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11/29/2004:

"Israel shocked by image of soldiers forcing violinist to play at roadblock *"

Of all the revelations that have rocked the Israeli army over the past week, perhaps none disturbed the public so much as the video footage of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man to play his violin.

The incident was not as shocking as the recording of an Israeli officer pumping the body of a 13-year-old girl full of bullets and then saying he would have shot her even if she had been three years old.

Nor was it as nauseating as the pictures in an Israeli newspaper of ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking Palestinian corpses by impaling a man's head on a pole and sticking a cigarette in his mouth.

But the matter of the violin touched on something deeper about the way Israelis see themselves, and their conflict with the Palestinians.

The violinist, Wissam Tayem, was on his way to a music lesson near Nablus when he said an Israeli officer ordered him to "play something sad" while soldiers made fun of him. After several minutes, he was told he could pass.

It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint.

But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs.

The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. "What about Majdanek?" he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.

The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem.

Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial "not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust".

"Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust," he wrote.

"If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps."

Others took a broader view by drawing a link between the routine dehumanising treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints, the desecration of dead bodies and what looks very much like the murder of a terrified 13-year-old Palestinian girl by an army officer in Gaza.

Israelis put great store in a belief that their army is "the most moral in the world" because it says it adheres to a code of "the purity of arms". There is rarely much public questioning of the army's routine explanation that Palestinian civilians who have been killed had been "caught in crossfire", or that children are shot because they are used as cover by fighters.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

This story is profoundly disturbing. ...'the soldiers responsible should be put on trial "not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust"'. So these right-wing Israelis are saying that because of their holocaust they deserve a state, and that any abuse of Arabs is irrelevant except when one of the army's myriad atrocities is evocative of the Jewish holocaust? How nuts is this? Where has the right-wing been all these years through all of the immorality? Well, if Israeli sensibilities are finally offended, good then, but why are they just noticing what so many of us have been pointing out for so long? Why don't their Wall and bulldozers remind them of the Warsaw Ghetto? They are worried that their historical suffering will 'be diminished' by the actions of their army? Where have they been? Must they assume that their wounds trump everybody else's, and thus justify their actions in Palestine? A million people were slaughtered in 8 weeks in Rwanda. 50 million died in the Middle Passage. 8,000,000 in just a few years in Leopold's Congo, and 3 million in the past three years in DR Congo. 8,000,000 native people died in the silver mines of Bolivia, and on and on. How about instead of comparing scars everybody cease and desist with the crappy behavior? The 'most moral army in the world'?? This is the idea they have been comforting themselves with through these years of bloody occupation? Accusing anyone who disagrees of anti-Semitism? I believe that Zionism has to go the way of every other discredited ideology, and Jews that have not already have to figure out that their suffering does not entitle them to spill oceans of Palestinian blood.
And by the way, they should get smart about the fawning devotion of the US-Israel serves a purpose, no more no less. Otherwise it would not be there. 100 years ago the racist discourse of the West lumped them right in with the Arabs as 'Orientals,' fit only for subjugation and extermination. It is really a shame that they have been instructed not at all by their own history. See how quickly they themselves become the racist tyrants and colonizers.

Replies: 3 Comments

Tuesday, November 30th, iyah360 posted:

"Well the majority of Jews in the world are not part of the elite capitalist class."

* no, they are used like pawns just like everyone else. also, the constant reminder of the holocaust in the school system and the constant building of holocaust memorial museums is exploitation of the people's suffering and a trojan horse to justify the atrocities of European Zionism.

"And what I said about 18th and 19th century Orientalism's (Orientalism being an area of scholarship for Eurpoeans) condemnation of 'the Semitic race,' which includes Arabs and Jews under the same umbrella, is true."

* While i understand your point, some would argue though that the Jews of Eastern and Northern Europe are not semetic, but rather converts. The confusion of the two has also allowed white Jews, with the help of the British to co-opt the identity of the whole people.

"I wouldn't say that Jewish capitalist elites are worse than any other variety."

* I agree. But at the same time the position(wrought through historical circumstances) in the financial sectors of the economy gives a small group of people an unprecedented amount of power in the the global capitalist economy.

"At the same time that I strongly believe it's far past time to call Israel and elements of European and American Jewry on their crap, we have to avoid painting entire peoples with the broad brushes we do.

This is called 'essentialism' and it is dangerous."

* Of course, and it is all too easy to fall into the traps of traditional anti-Jewish sentiment when discussing topics like this, but this should not blind us to the facts of the matter. The position of certain people in the system at this point is based on historical factors - when the history is taken into consideration, the essentialism stops and a better picture of the reality has a chance to set in.

Tuesday, November 30th, rootsie posted:

Well the majority of Jews in the world are not part of the elite capitalist class.

And what I said about 18th and 19th century Orientalism's (Orientalism being an area of scholarship for Eurpoeans) condemnation of 'the Semitic race,' which includes Arabs and Jews under the same umbrella, is true.

I wouldn't say that Jewish capitalist elites are worse than any other variety.

At the same time that I strongly believe it's far past time to call Israel and elements of European and American Jewry on their crap, we have to avoid painting entire peoples with the broad brushes we do.

This is called 'essentialism' and it is dangerous.

Tuesday, November 30th, iyah360 posted:

"the West lumped them right in with the Arabs as 'Orientals,' fit only for subjugation and extermination."

well - at least the ones who weren't part of the elite capitalist class.