Concert for Peace: NEVER!

Following my comment about the unfortunate Palestinian response to some of their teenagers playing music to an audience of Israeli Holocaust survivors, Claudio sent me this depressing link.

It is really hard to write on this subject without getting angry. We all know the extent to which Israel can be evil and satanic. After all, we Palestinians have been on the receiving end of Israeli savagery for decades.

In fact, being thoroughly tormented and killed by the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the holocaust has always been and continues to be “the” Palestinians’ way of life.

However, for some Palestinians to allow themselves to be duped to sing and play music to their oppressors and child-killers is simply beyond the pale of human dignity.

It is at least as insulting and humiliating as some Jews were forced or duped to play music to SS, Gestapo and Wehrmacht soldiers during the Second World War. In both cases, the act was meant to humiliate the victims and rob them of the last visages of human dignity.

It goes on and on. Khalid Amayreh is a person whose primary motivating force is hatred.

I don't know enough about the Palestinians to say how typical he is. He talks similarly to the people in Jenin who got so angry the other day, so he may not be a lone voice in the wilderness.

I'm of the persuasion that Israel should always be on the lookout for whatever policy might lead to peace with our neighbors, and should be willing to pay a reasonable price to encourage it to happen; I'm also of the persuasion that no matter what we do, the ultimate decision is of our enemies. They're the ones who need to decide to live alongside us in peace; a large majority of Israelis has long since wished to live alongside them in peace. Items like this demonstrate that some Arabs, in this case, Palestinians, are so consumed with hatred they'll pay whatever price needed to have it gratified - and since that won't happen, they prefer war.

Since Mr. Amayreh is so involved in Holocaust-Zionism comparisons, malicious nonsense as they are, here's another one for him to ponder.

While the Jewish grievances against Germany were vastly and incomparably greater than any Palestinian grievance could ever be, by 1952, that's less than a decade after the Shoah, Israeli society was at extreme loggerheads with itself about a proposal to accept indemnities from Germany. Ben Gurion the pragmatist sought German funds to help build Israel, recognizing that they would contribute to Germany's international rehabilitation; a large, vocal, and for a moment even violent opposition stated that Jews should never accept anything from Germany; better to slog on with food rationing and hundreds of thousands of refugees in tents, and never give the Germans the dignity of accepting anything from them. We'll put the past behind us and move on, but we'll not forgive.

Ben Gurion won the day, though it was close. By 1965 there were full diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany, two years before the Six Day War; the first German ambassador was a one-armed veteran officer of the Wehrmacht. By the late 70s, (West) Germany was Israel's closest ally in Europe. The two national memories are complicated till this day, and will remain so for the next century or two, but they don't interfere with each side's ability to get on with promoting its interests in a reasonably civil way.