She Saw No Contradiction

Just a brief blog - I woke up this morning and read the news that Israeli F-16 bombers have killed at least 155 people in the Gaza Strip, most likely all of whom are Palestinian.

The Israeli-Palestinian crisis has always been a bit too in depth for me to fully grasp, but I've tried, and with a Palestinian friend, I've gotten the general idea of both sides.

It's a terrible situation (duh) but one I can't understand, in terms of the motivations for the violence. The creation of Israel was questionable, I believe, not that we can go back in time and change it. But, and I know I sound terrible saying this, I would have expected more from the people who "gained" Israel, considering why they did.

It reminds me of a news article I read while researching Apartheid for one of my literature classes: "Brothers in Arms - Israel's Secret Pact with Pretoria." In the second part, the author begins:

Several years ago in Johannesburg I met a Jewish woman whose mother and sister were murdered in Auschwitz. After their deaths, she was forced into a gas chamber, but by some miracle that bout of killing was called off. Vera Reitzer survived the extermination camp, married soon after the war and moved to South Africa.

Reitzer joined the apartheid Nationalist party (NP) in the early 1950s, at about the time that the new prime minister, DF Malan, was introducing legislation reminiscent of Hitler's Nuremberg laws against Jews: the population registration act that classified South Africans according to race, legislation that forbade sex and marriage across the colour line and laws barring black people from many jobs.

Reitzer saw no contradiction in surviving the Holocaust only to sign up for a system that was disturbingly reminiscent in its underpinning philosophy, if not in the scale of its crimes, as the one she had outlived. She vigorously defended apartheid as a necessary bulwark against black domination and the communism that engulfed her native Yugoslavia. Reitzer let slip that she thought Africans inferior to other human beings and not entitled to be treated as equals. I asked if Hitler hadn't said the same thing about her as a Jew. She called a halt to the conversation.

Reitzer was unusual among Jewish South Africans in her open enthusiasm for apartheid and for her membership of the NP. But she was an accepted member of the Jewish community in Johannesburg, working for the Holocaust survivors association, while Jews who fought the system were frequently ostracised by their own community.

Many Israelis recoil at suggestions that their country, risen from the ashes of genocide and built on Jewish ideals, could be compared to a racist regime. Yet for years the bulk of South Africa's Jews not only failed to challenge the apartheid system but benefited and thrived under its protection, even if some of their number figured prominently in the liberation movements. In time, Israeli governments too set aside objections to a regime whose leaders had once been admirers of Adolf Hitler. Within three decades of its birth, Israel's self-proclaimed "purity of arms" - what it describes as the moral superiority of its soldiers - was secretly sacrificed as the fate of the Jewish state became so intertwined with South Africa that the Israeli security establishment came to believe the relationship saved the Jewish state.

I know that's a long quote, but it's worth reading, as is the rest of the article. This is one of the many concepts that I don't think I'll understand, and it's frustrating.

In other news, off to visit my paternal grandmother in the country. I get to see kittens. :)