The theme of this year’s official ceremony to mark Israel’s 68th Independence Day at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem was ‘civic heroism.’ During the festivities on Wednesday, Israeli newspaper Haaretz columnist, Asher Schechter describes that,
as the soldiers transitioned from formations depicting one time-honored symbol to another – a peace dove, a Star of David – they suddenly formed a phrase that should have inspired discomfort in anyone with even the slightest historical knowledge: “one people, one nation.”
It’s a phrase that, if you repeat it in German, in Germany, it is more than likely that you’ll be arrested for incitement. The reason? It is more than a little reminiscent of a leading slogan belonging to a certain German regime from the 1930s. In fact, it’s an almost-complete translation. The difference is that when the Germans originally uttered that phrase, it had the words “one Führer” at the end.
Schechter is quick to reject the Nazi Germany analogy, while adding that
it’s difficult to imagine a more fitting visual representation of the dangerous processes that are taking place in Israeli society—the same processes that the IDF’s Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan warned about last week—and the historical ignorance that in many ways fuel them, than inadvertently evoking a Nazi slogan during Israel’s Independence Day celebrations.
While utterly rejecting any similarity between the phrase and the Nazi slogan, Culture Minister Miri Regev (who was responsible for the ceremony) somehow managed to make things worse: “The phrase ‘one people, one nation’ is an expression of the just aspiration of the Zionist movement since its inception: to establish a Jewish state.” The similarities, nonetheless, are there, plain as the eyes can see.
What Regev did, Schechter underlines, was ‘what the right-wing always does: curb criticism of its actions by conflating it with antisemitism.’
There is also the question of where 20 percent of Israel’s citizens, the Palestinians fit into the ein volk.
And while we’re on the subject, what happens to its other ethnic minorities, like the Druze and the Bedouins? What role do they have in this “one nation”? The phrase “one people, one nation” is the latest in Israel’s ongoing effort to deny the existence of its Arab citizens.
Schechter reminds readers that last month, a poll conducted by the Israeli paper Israel Hayom showed that 48 percent of Jewish Israeli teenagers believe Israeli Arabs should not be allowed to run for office. A month earlier, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 48 percent of Jewish Israelis think Arab-Israelis should be ‘transferred” or “expelled.’
“One people, one nation,” then, can be seen as a statement of purpose, of sorts. Israel’s Arab Knesset memers are already fighting bills meant to disenfranchise Israeli Arabs, like the “suspension bill” that allows lawmakers to suspend other lawmakers from the Knesset by a majority vote of 90 members. The bill passed its first reading in March.
The historical allusion, however inadvertent, should also not be disregarded.
Its timing, a week after Golan was lambasted for “cheapening” the holocaust because he likened certain societal trends in Israel 2016 to the “revolting processes” that occurred in Germany decades ago, could not be any more prescient. When Golan warned about the dangers of societal trends like “intolerance, violence, self-destruction and moral deterioration,” trends that are often associated with the rise of Nazism in Germany, this is the sort of thing he was likely talking about.
Nor is this ‘the first time Israel’s anti-democratic stampede has inadvertently mimicked the words of prominent anti-Semites:
Last year, Benjamin Netanyahu was able to win reelection by warning Likud voters that “Arabs are rushing to the polls in droves.” As Gilad Halpern reported in +972 this week, it turns out the exact same words were said of Jews in early 20th century Poland.
Societies, Schechter concludes ‘don’t just make a rational, informed choice to become anti-democratic. Many times, this drive is greatly assisted by historical ignorance:
Israelis are taught a great deal at school about the Holocaust. As adults, they are surrounded by reminders of it. But most of these focus on the victimization of Jews, on a narrative that places the horrors of Nazism deep within anti-Semitic traditions. While that is true, what is missing is the intolerance, the violence, the nationalist extremism and the moral deterioration that enabled these traditions to manifest themselves in unspeakable ways. It wasn’t just “Juden raus!” It was also “ein volk, ein reich, ein führer.”
Yes, and this move towards ethnic intolerance and ignorance is assisted by mediocre “operators” in the public arena, and those who fail to check them. For example, QUESTION: which prominent Labour leader quite recently sloganised “British Jobs For British Workers”. ANSWER: Gordon Brown. No Labour Party enquiry into the “decent” and “cerebral” Mr. Brown, who trumpeted this to the masses while knowing that millions of Brits are employed in jobs outside the UK, millions of non-Brits work within the UK, and that in a globalised economy it is foolish to imagine that jobs are created or sustained by purely national factors.
“which prominent Labour leader quite recently sloganised “British Jobs For British Workers” ” Did he discriminate on the grounds of race? The assumption that the British are a single race is yours.