Gaza

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Such are the joys of feeling compassion toward the Palestinian plight. But let’s put aside the Israeli lobby—it’s much too busy discovering new anti-Semites under the beds—and look at the moral blindness that has afflicted Israelis in their denial of Palestinian rights. Roger Waters, the courageous musician whose father died fighting the Nazis, has been called a Nazi for pointing out that the Israeli army subjugates an indigenous population by using lethal force, including murder of women and children. The Messianic claim of religious nationalists who believe Jews have a God-given right to all the land between the Med and the Jordan River has a lot to do with that blindness. Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of 29 Muslims at prayer in 1994, ditto.

I write this as Gaza’s women and children are being killed by the Israeli invasion. No one who is sane and fair-minded denies the fact that Israelis have the right to live their lives without missiles raining down on them. But why are the missiles raining down? (And they are Stone Age missiles that have yet to hit a target after two weeks of being fired.) Because Gaza is a refugee camp without the basic human needs of electricity and medical supplies, a hellhole that in reality is a siege that has turned Gaza into a prison for the last eight years. The Nazis lasted 12 years. Israel has been oppressing the Palestinians since 1967. The Jewish people are a great people who have won more Nobel Prizes than there are name-droppers in Hollywood. But Israel’s brutal policies toward a helpless people will one day overshadow the Holocaust, take it from Taki. No matter how hard the Podhoretzes of this world try to smear those who demand fairness for Palestinians, they will not be able to shut down the cries of the innocent who are suffering under the settlers’ boot. Long after the likes of me are gone, Israel’s brutal occupation of an innocent people will help anti-Semitism in a way Mein Kampf never imagined.