about Israel “not celebrating military heroes” a lie or just massive ignorance? I don’t suspect Elie Wiesel was ignorant.
Just as the current Prime Minister honored Joshua, the first Prime Minister honored Joshua as well. Ben Gurion wrote this in his book about the 1956 Sinai campaign:
The Israel Defense Forces is not continuation of the (pre-state) Haganah, but it is a new turning point in the history of Jewish heroism, such as the war of Joshua Ben-Nun, the wars of King David and the Hasmoneans.
The notion that Israel doesn’t celebrate military actors is idiotic. Not only does Israel celebrate military “heroes”, it celebrates some of the most vile military actors ever imagined in human history and directly connects its behavior to those “heroes.”
In fact on the morning of the beginning of the war that Elie honored, which led to the napalming of U.S. soldiers, the Israeli Air Force Commander Mordecai Hod invoked Joshua and the “heroes” of 1948 and 1956:
The Spirit of Israel‘s heroes accompany us to battle . . . From Joshua Bin-Nun, King David, the Maccabees and the fighters of 1948 and 1956, we shall draw the strength and courage to strike the Egyptians who threaten our safety, our independence, and our future. Fly, soar at the enemy, destroy him and scatter him throughout the desert so that Israel may live, secure in its land, for generations. - from Michael Oren’s, Six Days of War, P 170.
At a speech that Elie gave at an opening for a Holocaust museum, he said this:
Only those who were there know what it meant being there. And yet – we are duty bound to try and not to bury our memories into silence – we try. I know what people say – it is so easy. Those that were there won’t agree with that statement. The statement is: it was man’s inhumanity to man. NO! It was man’s inhumanity to Jews! Jews were not killed because they were human beings. In the eyes of the killers they were not human beings! They were Jews! It is because they were Jews that it was so easy for the killers to kill!
…And so we go through the museum and what should we do? Weep? No!
My good friends – we never try to tell the tale to make people weep. It is too easy. We did not want pity. If we decided to tell the tale - it is because we wanted the world to be a better world – just a better world and learn and remember...
I’m not sure who he was referring to when he said “we”, but I suspect the reason that Elie told his tale (based on his behavior and loyalties) wasn’t because he wanted the world to be a “better world”; he wanted the world to look away when Israel carried out atrocities.
The notion that the Holocaust was “man’s inhumanity to Jews” is even more misleading than the suggestion it was “man’s inhumanity to man.” The Holocaust, the genocide of Jews by Nazis (and some collaborators) during World War 2, was, more precisely, Nazi genocidal hatred toward Jews; it wasn’t “man’s”. Very particularly, it wasn’t Palestinian genocidal hatred. It wasn’t Swahili. It wasn’t American. It wasn’t British. It wasn’t Elton John’s. It was, in fact, a relatively small minority of humanity’s genocidal hatred. Elie slanderously assigns guilt to “man” for what happened to millions of Jews during World War 2. He essentially blames “the goyim”— all non-Jews — for what happened to Jews during World War 2. Furthermore, while Nazis specifically genocidally hated Jews, they also specifically genocidally hated Roma, Slavs, and Communists. Elie demanded the specificity of one group of victims, yet disregarded the specificity of the victimizers. Not only that, he collaborated with an apartheid state established through the racial cleansing of Palestinians to deny the Armenian genocide. It seems Elie Wiesel had no qualms about “inhumanity” to not just Armenians, but Israel’s inhumanity to Palestinians. To this day Israel has laws punishing the acknowledgement of the racial cleansing. From Human Rights Watch:
The second law would heavily fine any government-funded institution, including municipalities that provide health and education, for commemorating the "Nakba" - the Arabic term to describe the destruction of Palestinian villages and expulsion of their residents after Israel's declaration of independence - and for expression deemed to "negate the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."
Imagine if the U.S. government heavily fined any government funded institution that commemorated the Trail of Tears, or the Atlantic Slave Trade. Zionists insist that “the nations” (the goyim) hyper-focus and flagellate themselves over the Holocaust, even though most non-Jews had nothing to do with the Holocaust, while the Israeli government cannot even acknowledge the suffering it has unjustly inflicted on innocent people using the Holocaust as an excuse.
