April 23, 2009

The holocaust, the nakba and the bad analogy

Hey did you hear about the guy that got the sack from Israel's holocaust museum, Yad Vashem? Apparently he compared the holocaust to the Palestinian catastrophe, the nakba. It's all over the net now but the story first broke, I believe, in Ha'aretz. See this:
Yad Vashem has fired an instructor who compared the trauma of Jewish Holocaust survivors with the trauma experienced by the Palestinian people in Israel's War of Independence.
Ok, so he compared the holocaust to the nakba.
He said he did so because the ruins of the Arab village, today a part of Jerusalem's Givat Shaul neighborhood, can be seen as one leaves Yad Vashem.

"Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors' arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world's Jews. I said there were people who lived on this land and mentioned that there are other traumas that provide other nations with motivation," Shapira said.

"The Holocaust moved us to establish a Jewish state and the Palestinian nation's trauma is moving it to seek self-determination, identity, land and dignity, just as Zionism sought these things," he said.
Well it's certainly a bad analogy. Zionism doesn't equate with the demand for Palestinian rights. Zionism is for privilege not rights.

No comments:

Post a Comment