I remember reading stuff about this issue. Can’t find the the article I read but for what it’s worth …
I read a bunch of articles about the issue some time ago, can’t find those I read but you get the gist …
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3558327/Israels-anxiety-as-Jews-prefer-Germany.html
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Zelitch is rather hard to pronounce in German, but I would see Zelitsch (or similar) as a totally possible family name. Maybe with a family background in German-speaking regions and over time the name changed? She writes she grew up and lives in Philadelphia.
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This is the kind of hyperbole that makes it difficult to take critiques of Israel seriously. In 4 years, Syria has killed 50 times more Syrians than Israel has killed in 70. And displaced more people than the war of 1948.
This is particularly relevant because Syria’s brand of brutality was developed by the fugitive nazis who trained Syria’s army and intelligence services in the 1950s.
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I think more to the point, beyond how Europe as an entity continued to be bigoted against Jews after WWII, consider how the Soviet Union treated them in the U.S.S.R. and more specifically the satellite countries, which this fictional country would have been part of.
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Whoa…that’s a real thing. Thanks for teaching me something new today!
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Oh really? Citations needed. How many have been killed and displaced? And where are you getting your figures?
And why in the first place do the figures have to be some comparatively large number before critiques of self-serving Israeli brutality can finally be taken seriously?
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You’ve never been a true survivor if you don’t deeply, at the core of your being, understand exactly why this level of self-preservation exists there. How many thousands of years of entire populations trying to kill you does it take before you stop being merely defensive and start taking the offense?
Isn’t that what so many people still say, to blame the victim: Why didn’t the Jews fight back in the 1930s and 1940s?
So now they’re fighting back. This should not be surprising. And just like with individual victims, some of the complex PTSD symptoms expressed are more damaging (self and others) than restorative.
The best way to work towards healing is not to condemn the victim for their reactions in the process.
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Ironically, my fiancee is German, and it’s looking extremely likely that we might end up living in Germany, rather than the US.
But those articles are a relative handful; five digits or so of movement from Israel to Germany. So, while it’s definitely a trend, it’s a minor one, just due to population densities and relative opportunity. And the Jewish communities in Germany are so small that, according to my fiancee when she was filling out her taxes this past year, there are specific tax codes for each of the ten or so Jewish communities in the entire country (118,000, according to the official census; my old hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, has 2/3rds as many Jews as the entire country of Germany).
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Granted, to some extent. But I know Palestinians who would ask in return why they should quietly accept being the new victims of former victims turned dispossessing, murderous oppressors.
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Do you also need citations about the wetness of water, the hygienic habits of ursine forest dwellers, and the Pope’s sectarian affiliation? The Syrian Civil War’s displaced are estimated at 4.5 million (Syria's refugee crisis in numbers - Amnesty International)
The war of 1948’s refugee count is around 800,000 Arab Refugees, and the subsequent decade saw around 800,000 “Arab Jews” (don’t use the term in front of actual “Arab Jews,” BTW) forced INTO Israel, with more forced into France, the UK, and US.
Critiques of Israeli brutality can be taken seriously when they don’t involve libelous hyperbole. The act of sending shrapnel and lead into human flesh at high speed should be an easy one to criticize without that kind of language, since it happens to be inherently bad.
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As long as we are the beaten down kind of Jews we are OK in the eyes of the world. As long as they can feel sorry for us, they can ask “why didnt you fight back?” Once we stand up on our own and say “no, were not the ones who turn the other cheek” well now, thats a whole nother story! What business is it of these uppity Jews to decide these things for themselves? (big ol’ /s there, kinda…)
Shengen work privileges are pretty valuable!
But as you noted, it seems the Jewish community in Berlin is not that big.
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This. Even the most well-established historical event cannot be divorced from its surrounding societal and cultural contexts. Historians incapable or unwilling to acknowledge and recognize the subjective biases in their analysis and those of their sources are bad historians.
Perhaps Doctorow has somewhat mischaracterized Zelitch’s depiction, but I’m not sure how much I would enjoy an alt-history author writing about an historian protagonist while misunderstanding how the study of history is supposed to work. I should ask my history prof friends if they’ve read her stuff.
