Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

nations are imbued with the Holocaust narrative that protects them from
condemnation. Unfortunately, there are many Jews who do not know when
enough is enough, and when to stop persecuting the Palestinians. The
December 2008–January 2009 attacks on Palestinians in Gaza was one such
breaking point.
The world media did not sympathetically report on Prime Minister
Netanjahu’s drawing on the ‘Hitler-Nazi and the Holocaust’ in order to
attempt to justify Israel’s attack on the Palestinian people.
* * * * *
The only countries whose political establishment openly funded political
activity in Palestine was Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and in a deeper and
more humane way the Islamic Republic of Iran. When Hamas won the
election in Gaza – and it was a free and fair election because Hamas had
worked hard on basic humanitarian projects for a number of years – the US
and Israel panicked and rejected the outcome and set up the fatally flawed
alternative Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, thereby dividing the
Palestinian people. After all, this kind of division had worked in the past
with Germany, Cyprus and Korea.
Perhaps fortunately for the Palestinians, the global financial crisis from
October 2008 still reverberates. Former charitable organisations and nongovernment
organisations (NGOs)– in the US and elsewhere that had been
sending millions of dollars to Israel have been bankrupted and the funds
have dried up. This has caused many Israelis to re-locate to the US, Europe
and Australasia.
Perhaps, again, this global financial crisis merely will hurry along the
inevitable – the establishment of a single Palestinian state. Yet even during
the 1970s, when I spent time in Israel at Kibbutz Kiriat Shmona, near the
Lebanese border, it was Shmuel from Russia who informed me that the
kibbutz system was breaking down because young Israelis, especially the
women, did not like physical work anymore because the bright lights of Tel
Aviv were more enticing. Today they rely on migrant workers from Asia.
Then I participated in a debate at Tel Aviv University. Discussing the
problem facing Israel, one man from New York said, ‘I know how to solve
the problem: America in Israel, Russia in Egypt.’ A Sabre, a native-born
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