ROBERT S. WISTRICH
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lives becomes a "genocide." We have reached a point where, in the
West, every minority group that wants to be taken seriously–
blacks, homosexuals, women, etc.-must claim that it has experi–
enced its own unique version of cultural genocide-not to mention
the many national and political causes that use the same hyperbole.
The Nazi Holocaust, an
exceptional
phenomenon by any standard,
even in the long history of anti-Semitism, thus becomes
typical-the
touchstone and archetype by which others, first and foremost the
Palestinians , stake their claim on the world's conscience. Unless it
fights this parody of the past, which mocks the Holocaust and
reduces it to a mere metaphor, Israel will inevitably lose one of its
most precious assets in forging its own consciousness of a common
fate-namely, the sense of the uniqueness ofJewish suffering and of
the unique wickedness of the total extermination directed against the
Jewish people. No other people, before or since, not the Russians,
Poles, Czechs, Gypsies, or Armenians-and certainly not the
Palestinians today-have had to face the threat of complete physical
annihilation. Only in the case of the Nazi "Final Solution" were all
utilitarian considerations ofloss or gain, of
Realpolitik,
military strat–
egy, and economics, utterly disregarded in pursuit of an uncompro–
mising exterminatory drive.
All attempts, therefore, to transpose the Nazi horror to the
Middle East, to fantasize the Israelis as Nazis, or the Palestinians as
hunted Jews, are the product either of sheer ignorance and stupidity,
cynical political calculation, or deliberate anti-Semitism. No one has
imposed the Yellow Star on the Palestinians in Lebanon or in Judea
and Samaria; they are not forcibly kept and starved to death in ghet–
tos, sentenced to exhausting hard labor, or methodically gassed in
extermination camps.
*
Why, then, the special fervor of the mass
media in stigmatizing the Lebanese war as a calculated act of" geno–
cide" and implying that this was Mr. Begin's "Final Solution" to
the Palestinian problem-which can only mean the physicalliquida–
tion of the Palestinian people? Is not this brazen mendacity a form of
anti-Jewish blackmail, an attempt to taint and intimidate in advance
any supporter of Israel with the odium of siding with executioners?
"Indeed , when Lebanese Christians carried out a small-scale massacre of
Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla, this provoked the largest protest demonstration
in Israel 's history, much to the astonishment of the Phalange and the Arab world
as a whole.
