Howard Epstein – JUDGE ISRAEL BY THE QUALITIES OF ITS ENEMIES
You may not have noticed this (if, for example, you are no more sentient than a certain world leader in his 81st year), but Israel gets a lot of stick one way and another. Consider the number of anti-Israel motions passed at the United Nations – 171 in the first 70 years of Israel’s statehood – while the Russian Federation, which denies launching a war of aggression against Ukraine – only a “special military operation” that has so far claimed some 50,000 lives on both sides – gets a free pass. And Saudi Arabia and Iran, who separate heads from bodies, or overstretch necks, at the drop of a gavel, scores of times a year? None. Nor the not-so-decorous regimes of Myanmar and North Korea, about whom little censure is heard, let alone seen as the subject of criticism from Messrs Sanctimonious, & Co, New York City.
Perhaps these oppressive regimes will one day produce their equivalent of Pope John Paul II, who in the new Millennium probably thought apologies by the Catholic Church were somewhat overdue so, as is the Catholic way, went to confession, for crimes, one might think, against humanity. The Vicar of Christ on Earth apologised for • the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 • the Muslims killed by the Crusaders • the forcible conversion of the indigenous peoples of Latin America • the burnings of “witches” at the stake • the Spanish Inquisition • the religious wars following the Protestant Reformation • involvement in the African slave trade • Catholic missionary activities in China • the “Stolen Generations” of Australian Aboriginal children • the banishment to “laundries” of Irish unmarried mothers • the countless child sex abuse cases world-wide • to women – around 50% of the human race – as “they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude” • and to the Jews, all of whom were, until 1965, held collectively responsible for the murder by crucifixion of Jesus Christ nearly two thousand years before.
He might helpfully have added the comprehensive Catholic silence on, and therefore complicity in, the Shoah, not entirely unconnected with the 1933 Concordat between the Church and Hitler. (Yet another apology might have been for the annual celebration by the Church of Hitler’s birthday.)
Now, as compared with that list of horrors, how guilty have the Jews been throughout 2,000 years of exile and 75 years of Israeli statehood? Truly, we are about as successful at inflicting wide-scale human misery as we are at soccer and Olympic sports. Not entirely blameless, of course, but barely off the starting block compared with the competition.
Yet do not think our ineptitude at inflicting extensive suffering counts today at the UN. It continues with its old tricks. This very year, three UN Special Rapporteurs on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories, on the right to adequate housing and on the human rights of internally displaced persons” (there are also – but unmentioned – a fair few of them in Ukraine, Syria, and Sudan), called for action to “stop systematic and deliberate housing demolition and sealing, arbitrary displacement and forced evictions of Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank”.
Superficiality is their currency; cynicism their inclination; prejudice their disposition.
For balance, we might ask, why is there no call for action on the excesses of Hamas in Gaza who hold two million of their people captive, refusing to use the concrete they receive, via Israel, to build up, preferring to use it for attack-and-kidnap tunneling into Israel?
Israel is recognised by some (eg British Army Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Kemp, ret.) as having the most moral army in the world, going to extreme lengths to minimise civilian deaths in conflicts. Other wars can be many times bloodier, more oppressive, and more indiscriminately conducted, yet only Israel is repeatedly castigated. According to Al-Jazeera, the condemnation score in the UN General Assembly in 2020 was: Israel 17 – The rest of the World 6!
But to return to earlier themes, you did not have to be Catholic to be complicit in the Shoah, for there must have been others, including atheists and agnostics, working in 1944/5 at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. It was they who, contrary to the wishes of Winston Churchill, deemed the ovens in, and train lines to, Auschwitz-Birkenau to be beyond the reach of their bombers, notwithstanding that the I G Farben works that they did bomb were just a Jewish slave worker’s forced march from his hut in Auschwitz, past the gas chambers and ovens in Birkenau, on his tortuous way to forced labour, until he was worked – or shot, beaten or gassed – to death.
And Israel should feel guilty for its alleged war crimes? Does the UN’s member states even know what a war crime looks like? They should for, according to Amnesty International, 82% of countries torture their own citizens. (Israel and the UK are not listed among them.)
It’s tough out there all right, and life for Israel is not made any easier by one-sided, tendentious witch-hunts by some of the most evil entities in the world. It is well past the time to judge Israel by the qualities of its enemies.
© Howard Epstein June 2023 – www.howard-epstein.com