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I have no idea what to say here, other than the fact the obvious needs stating.
Why the fuck is this ‘oh you’re insert group here die.’ still a thing?
I know i know sins of the father but just at some point it’s like everyone should realize it’s some kind of hate-cycle everyone needs to get off of. Easy to say from the comfort of my home and not having seen people get blown apart, or get evicted from my home or whathaveyou but at some point I would hope people would go ‘we have better things to do than kill eachother.’
Incredible naiveness I’m aware…Human history is paved in blood.
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So, I’ve always been fascinated by the Palestinian narrative of the Holocaust, and I’m sure there’s at least one dreary university press book discussing it. I tend not to think it’s that simple, but Palestinians, depending on level of education, really do reduce it to this and have a sense of bitter irony about it. It’s almost bizarre in a sense that while a Kuwaiti might have never heard of the Holocaust, a lot of Palestinians have an ingrained cultural knowledge of it, that like all folklore, is true in parts and false in others. I learned about the Holocaust from my Palestinian father. I didn’t learn about it at all in high school in an Arabian Gulf country where teaching it was proscribed.
This is where history becomes personal narrative. I’m interested to know what @Mindysan33 thinks about the division, intersection, or non-division of the two, but I tend to view history and narrative to be distinctly different but interwoven closely. In one version of events, the Palestinians’ preferred version, the Palestinians surrender a lot of agency. Rashid Khalidi wrote about this in The Iron Cage, and covers history that normally takes a very Jewish/Israeli-tilted view of events and reframes it in an Arab context. I think it says a lot that Palestinians have a primarily Jewish-Israeli centered narrative of events, too. Even Palestinians who buy the Holocaust Hoax idea of events still frame things in largely the same terms.
In any event the description here is largely moot. I think Palestinians have learned that appeals to history and 1948 aren’t compelling to disinterested Americans. The BDS movement has found success in appeals to the present and the future. I’ve noticed that people who argue the history have the least relevant arguments: Israel has a demographic problem now that isn’t going to get better. This is where I’ve found the discussion is most enlightening.
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Israel gets about $3B in military aid from the US, no appreciable aid of any other kind, has a national GDP of $260B, and a federal budget deficit of ~ 2.5% of GDP, something well in-line with every social democracy in Europe. If that’s “getting by”, I think it’s doing just fine.
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Palestinians are not the only people who experienced displacement in that part of the 20th century. Like Sudetenland Germans, Poles, Baltic peoples, Ukrainians, Tatars, Indians, Pakistanis, and so many other people, Palestinians have to accept that their experience will not be re-dressed with yet more large scale displacement. Of anyone.
Plenty of Palestinians have already come to that realization. That’s a particularly severe problem among groups that do not have a state. It doesn’t help that the label “Palestinian” began as a mark of shame against those Arabs who allowed themselves to be pushed around by those oh-so-lowly Jews, and so any recognition of what I said above is deemed an act of selling out.
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Because in some parts of the world, the governing nation state lacks the ability or the inclination to enforce a stable social order that respects the rights of all the people residing therein. State building is hard. People in places where state building has failed act accordingly.
Indeed. Which is a part of the growing realization that the Two-State Solution may be unviable. The idea of a biethnic state has been gaining steam for this reason. I recall during the contentious desettlement of Gaza, some settlers (albeit a slim minority) were making noise about placing themselves under the authority of the PA as long as they could stay. The PA, of course didn’t see a problem with this. I think that many people assumed the Palestinians were being disingenuous about their response, but the sense I got from the Palestinian side was far less, “this is exploitable” (with cartoonish hand-rubbing) and a lot more “this is the kind of reasonable thing that we’ve been asking for all along.” I think when you talk to most Palestinians, if you bring the discussion down to brass tacks- a lot of what they want is incredibly practical. I personally question whether the Two-State idea is a way of achieving anything because it aligns rather poorly with the interests involved. But there is a myth of irrevocable and unique Palestinian irrationality that seems exclusive to American and (ironically) to a lesser extent Israeli rhetoric about the issue, and it needs to die a quick death.
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