‘Israel’s Right To Exist,’ Really!

Posted on May 20, 2012 |

French Catholic Pastor Abbe Pierre (d. 2007) was a member of French resistance against Nazis. He was honored both in France and Quebec for his religious and political views. However, he was hounded by the powerful French Jewish lobby groups for believing that European Jews have no right to occupy Palestine, as the later played no part in the ethnic-cleansing of European Jews.

In May 1996, Pastor Roger Parmentier wrote a letter to French philosopher, Roger Garaudy, who was fined $40,000 by a Paris court for his book ‘The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics’.

The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics

“You have proved that you love the Jews infinitely more than those who give lessons. But here you are, you also love the Palestinians and Arabs in general, the majority of whom are Muslims, but sometimes Christians. All Palestinian or Arab brothers who, for generations, have been humiliated, colonized, dispossessed, bashed, imprisoned, starved. And you have reason to love them and to want justice and peace for them. Nobody understood (and nobody explained, either) that it is because of them that you embarked on the mad enterprise that consists in trying to explain (to the ignorant and to people who do not want to know) the consequences of the horrible extermination of Jews, or the fate of the Arabs, who had nothing to do with Polish or Russian pogroms, the Dreyfus Affair, the concentration camps, or the Nazi extermination. And yet, it is they who are dispossessed. What is contested is not the abjectness and horror of antisemitic massacres, it is their use to justify the creation and permanent expansion of the State of Israel and to cover up mad injustices. To make of “Auschwitz” a political argument to support Israel is to run the risk that this argument be contested. And when the historical reexamination of the Nazi period is refused, when the files are closed, is not that really to prevent the questioning of the legitimacy of the State of Israel and its behavior? Yet history will prevail. One day, everything will be known“.

This brings me to a brilliant article by a political analyst, Sharmine Narwani, and published in Al-Akhbar.

“Except of course the Holocaust is not my fault – or that of Palestinians. The cold-blooded program of ethnically cleansing Europe of its Jewish population has been so callously and opportunistically utilized to justify the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab nation, that it leaves me utterly unmoved. I have even caught myself – shock – rolling my eyes when I hear Holocaust and Israel in the same sentence,” she wrote.

“What moves me instead in this post-two-state era, is the sheer audacity of Israel even existing. What a fantastical idea, this notion that a bunch of rank outsiders from another continent could appropriate an existing, populated nation for themselves – and convince the “global community” that it was the moral thing to do. I’d laugh at the chutzpah if this wasn’t so serious,” she adds.
“Even more brazen is the mass ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population by persecuted Jews, newly arrived from their own experience of being ethnically cleansed,” she wrote.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
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