This week’s postings on JfJfP.com website
A seemingly trivial and, on the face of it, the most grave, subject dominate the postings this week, January 26 – February 1, 2015.
The trivial has brought the wrath of the American media, yes, even Fox news, on PM Netanyahu’s head and, as with the Marche Republicaine, caused Israeli media to express their shame about greedy boy Bibi. This was because he accepted an invitation, set up by the Israeli ambassador to the US, to address the US Congress two weeks before the Israeli election. Against all protocol, the invitation and acceptance were delivered without any reference to the White House. This strained the already frayed relationship with Israel’s greatest benefactor.
US turns against Bibi for ‘playing us for fools’ for the American response;
Bibi struts his Churchillian stuff, for the Israeli response.
‘You can’t reason with these people.’ ‘You said it’ a clever imagined transcript of the POTUS / PM phone conversation by Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, Marwan Bishara, covers many of the issues that have damaged the relationship.
The most grave of issues is, of course, the Holocaust because it’s the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army, a date which became Holocaust Memorial Day.
Many people this year have broken the taboo and written about the Holocaust as the post-war identifier of Jewish existence.
In the marketing of history, the Holocaust has become a super-brand, Anshel Pffefer, Ha’aretz’s UK-based reporter, on how the making of the Holocaust a universal marker of human evil / suffering has taken that holocaust out of Jewish control.
In Is there any meaning to be found in Auschwitz? Robert Cohen traces how one British Jew changes his understanding of what ‘the lessons’ of the Holocaust are: viz: not visiting on the Palestinians the forms of discrimination that slipped into the idea of extermination;
And the most shocking, and revealing, report of the week: the trial and sentencing by a military court of a 14-year-old girl for throwing stones. Nothing better reveals the basic assumption of military courts: all Palestinians, regardless of age/gender, are the enemies of Israel and must be punished as such.
Military court imprisons youngest child ever
The fate of Palestinian children is described by Defence of Children in
Israel’s style of warfare cannot but harm children; the aim of the IDF may not be to destroy the next generation of troublesome Palestinians, but their shelling of Gaza inevitably means that Palestinian children are killed, maimed, or left orphans. The Israeli defence of this carnage is that Hamas ‘uses children as human shields’. This is nonsense. It is not possible to bombard a densely populated area in a way that kills only Hamas militants.
Israel has a USP – unique selling point – tried and tested weapons for suppression of local rebellion. China is a good market for these systems, and omes free of the strictures from the EU and USA:
Israel wants to break free from EU and USA
And in Europe, reports from Stamford Hill demonstrate how Jews and Muslims can work together – a report from Al Jazeera that goes against the grain of Jewish panic after Charlie Hebdo.
Jews and Muslims keeping the peace
And much else beside