We must end our lie of being victims


December 3, 2015
Sarah Benton

june 1967
Israeli soldiers celebrate the capture of Old Jerusalem from the Jordanians in front of the Dome of the Rock on June 11, 1967. Photo by Bettmann/Corbis

Despite Netanyahu’s Cries of antisemitism, Israel No Longer a Victim

Connecting the European boycott of settlement products to the Holocaust ignores two dramatic transformations the Jewish people underwent in 1948 and 1967.

By Yechiam Weitz, Haaretz
November 30, 2015

The Berlin department store KaDeWe decided to take Israeli products manufactured in settlements off its shelves (the store backtracked shortly thereafter). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded harshly. Speaking at a cabinet meeting he said that the store had been owned by Jews and that the Nazis had stolen it from them and the store was “now marking products from settlements in Judea, Samaria and the Golan…and now we have been told they have removed the products – a boycott in the full sense of the word.”

Netanyahu was not the only one to create a close connection between marking products in Europe and the Holocaust. A response from the Foreign Ministry reportedly stated that marking products recalled “the painful marking of Jews during the Holocaust in Europe.”

These remarks are a historical distortion, which ignores two dramatic transformations in the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The first took place in 1948 – the establishment of a sovereign state of the Jewish people. During the period of violent debate over reparations from Germany, David Ben-Gurion made clear in no uncertain terms that sovereignty meant that Jews were able – for the first time in 2,000 years – to make tough decisions about their own country and their society. “Sovereignty” is the complete opposite of “victimhood.”

The second transformation took place only 22 years after the Holocaust. In 1967, after the conquests of the Six-Day War, we became an occupying people, controlling more than a million Palestinians. After the great military victory we were under the heavy shadow of the waiting period that preceded the war, in which the fear of a second Holocaust was dominant.

The writer and educator Muki Tzur wrote in “The Seventh Day” that during that time “we were very close to the Jewish fate from which we had fled for years as if from fire. Suddenly everyone began talking about Munich, about the Holocaust, about the Jewish people that was abandoned to its fate.” After the victory we were in a completely new situation, which we could not or did not want to deal with – we were no longer victims. The victim was the other.


The settlement of Har Homa, outside Bethlehem, before Netanyahu announced the state was going to expropriate another 400 hectares (988 acres) of Palestinian land in the Bethlehem area. Photo by AFP.

In the almost 50 years that have passed since then we have established many mechanisms for preserving the occupation and the oppression of the conquered people. What would Nathan Alterman, who was one of the first leaders of the Greater Land of Israel movement, have said about a road “for Jews only”? In a slow and insidious manner, the occupation has moved from “enlightened” to racist, evil and above all, callous.

Marking products of the occupation is not “an antisemitic step,” but rather a legitimate and necessary tool in the struggle against the occupation, which devours everything good in our society and our soul. The comparison the prime minister made is blasphemous, another denial of the Holocaust, like his statement that the mufti was supposedly the author of the “final solution.” The settlers who steal land, water, olive trees and basic human dignity from the local inhabitants are not innocent victims. They are the ones who are turning the others into victims, every day and every hour.

The writer, a historian, teaches at the Department of Land of Israel Studies at the University of Haifa.

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