[Marxism] French Jewish writer sees Gaza as "Second Death of Judaism"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Quite some time ago, I came to the conclusion that the foundation of the
state of Israel marked the completion of Hitler's destruction of European
Jewry. The key to establishing Israel was not just the immigration policies
of the various imperialist powers but the refusal of the imperialist powers
and the Soviet bloc to recognize any obligations to take the measures
required to rebuild European Jewish communities on a viable basis free of
the old anti-Semitic exclusions, discrimination, and persecution of the
past.

The state of Israel has been not only the visitation of a curse, a
punishment, and a savage oppression on the Arab peoples of the Middle 
East that they had done nothing to deserve, unlike the European powers in
particular, but has had devastating effects on the morality, politics, and
basic human decency of Jews around the world. It remains to be seen whether
the masses of world Jewry can rescue themselves or be rescued from this
historic disaster.

I thank Charlie Post for bringing this item to my attention.
Fred Feldman


http://www.protection-palestine.org/spip.php?article6854
The second death of Judaism.

by Eric Hazan (Editor and writer, founder of the Editions "La Fabrique")


publié le vendredi 16 janvier 2009.


The millions of Jews that were exterminated by the Nazis in the plains of
Poland had some common features that allow one to speak of a European
Judaism. It was not so much about being part of some mythical people, nor
about religion for they were many to have drifted away from it : it was
about elements of a common culture. It could neither be reduced to cooking
recipes, nor jokes conveying the well-known Jewish humor, nor even language
since not all of them spoke Yiddish. It was something deeper, under various
forms shared by the textile workers of Lodz and the diamond polishers of
Anvers, from the talmudists of Vilna to the vegetable sellers of Odessa and
up to certain families of bankers as the one of Aby Warburg. These people
were not better than others, but they had never exercised any state
sovereignty and their living conditions were offering no other way out than
money and studies. In any case they despised the brute force which they
often had to suffer from. They were numerous to chose the side of the
oppressed and to participate in the resistance movement of the first half of
the last century : it is this culture that fed the Jewish Workers movement,
from the Polish Bund, spearhead of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions in the
Czarist empire, to the Parisian furriers and helmet crafters unions whose
flags bore mottoes in Yiddish and that gave a lot of fighters in the MOI
[1], against the Nazi occupant. It is on that ground that the emblematic
figures of the European Judaism grew up, Rosa Luxembourg, Franz Kafka,
Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein. After the war, lots of survivors and their
children would support emancipation struggles in the world, the black
Americans, the ANC in South Africa, the Algerians in their liberation war.

These people are dead and will not be resurrected. But what is happening now
in Gaza is killing them a second time. One will say that there is no need of
getting upset, that there were many precedents, from Deir Yassin to Sabra
and Chatilla. I think, on the contrary, that the entry of the Israeli army
in the ghetto of Gaza marks a fatal turn. First by the degree of brutality,
the number of children burnt dead or buried under the debris of their house
: a line has been crossed, it has to bring and will bring one day the
Israeli Prime minister, the minister of Defense and the chief of Staff in
front of the International Court of Justice.

But the turn is not only that of horror and massacre of masses of
Palestinians. There are two points which make the actual events the worst
thing that has happened to the Jews since Auschwitz. The first is the
cynicism, the blatant way to treat Palestinians as if they were subhumans,
the leaflets dropped by planes announcing more deadly bombings when the
population of Gaza has nowhere to flee, all issues blocked, and nothing left
to do but wait for death in the dark. This type of prank is ghastly
reminiscent of the way Jews in eastern Europe used to be treated during the
war, and on that point I am firmly waiting for the outraged cries of the
good sold-out souls. The other novelty is the silence of the majority of the
Jews. In Israel, in spite of a handful of irreducible braves, the mass
demonstration are lead by Palestinians. In France, the demonstrations of the
3rd and 10th of January saw the proletariat of the poor neighborhoods march
the streets, but I did not hear enough angry shouts of Jewish intellectuals,
unionists or Jewish politicians. Instead of being satisfied with the
nonsense of the government or the CRIF [2] ("not to bring the conflict
home"), now it is time for the Jews to march in number along the
"arab-muslims" in the protests against the unacceptable. Otherwise their
children will ask them one day "what they were doing at that time" and I
would not like to be in their place when they will have to answer.

Eric Hazan

[1] Main d’œuvre Immigrée, organization funded by the French Communist Party
in the 1920s

[2] Conseil Representatif des Institutions Juives de France

(Trad. Yann Lecrivain with the help of M. Moreau)




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