The persecution of Jews at various times throughout history has sometimes been very bad, but it doesn’t give any Jews the right to conquer and rule Palestine anymore than the decimation of the religion of the Aztecs by the Spanish Christian conquistadors gives any descendants of people who followed that religion (or current followers if there can be said to be such a thing now) the right to conquer and rule Mexico. Nor does it create a moral right for Jews to have the religion they choose to be protected from disparagement, any more than the persecution and destruction of the Aztecs’ religion creates a moral right for it to be protected from disparagement. The conquistadors had no right to do what they did, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t disparage the idea that people should sacrifice humans to the god, Tlaloc. Likewise, just because people who worship Yahweh have been persecuted (often by other people who worship Yahweh) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t disparage the idea that humans should be sacrificed to Yahweh (it happens, for example, in Joshua, and it happens in the New Testament as well; that’s right, Jesus is a human sacrifice) or the idea that Israelites have the right to racially cleanse Canaan (Palestine) because a genocidal character in a book written by ancient totalitarian barbarians supposedly gifted the land to them and commanded them to kill everyone on it.
In the U.S., we now have a legal right to disparage any religious idea we wish, even though most of our current congress wants to intimidate people for disparaging Zionism and even take away that right, and I’d argue it’s a human virtue to disparage bad religious ideas. One such bad religious idea is that it’s essentially racist to disparage Zionism, Judaism or the state of Israel, or that disparaging Zionism, Judaism or the state of Israel fundamentally implies Nazi-like hate of all Jews. I dislike Scientology and I think it is a pile of turds dumped by a charlatan, L. Ron Hubbard, but it doesn’t mean I have a murderous hatred of Tom Cruise, a Scientologist; in fact, I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I even like some of the movies he has acted in.
Certainly there are some people who have a murderous bigoted hatred of the Jews, and those people should be loathed, just as there are some people who have a murderous bigoted hatred of the Communists, and those people should be loathed as well. Indeed, wars have been launched, and millions of people have been killed trying to destroy communists. Communists were among the first prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. Nazis had a bigoted murderous hatred of communists. But there aren’t many Americans who would find that fact to be a compelling argument for why people should not disparage communism or specific individual communists or communist organizations, like the Chinese Communist Party.
The fear that Herzl expressed as the primary motivation for building a state in Palestine was that there was nowhere safe for Jews, and the only way Jews would be safe is if they had a sovereign state:
We might perhaps be able to merge ourselves entirely into surrounding races, if these were to leave us in peace for a period of two generations. But they will not leave us in peace. For a little period they manage to tolerate us, and then their hostility breaks out again and again. The world is provoked somehow by our prosperity, because it has for many centuries been accustomed to consider us as the most contemptible among the poverty-stricken.
Of course that idea has proven disastrously false. The genocide Israel is currently carrying out is because it was attacked by its prisoners and now Israelis don’t feel safe — this despite there being a “Jewish State”. Israel is arguably less safe for Jews than many other countries, such as the U.S, and it has been for more than “two generations”. If Zionists just wanted Jews to be safe and have “peace”, they probably shouldn’t have chosen to settle in a populated territory and carry out a racial cleansing campaign where their religious literature commands. They could have just asked for some empty land in Wyoming.
We are one people--our enemies have made us one without our consent, as repeatedly happens in history. Distress binds us together, and, thus united, we suddenly discover our strength. Yes, we are strong enough to form a State, and, indeed, a model State. We possess all human and material resources necessary for the purpose.
Unfortunately, the state formed is absolutely not a “model State” as Herzl had envisioned. As it is now, it is a genocidal pseudo ethno-theocratic state; one of the worst sorts of states that can be. Being bound by the xenophobic belief that all people will be forever racially tribal and will always come to hate Jews as an imagined race is not a good reason to bind together to form a state. That seems, strangely, to be a very impactful argument for why some Jews remain Jews though. An impious Jew may think “oh, if I reject being a Jew just as I reject Yahweh, the gentiles will still view me as a Jew and I’ll end up being persecuted as if I were a Jew; I will therefore stay a Jew, declare myself racially Jewish, and take upon myself the erroneous conception of my persecutors.”
What does that say about that Jew and his view of “gentiles” though? It reflects a belief that there aren’t non-Jews who will see him as an individual free to choose his own tribe(s) and religion and isn’t defined by his mythological ancestry— that is, he holds a view that all non-Jews are delusional racial bigots, this despite the historical record of non-Jews rescuing people conceived as Jews, whether they identified as Jews or not, at risk of their own lives, from monsters. An Academy and Golden Globe award winning movie was even directed and produced by some Hollywood-Jews, who Michael Rapaport believes to be an oppressed race, about one such gentile — Schindler’s List. The Israeli government even designated Schindler “Righteous among the Nations”— an award given to non-Jews who saved Jews during World War 2 despite risk to their own lives. But that would also imply that gentiles who didn’t do that were, I suppose, not righteous? The opinion of Israel about the “Nations” is demonstrably not particularly high. And I suspect that a person today, who attempted to save Palestinians despite risk to their own lives, would not be given the same award. Or imagine I created my own award: “Righteous among the Jews.” Yah, I don’t think Jerry Seinfeld would appreciate that, and not only because he wouldn’t be getting one.