“And what are they doing with Palestinians every day? They’re killing them. They’re walling them in, they’re essentially doing the same thing that was done to them. Of course they’re not tattooing the numbers into the arm, and they’re not taking their glasses and their gold fillings, and everything else, as far as I know, but they’re still slaughtering these people. Now what’s with that? It’s exactly what Hitler did to the Jews.”
Armitage also reportedly accused the benignly named American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC, Israel’s official but unregistered lobby) of funding opponents of the lobby’s critics, adding, “and believe me, they have money to spare. The point is, the Jews have such a perfect position at this point.”
He also accused AIPAC of “buying our elections, which pisses me off … Israel has a hammerlock on America.”
“This really goes beyond reasonable criticism of Israeli policies and into hateful rhetoric about Jews,” said Karen Stiller, the Peninsula director of the Jewish Community Relations Council, told J (for Jewish), the recently renamed Jewish Bulletin of Northern California. But does it?
Presumably, with regard to Israel, one can imply from her statement that, short of using gas chambers and cremating Palestinians in ovens, the Israelis can do anything they like to the Palestinians.
While it would be expected that Professor Armitage’s responses would offend some Jewish sensibilities, a more important consideration is whether or not what he said was valid.
With regard to comparisons between the behavior of the Israeli state towards the Palestinians and that of the Nazis towards the Jews, leading Jewish critics of Israel such as Professor Norman Finkelstein and the late Professor Israel Shahak, a survivor of World War II death camp Buchenwald, have frequently made such comparisons.
Moreover, a little over a year ago, a group of Holocaust survivors living in Israel sent a petition to the Israeli government criticizing its treatment of the Palestinians and invoking memories of their experiences under the Third Reich. This was dutifully reported in Israel’s daily Ha’aretz, but thanks to the lobby’s intimidation of the U.S. media, their statement was never reported here. This is the excerpt of their statement published in Ha’aretz on Dec. 31, 2002:
“(W)e cannot clear our conscience in light of the mass, arbitrary destruction of civilians’ homes, uprooted olive trees, and orchards shaved to the ground. We cannot accept the extensive disruptions of daily life and abuse, for its own sake or not, at the checkpoints.”
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