Attached to the link are many more cartoons from across the Middle East. Anti Defamation League is a group that wants to stop defamation of Jews, it compiled quite a few cartoons in response to the latest Gazan war. This site is of course, quite biased but at some point, it also shows that these points exist. Arabs while probably not as extreme as these images, still find some truth to them.
I found it very interesting to note how much imagery was used about America, and the power dynamics between America and Israel. Some of the cartoons point to an American enabler, others point to Israel running the bigger picture. This difference in opinion shows that perhaps there is some confusion about who is leading who into these conflicts. Like Control Room where the Arabs will connect with American troops storming Iraq with Israel, this is similar in nature.
The big point the ADL wanted to make was how the Arabs think that the Jews are the Nazis and feel the shock and horror of that heresy. I think I remember reading somewhere in the readings that someone questioned why given what Israel has gone through that they are putting this on the Palestinians. It is hard to say how strong the correlation between Nazi and Israel that the Arabs see given the biased tone. Yet, at least half the cartoons suggest that they think that Israel has major blood on its hands. They are the monstrous giant face taking down the little, beaten, poor, decrepit Palestinian. The sense of scale in these pictures seem to relate to the power associated with each.
The security council picture in the blog (the guy with his hands tied and blindfolded) represents how Arabs feel that the UN does not have the power or the observations to see what is going on or who to blame (Israel, of course). At least to me that is partly true since the US does have veto power and not a lot has been accomplished by the UN to pressure Israel to do things since the US has their back.
How are these different than the Western ones? Are these representative of the Middle East? Is the Israeli-Nazi connection totally blasphemous or somewhat valid?
Here is a video clip comparing images of the "old Jewish Holocaust" and the "new Palestinian Holocaust". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3PF0q33uDw
ReplyDeleteWatching the clip, I could see the visual similarity of the images, but without any background context about what I was seeing, it is hard to say how comparable the specific situations are. I see walls and fences from WWII and now--both images of segregation and containment. But does the security wall around the West Bank carry the same meaning as the security wall around Auschwitz? Can you compare a checkpoint soldier bearing a gun with a Nazi soldier evicting Jews from a house? But the commenters on this video clearly agree with the comparison. One even says: "The Zionists crimes against the Palestinians is much worse than what Nazi did. Nazi did not have support from USA and the European countries but the Israelis had. That is why they are killing more and torturing worse."
But the comparison is difficult for us to swallow, I think. I remember hearing a Jewish-Polish journalist speak at Macalester last year about the Shoah as a "unique" and "untouchable/incomparable" event in the minds of Jews and Westerners in general. Not that it necessarily should be so, but that it is. I think one major difference is scale. Six million Jews (roughly 70% of European Jewish population) were killed in a few years' time. In that time, they endured starvation, uncontrolled epidemics, forced labor, cruel medical experiments. According to the Israeli Info Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp), 5000 Palestinians were killed between 2000-08, although I would imagine tens of thousands may have died throughout the entire course of the conflict.
The trauma many Palestinians have endured (humiliation at checkpoints, threat of home invasion/destruction, poor living conditions) could certainly be construed as a type of slow torture--not dissimilar to the Jewish experience in the ghetto--but this type of trauma does not make the same impression on us as what the huge massacres of Jews inside and outside the camps.
The rhetoric behind the killings is also important in how most people distinguish these events. Whereas the Shoah was a deliberate and unapologetic attempt to exterminate all the world's Jews, the civilian Palestinian deaths are considered the unfortunate collateral damage of a war against terrorists. I don't think many Israelis have expressed a desire for a Palestinian genocide. They want to the Palestinians to leave, rather than to be wiped off the earth.
I'm not an expert, but I believe that there was a level of disbelief about the concentration camps when their existence first became known in the West. I don't think the information was released to the public in Western countries till about 1944 (the govt. didn't think the maltreatment of the Jews would really raise support for the war effort), and the camps weren't freed until the end of the war. Guilt about the fate of the Jews is one reason we feel such a need to support Israel. And I would like to think that the U.S. govt. would have learned its lesson, and be more open about the violence in Palestine and willing to intervene before the death toll climbs so high. Sadly, it seems that the U.S. is again too uncomfortable to deal with the issue of violence against a group that many Americans do not sympathize with....and between selling weapons to Israel and being unwilling to put much pressure on her to stop the attacks on the occupied territories, the U.S. may have to add guilt for Palestinian deaths to any guilt about the Shoah.
Finally, I think the other side of this question is "Holocaust denial" by some Palestinians. If you go to www.pmg.org.il you can find some clips from Palestinian TV. One features Palestinian historians calling the Shoah a Jewish lie used to gain world sympathy, which would eventually spur the creation of Israel. Another shows a Muslim cleric saying that holding Jewish leaders responsible for the the Holocaust. It may be an effective tactic for stirring up resentment among Palestinians and other Arabs, but it certainly does not gain the Palestinians any sympathizers in Israel or the West, and unfortunately makes the people come off as heartless and disinterested in the truth.