Israel’s Collective Guilt
Israel isn’t trying to kill Palestinians in Gaza, rather…
Is Israel murdering Palestinians — seemingly wholesale — to wipe out its collective guilt? Year after year, Israelis have ignored an ever more permanent concentration camp — Gaza. But let me be clear — greater Israel never meant to create a concentration camp. Just like the Germans never meant to build extermination camps in Poland years after building concentration camps in Germany.
Like the German SA and SS in Dauphin’s story, running Gaza was left to radical parts of Israeli’s government. Good Israelis, so to speak, didn’t want to know. Just like I don’t want to know how people fleeing the South are treated at the United States’ border (so no judgement here).
I am not making excuses for Israel or Palestinians. I am only pointing out that we’re all bad at preventing problems from getting out of hand.
Anyway, I can’t recommend enough, Marc Dauphin’s Medium story Concentration vs Extermination Camps During Nazi Germany.
His story has helped me bring into focus what surprises me most about Israelis — their denial that young people in Gaza and the West Bank have grown up feeling, if nothing else, that they live in concentration camps. (These are my own thoughts, NOT Dauphin’s!)