Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Kosnik sez "Nakba Denial as Much a Crime as Holocaust Denial"

Your drivel is served:
Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany, and many other countries. The logic is that such a great humanitarian disaster should be remembered, and in remembering never repeated. Yet another humanitarian disaster, different, but certainly involving the population of an entire nation, still hanging over them with the spectre of obliteration from the face of the earth, in the name of race. And this disaster was caused by the very people who collectively were victims of the Holocaust. So certainly it is of great significance, something to be remembered, something to make them strive to avoid victimizing others as they were victimized. Yet almost the opposite has occurred. And so Israel denies the Palestinian Nakba ... but brave and powerful voices are speaking the unspeakable, telling the whole painful truth [...]
Have some Nakba-denial:

From Yaacov Lozowick (Right to Exist, p. 99):
Despite the frequency with which his work is cited in support of the most extreme Palestinian views, even the revisionist [Benny] Morris concedes that the 1948 war was a legitimate war of self-defense and Jewish independence, that no prior plan of ethnic-cleansing was contemplated, that the Jewish atrocities were balanced by Arab ones, and that in any case these were dwarfed by genocidal Arab intentions which the Israelis thwarted.
Holocaust deniers deny that 6 million Jews were killed. Nobody denies that 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. What the diarist means by "Nakba-denial" is failure to render the events of 1948 with the requisite amount of pro-Palestinian hand-wringing. And actually, spurious equating of the, ahem, Nakba with the Holocaust is itself a form of Holocaust denial.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

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