Israeli Minister: Jews too have behaved like Nazis

Amid the news that the UN's new Special Investigator of Israeli Actions to its Human Rights Council, Princeton University international law expert Richard Falk, is being denied entry to Israel for "comparing Israel to Nazis," few probably remember Aharon Cizling. Cizling was the first Israeli Minister of Agriculture, and as quoted by Israeli historian Tom Segev, said in a Nov. 17, 1948 cabinet meeting, "I often disagree when the term Nazi was applied to the British ... even though the British committed Nazi crimes. But now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being is shaken."

Cizling is quoted today in Electronic Intifada by no less a personage than South Africa's intelligence minister, anti-apartheid resistance hero Ronnie Kasrils (who like Falk, is Jewish), in a piece titled, "Sixty years after Deir Yassin." It was sixty years ago today, April 9, 1948, that Zionist militias in gruesome fashion slaughtered over 100 of Deir Yassin's inhabitants. It was but one of 31 massacres of Arabs by the Zionists that took place between 1947-49, Kasrils notes. Fahimi Zidan, a Palestinian child who survived by hiding under his parents' bodies, recalled:

"The Jews ordered [us] ... to line up against the wall ... started shooting ... all ... were killed: my father ... mother ... grandfather and grandmother ... uncles and aunts and some of their children ... Halim Eid saw a man shoot a bullet into the neck of my sister ... who was ... pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher's knife ... In another house, Naaneh Khalil ... saw a man take a ... sword and slash my neighbor ..."

Kasrils also notes:

Despite these sentiments, Cizling agreed that the crimes should be hidden, creating a lasting precedent. That such barbarism was conducted by Jewish people a mere three years after the Holocaust must have been too ghastly to contemplate, as it would constitute a major embarrassment for the state of Israel, held-up as a "light unto nations;" hence the attempts to bury the truth behind a veil of secrecy and disinformation. What better way to silence enquiry than the all-encompassing alibi of Israel's right of self-defense, condoning the use of disproportionate force and collective punishment against any act of resistance.

So Falk should take comfort; his treatment is part of an age-old Zionist tradition. The last word goes to Kasrils:

Israel will soon mark the 60th anniversary of its establishment. In so doing, Israelis and the Zionist supporters would do well to acknowledge the reasons why, for Palestinians and freedom-loving people throughout the world, there will be no cause to celebrate. Indeed, it will be a period of mourning and protest action; a time to recall the countless victims that lie in Israel's wake, as epitomized by the suffering inflicted on the inhabitants of Deir Yassin, the original site of which is ironically located just a stone's throw away from where the present day Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, was built.