Sound of Music

At the counter of the supermarket I ran into a friend who seemed very tense because she had family in Gaza.  But then Gaza has been the centre of  our attention and all what we have been talking about recently.  In fact asides from the distraction of the world cup, I have been flipping from one station to another to keep up with the reality on the ground.   My e-mail box has been inundated  with articles, youtubes,  as well as appeals, and  petitions that I am still trying to go through.  As my friend and I were ready to pick up our bags, a young boy standing by,  and  who apparently heard our discussion felt at liberty to contribute a comment:  “It is Hitler who needs to be blamed for all this; they are doing to us what he did to them.”  My friend and I were dumbfounded.   “How do you know about Hitler?” I asked him.  “From the Sound of Music”  he answered. 

I remembered how many times I had watched that lovely musical with my own children, and how the Trap family had to escape from  the Nazis.  I do not think that little boy realized that it was practically taboo to make an analogy between the Nazis and Israel.   However,  more voices nowadays and even Jewish voices are making this analogy as well as  being critical of Israel for having used the Holocaust to justify all the human rights violations against the Palestinians.  In fact I  had quoted  the famous Israeli singer Yaffa Yarkoni in my book Reflections from Palestine – A journey of Hope when she said: “When I saw the Palestinians with their hands tied behind their backs, young men, I said,  it is like what the Nazis  did to us.  We are a people that lived through the Holocaust, how can we be capable of such a  thing?”  Although Yaffa has passed away a few years ago,  there are many other Jewish voices  who are posing this question to the Israeli government.  But Mr. Netanyahu with his arrogance and megalomania, and using different pretexts  is  determined to wage a genocide against the Palestinians, and not only in Gaza.  In his press conference on Friday The Times Of Israel reported that he made it explicitly clear that he could never, ever, countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank. He indicated that he sees Israel standing almost alone on the frontlines against vicious Islamic radicalism, while the rest of the as-yet free world does its best not to notice the march of extremism. And he more than intimated that he considers the current American, John Kerry-led diplomatic team to be, let’s be polite, naive.

Let us not fool ourselves that the cycle of violence needs to stop.  There is no symmetry between the occupiers and those resisting the occupation.   What needs to stop is the occupation, the  ongoing Nakba and the dispossession of the Palestini