Joe Hildebrand: the Greens fail to see hypocrisy in their unhealthy Israel obsession
If they believe the Palestinians have rights to a homeland why do the Greens not believe that the Jewish people deserve the same, asks Joe Hildebrand.
Opinion
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There is an old joke in which the teller casually poses the childlike riddle: “What’s worse than having your lunch stolen?”
When the respondent innocently asks “What?” the teller then shouts with furious indignation: “THE HOLOCAUST!!!”
It is a particularly fitting joke for these troubled times, and it is a joke that the Greens and their extremist activist enablers have unwittingly become.
And given their uncanny aptitude for humourlessness it is also a joke that no doubt needs to be explained.
Luckily for them, that is why I am here.
The point of the joke is not that the Holocaust wasn’t horrific – on the contrary, the whole premise of the punchline rests on the fact that the Holocaust was the most horrific thing to happen in all of history.
Indeed, its purpose is to shame the ambushed respondent for momentarily considering something so trivial as a lost lunch against the horror of humankind’s worst genocide.
But that is not the joke.
The twist is that the joke is on the teller.
The real unspoken punchline is the unreasonableness of someone so fixated on one particular outrage that nothing else can ever be allowed to matter.
The joke was first sprung on me in the 1990s, and it was funnier then.
The horror of the Holocaust and the right of Israel to exist were both, it seemed to me at least, generally accepted facts in the West.
The absurdity of it was obvious.
But no longer. “Palestine from the river to the sea” is an open and literal call for the extermination of the Jewish state, as our Prime Minister has strongly and rightly confirmed.
And even the Holocaust itself has become a political plaything, with innumerable activists and academics – including some Jews – claiming it is being used as a crutch for Israeli aggression.
To be clear, I have many grave misgivings about the intensity of Israeli fighting and the civilian casualties in Gaza – and the incursion into Rafah in particular – as well as the actions of extremist settlers into occupied territories and the now-forgotten complaints of higher energy and water prices in the West Bank.
But dismissing or diminishing the Holocaust as the prime driver for Israel’s actions and anxieties is a dangerous road paved on very thin ice.
There is a saying among Jews that it is a mistake to think that Israel happened because of the Holocaust; the Holocaust happened because there was no Israel.
In many ways this is true.
The Zionist movement (with a goal of a Jewish homeland) was under way decades before the rise of Nazi Germany but because British Palestine was still, well, British Palestine, when the purges came there was nowhere to run to.
But it is undeniable that a sense of global shock, sorrow and shame over the horrors that were later revealed was critical to the creation of a Jewish homeland – essentially a national refugee camp – in 1948.
Even then the Jews had to physically and militarily fight for their right to exist. History shows they fought and won.
Sadly, as in any war, there were also losers. And more unfortunately for them they were also the aggressors. Japan and Germany would no doubt sympathise.
Many Palestinians were dispossessed and their land was occupied.
Ironically, most would not have been, had they as readily accepted the will of the UN back then as enthusiastically they do today.
Israel has done some dodgy stuff since, the Palestinians have done some dodgy stuff since and the Arab states surrounding both have continued with their Byzantine diplomatic and military wranglings, as they have done for a thousand or two years and many more.
That’s just the local history.
Meanwhile back at the ranch we have the Greens and their ugly one-eyed obsession with Israel.
Oh no, they say, you can’t justify any of this. You can’t create a safe haven for Jews just because they’ve been persecuted and killed for millennia, resulting in the greatest industrial-scale murder in the history of the human race.
Then at the same time they say it’s OK to vandalise electorate offices, terrorise Jewish students and chant “Where’s the Jews?” at the Opera House, because nothing’s more important than the genocide in Gaza.
There was, I’m sorry to report, another genocide that happened not so long ago. It wouldn’t take much to read up on it.
But I guess that’s the joke.
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