Anatomy of a national suicide

by Gideon Spiro גדעון ספירו That is the headline over Professor Daniel Blatman’s review of the latest book by Ian Kershaw, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944-1945. (Haaretz books section, 31 October 2012) Blatman quotes Kershaw to the effect that no state has ever fought a lost war for as long as Germany towards the end of Hitler’s regime, and Blatman adds that “his conclusions are relevant not only for the Third Reich”. Professor Blatman, a scholar of the Holocaust and the head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University, knows what he’s talking about. His review is instructive of just what a dangerous Israel is in. In an article Professor Blatman published in Haaretz, he stated that the level of racism in Israel, the incitement against Arabs and asylum-seekers from Africa and the undemocratic laws passed by the Knesset are placing Israel at the stage Germany was in in 1932, a minute before Hitler’s rise to power. (“1932 is already here”, Haaretz, 25 December 2010). [1] In other words, the foundation for the creation of a fascist regime exists in Israel today.The warning-sings are many. Here’s one of them: in his review, Blatman writes: “in the middle, between the leaders of the regime and the Party, the generals and the civil society, stood millions of rank-and-file soldiers – young Germans many of whom had spent their school-years and formative years in the educational system of the Nazi State; certainly those who were mobilized in the last years of the war, and who were in primary school in 1933”.When I read those words I am reminded of the process of indoctrination that Israel’s schoolchildren are undergoing at the initiative of Education Minister Gideon Saar, from the removal of textbooks that convey a democratic message and represent the conflict with the Palestinians in a somewhat balanced way, through encouraging schools to organize tours to the Occupied Territories, all the way to the latest innovation: allotting budgets to schools based on the number of their graduates who join the army. This is the militarization of the educational system. The Minister and his right-wing government want to raise generations of soldiers who have been brainwashed in school with nationalism, religious extremism and racism and so be fit to serve the Occupation and apartheid with no pangs of conscience. On the issue of comparisons between the Israeli Occupation and the Nazi regime, we would do well to recall Professor Amos Funkenstein (RIP), an Israel Prize laureate who held the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Chair in the History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University, who said 25 years ago in an interview with Haaretz: “Between 1933 and 1937, until Krystallnacht, the situation of the Jews of Germany was better, in some ways, than that of the Arabs in the Occupied Territories”. (Haaretz, 9 December 1988).The State of Israel is in the process of committing national suicide.