Israel and the Holocaust
Ellis at the Sharp Side analyses how the Holocaust is used by certain Zionists to shup up any criticism of Israel:
Which brings me back to the linking of Palestinians and Nazis. Why is it so important to connect two historically distinct and quite unrelated sets of people? It?s hardly a puzzle. The persecution of European Jewry by German anti-Semites is used to deflect attention away from the reality of Israel as a sectarian state and its long history of repression of the Palestinians. The Nazi Holocaust is used to shut down any criticism of Israel by insinuating, or explicitly asserting, that such critics are anti-Semites. Knowledge of the Holocaust is used to silence knowledge of the Naqba.
Neither John Updike nor Amos Oz has any direct experience of living under the Nazis. One modern author who did was the French writer Jean Genet. When Genet was in Lebanon in 1982 during the time of the Israeli invasion he noticed that the signs on the road to Beirut were in Hebrew: ?Arriving in Beirut from Damascus and seeing those signposts at the crossroads was as painful as seeing Gothic lettering in Paris during the German occupation.? (Jean Genet [translated from the French by Barbara Bray], Prisoner of Love (New York, 2003)), p. 310.