Israel: Learning from Nazis

Retired Judge Hadassa Ben-Itto stated candidly in a conference in London that Israeli state has to learn from the Nazis. Not the first ranking Israeli to make this suggestion, and certainly she will not be the last. The fact that she is a retired judge does not say anything; we all know the "structural flaws" in the so-called Israeli justice system that the Goldstone report referred to, concluding that the system cannot be trusted to administer justice according to international standards.

In 2002, during the massive Israeli invasion of occupied West Bank cities and refugee camps all Palestinian teenage boys and men in some villages were rounded up by the occupation army forces and detained in "concentration zones" to be "processed," making sure they were not "terrorists." Israeli soldiers then inscribed identification numbers on foreheads and forearms, causing furore around the world, including among a right wing Israeli minister who had family members exterminated in the Holocaust. Later, it was revealed with gruesome pictures in the media, how some Israeli soldiers went further, inscribing with their army knives Stars of David on the arms of Palestinian boys as a permanent reminder of who is master.

Without any sense of irony or guilt, an Israel army general at the time infamously bragged about learning from the Nazi tactics of suppressing the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in the plans used by his army in committing its bloodbath in the Jenin refugee camp and all over the West Bank.

During the first Intifada, Yitzhak Rabin, the celebrated Israel dove (well, by ISRAELI standards war criminals can be doves, too, if they speak about some abstract notion of peace. Peres, Sharon, Olmert, Livni, Golda were/are all men and women of peace!) and war criminal by any international standard, ordered his soldiers to take the "preemptive measure" of breaking the arm bones of  Palestinian boys to prevent them from thinking of throwing stones at the occupation forces. During the same period, it was revealed  that some soldiers attempted to kill four young Palestinians by burying them alive under a mound of dirt. Rabin is famous for far more serious crimes, of course; he led the ethnic cleansing of at least one Palestinian city during the 1948 Nakba and orchestrated the mass theft of personal belongings of the dispossessed and displaced Palestinians.

So the only appropriate comment to this retired judge is that she must be quite senile to call now for learning from Nazis! The "learning" has been happening from day one of creating this state, if not earlier!