Prometheus 6

Nazi reminders in Gaza?
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist  |  July 31, 2005

A READER e-mails a link to a news item from Gaza, where some Jewish residents have ''tattooed" their national ID numbers on their arms, Auschwitz-style -- a bitter gesture of protest against their forthcoming expulsion. My correspondent's comment is blunt. ''Misusing Holocaust language and imagery," she writes. ''Utterly disgusting -- makes me have less sympathy for them."

...Let's be clear: You don't have to support disengagement to agree that the Nazi-talk is grotesque. The Israeli army is not the Gestapo. The peaceful Jewish residents who will be forced from the homes and land they love are not being sent to gas chambers. Sharon's plan may be delusional -- instead of enabling Israelis to ''disengage" from Palestinian violence, it will bring them more of it, and in deadlier forms -- but it isn't the Final Solution.

And yet . . .

And yet there is no getting around the fact that Israel is about to become the first modern, Western nation in more than 60 years to forcibly uproot a whole population -- men, women, children, babies -- solely because they are Jews. There is no getting around the fact that the forthcoming expulsions are rooted in the belief that any future Palestinian state must be Judenrein -- emptied of its Jews.

Let us disengage from specific ethnic labels for a moment.