Robert Fine’s response to Saturday’s “asa Jew” letter is published in today’s Guardian here.
Why does it matter whether “we the undersigned are all of Jewish origin” (Letters, 10 January)? Perhaps it is meant to give a bad argument good authority. The analogy that follows – that what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza is reminiscent of what the Nazis did to the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto – is historically inaccurate and politically thoughtless. Understanding requires that we make distinctions. But this association of images obliterates all distinctions – between, say, accidental “collateral damage”, killing civilians through negligence, intentional murder of civilians by army personnel, or the wilful annihilation of an entire people. Distinctions are as important in politics as in international law.
This kind of radicalism also echoes a tendency to situate Gaza in terms of collective Jewish responsibility. In this case the signatories declare themselves in effect to be good Jews, unlike those bad Zionist Jews who murder children and who must no longer be “appeased”. They assure the world that it is OK to hate the bad Jews, for the bad Jews have failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust. This moral dualism substitutes for political distinctions. It succumbs to the temptation to reduce politics to a broth of moral outrage (aimed at “Israel”) and innocent compassion (in this case with Hamas, whose only crime is said to be its refusal to become a “pawn in the hands of the occupation regime”).
I am not saying we can never write of our shame at what is done in our name “as Jews”, but we need to be far more thoughtful about how we lay claim to this signature.
Professor Robert Fine
Department of sociology,
University of Warwick
Engage 
January 12, 2009 at 11:31 am
By hook or by crook they work this analogy into their stories. This from Alastair Macdonald, Reuters Bureau chief, Israel and Palestinian territories:
Shadow of Warsaw Ghetto over Gaza-Israel border
http://tinyurl.com/9qk4sh
January 12, 2009 at 1:09 pm
An excellent reply by Robert Fine.
Can someone who knows these people explain why do they say they are of ‘Jewish origin and not just ‘Jewish’? Do they only regard themselves as linked to the Jewish people when they want to criticise Israel? Saying you are of ‘Jewish origin’ means either that they no longer regard themselves as Jewish or that they are ashamed of being Jewish.
Matan Vilnai was an utter idiot for using the word Shoah. However, I can repeat what others have categorically said, that it is not unprecedented to use such a word in Israel to mean disaster rather than necessarily mean Genocide.
The use of symbols and imagery of the Holocaust: Hans Frank, Warsaw, Quisling is utterly sick and/or shameful. Where is the Final Solution in Israel’s actions? It is Hamas, Al-Quaida and Hizbollah with their paymasters that wish such an outcome for Israel and the Jews of the world.
January 12, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Thanks Joshua for the link. And there I was, thinking that Reuters was a news agency and left the editorializing to the papers that took the story. No need for the Guardian, Indy…to bother with employing independent-minded and well-trained-in-thinking-for-themselves journalitst, just print it straight off the Reuters feed and bingo, another fine example of even-handed liberal (or should we start using the word “progressive”, with or without the inverted commas for these lackwits?) thought on the Middle East. Makes you proud to be British.
Well, no it doesn’t, of course, but let’s swap cliche for unthinking cliche – that also saves time thinking.
January 12, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Yad Vashem’s response to the use of Nazi imagery:
Yad Vashem says Nazi imagery used to assuage European guilt
‘The employment of Nazi images in anti-Israel rallies around the world during violent protests against Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza is intended to both allay European guilt over the Holocaust and deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state, a senior Yad Vashem official said on Sunday.
“By accusing us of being Nazi-like, Europeans alleviate some of their own feelings of guilt and responsibility for the Holocaust,” said Dr. Robert Rozett, director of the Yad Vashem Libraries.
“Moreover, by saying that the Jews are acting like Nazis, they are delegitimizing the very existence of the State of Israel,” Rozett said. ‘
And, from the same article, Abraham Foxman’s response:
‘The anti-Israel protests in Europe “were worse than ever before,” said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the New York-based Anti-Defamation League, in a telephone interview from New York, adding that, fueled by the Internet, there was “no shame, no hesitancy and no restraints” anymore in comparing Israel with the Nazis.
“Anti-Semitism in Europe was never really rooted out, just contained,” he said.’
http://tinyurl.com/9kq3gu
January 12, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Here is a more serious assessment of why the revival of antisemitism in the world today is a necessary consequence of a misplaced and pseudo Utopian thinking published at the Telos Press website:
From the article: “A Revivified Corpse:
Left-Fascism in the Twenty-First Century”
by Ernest Sternberg
“The most remarkable feature of the cult of Empire-hatred is that it produces disdain for those whose suffering does not meet the cult’s attribution of global evil. Exhibit number one is Darfur. Though an “an ocean of indifference and cowardice” condemned the Darfuris, the anti-liberals, anti-imperialists, and anti-globalists “earned a special distinction” (p. 141).
It is this anti-imperial obsession that makes Rony Brauman, onetime president of Doctors Without Borders and author of the French postscript to Norman Finkelstein’s Holocaust Industry, “blind and deaf to the tragedy of the Darfuris” (p. 137). Brauman, Robert Nesbitt, Noam Chomsky, and other intellectuals turn strangely silent on Darfur or attribute the whole hullabaloo to an American or Zionist plot. The NGO anti-racism meeting in Durban in 2001 mustered the crowds to chant “One Jew, one bullet,” but cold-shouldered the Africans who wanted to spotlight Rwanda genocides; forgot the plight of the 260 million Dalit untouchables; ignored the cause of the Roma in Eastern Europe; and omitted from its final declaration the massacres in Chechnya and the Balkans….”
http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=288&zenid=ca33e9c6fa4a84cb3646baa0ac31af6c
January 12, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Great reply Robert
January 13, 2009 at 11:40 am
Does someone know how to post a response letter from today’s Guardian? Apparently, the letter’s writer thinks that Fine’s letter justifies “genocide”.
There is also another letter from a bunch of “Jews” (who later become “human beings”; I guess it’s a case of either/or) who apparently think that the murder of many of their (collective) anscestors gives them some sort of moral authority.
I do wish these “Jews” would make up their minds. Apparently, the experience of genocide means that either Jews are psychopathic muderers scarred by antisemitic genocide or moral angels. As Jacobson quotes in another context, “when will the Jews be forgiven the Holocaust”.
March 25, 2010 at 10:18 am
Robert fine’s latest Grauniad letter (24/Mar ’10) berates the building of housing for Jews in Jerusalem as high-lighting the struggle between a tolerant mixed society and the forces of ultra – nationalsm. For a sociologist (Prof at U of Warwick) he has forgotten – like ex-Mayor Livingston- that people only unbend when secure and on a common communications wavelength with bigger fish to fry than their differences. Such s possible undera strong largely non-denominational Western government
The policy of the Arab parties in Palestine has been, and is to resist the arrival, and get rid of the Jewish community. In such circumstances preaching of tolerance as equals should be equally addressed to the Arab “leadership” and rank and file to acknowledge that their campaigns of war, border reiving, denunciation, delegitimisation and defamation has done nothing for their own Arab improvement, and nothing to essay and arbitration.
In a parallel letter of the same day by Dr Anthony Isaacs he suggests tying aid tocompliance. Well Hear! Hear! If the “Palestinian fake up and muck up had been told to accept the UN 181 policy of two states for two people or no UNRWA and no other aid before 1967 or since; do you think the situation would have ever reached the present proportions? Too many cynics think they can solve this problem by kicking Israel – because that is possible. That the Arab side needs a kicking as well but it is impossible because they have no sympathy for their own, escapes a lot of know alls.