chapotraphouse

Like BE said, zionism is not special, it is just settler colonialism for Jews. In the same way that not all Anglos did settler colonialism, heck plenty were made slaves to make it possible, but that doesn't change that the colonization of Jamaica was an Anglo project. Erasing the fact that zionist Jews are responsible for their actions is grotesque.

Finkelstein talks about this a lot in Holocaust Industry, about how there is this Zionist mentality of Israelis being separate from everything the gentiles are doing even if they literally help them do it and benefit from it. To treat Israel as something forced upon the Jews IS genocide apologia

The Holocaust uniqueness debate is sterile. Indeed, the claims of Holocaust uniqueness have come to constitute a form of "intellectual terrorism" (Chaumont). Those practicing the normal comparative procedures of scholarly inquiry must first enter a thousand and one caveats to ward off the accusation of "trivializing The Holocaust." 12 The claims of Holocaust uniqueness are intellectually barren and morally discreditable, yet they persist. The question is. Why? In the first place, unique suffering confers unique entitlement. The unique evil of the Holocaust, according to Jacob Neusner, not only sets Jews apart from others, but also gives Jews a "claim upon those others."

For Edward Alexander, the uniqueness of The Holocaust is "moral capital"; Jews must "claim sovereignty" over this «valuable property."14 In effect. Holocaust uniqueness - this "claim" upon others, this "moral capital" - serves as Israel's prize alibi. "The singularity of the Jewish suffering," historian Peter Baldwin suggests, "adds to the moral and emotional claims that Israel can make ... on other nations. "15 Thus, according to Nathan Glazer, The Holocaust, which pointed to the "peculiar distinctiveness of the Jews," gave Jews "the right to consider themselves specially threatened and specially worthy of whatever efforts were necessary for survival."16 (emphasis in original) To cite one typical example, every account of Israel's decision to develop nuclear weapons evokes the specter of The Holocaust." As if Israel otherwise would not have gone nuclear.

There is another factor at work. The claim of Holocaust uniqueness is a claim of Jewish uniqueness. Not the suffering of Jews but that Jews suffered is what made The Holocaust unique. Or: The Holocaust is special because Jews are special. Thus Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, ridicules the Holocaust uniqueness claim as "a distasteful secular version of chosenness."18 Vehement as he is about the uniqueness of The Holocaust, Elie Wiesel is no less vehement that Jews are unique. "Everything about us is different." Jews are "ontologically" exceptional. 1 9 Marking the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews, The Holocaust attested not only to the unique suffering of Jews but to Jewish uniqueness as well.

Appropriating a Zionist tenet, the Holocaust framework cast Hitler's Final Solution as the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews. The Jews perished because all Gentiles, be it as perpetrators or as passive collaborators, wanted them dead... Its political utility, however, is considerable. One might note, incidentally, that the "eternal anti-Semitism» theory in fact gives comfort to the anti-Semite. As Arendt says in The Origins of Totalitarianism, «that this doctrine was adopted by professional anti-Semites is a matter of course; it gives the best possible alibi for all horrors. If it is true that mankind has insisted on murdering Jews for more than two thousand years, then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human, occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument. The more surprising aspect of this explanation is that it has been adopted by a great many unbiased historians and by an even greater number of Jews. "23

**The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred has served both to justify the necessity of a Jewish state and to account for the hostility directed at Israel. The Jewish state is the only safeguard against the next (inevitable) outbreak of homicidal anti-Semitism; conversely, homicidal anti-Semitism is behind every attack or even defensive maneuver against the Jewish state. To account for criticism of Israel, fiction writer Cynthia Chick had a ready answer: "The world wants to wipe out the Jews ... the world has always wanted to wipe out the Jews. "24 If all the world wants the Jews dead, truly the wonder is that they are still alive — and, unlike much of humanity, not exactly starving.

This dogma has also conferred total license on Israel: Intent as the Gentiles always are on murdering Jews, Jews have every right to protect themselves, however they see fit. Whatever expedient Jews might resort to, even aggression and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defense. Deploring the "Holocaust lesson" of eternal Gentile hatred. Boas Evron observes that it "is really tantamount to a deliberate breeding of paranoia.... This mentality ... condones in advance any inhuman treatment of non-Jews, for the prevailing mythology is that 'all people collaborated with the Nazis in the destruction of Jewry,' hence everything is permissible to Jews in their relationship to other peoples. "25 ** In the Holocaust framework. Gentile anti-Semitism is not only ineradicable but also always irrational. Going far beyond classical Zionist, let alone standard scholarly, analyses, Goldhagen construes anti-Semitism as "divorced from actual Jews," "fundamentally not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish action," and "independent of Jews' nature and actions." A Gentile mental pathology, its «host domain" is "the mind." (emphasis in original) Driven by "irrational arguments," the anti-Semite, according to Wiesel, "simply resents the fact that the Jew exists. "26 "Not only does anything Jews do or refrain from doing have nothing to do with anti-Semitism," sociologist John Murray Cuddihy critically observes, "but any attempt to explain anti-Semitism by referring to the Jewish contribution to anti-Semitism is itself an instance of anti-Semitism!" (emphasis in original)27 The point, of course, is not that anti-Semitism is justifiable, nor that Jews are to blame for crimes committed against them, but that anti-Semitism develops in a specific historical context with its attendant interplay of interests. "A gifted, well-organized, and largely successful minority can inspire conflicts that derive from objective inter- group tensions," Ismar Schorsch points out, although these conflicts are «often packaged in anti-Semitic stereotypes. "28