Sunday, August 22, 2010

Israel Considering Deporting Children of Foreign Workers

A eight year old boy, told that he was no longer welcome in the land he was born, was forced to leave his home for a far away land he didn’t know, whose language he didn’t speak, with no idea of how his family would survive.


My great great grandfather moved to Austria from Galicia seeking a better life, worked hard and provided for his family. My grandfather fought for the Kaiser in World War I.

When the forces of evil came to Austria, all this counted for nothing and my family was one of the lucky few to find refuge on a foreign shore.

I never liked the term coined by Yehoshua Leibowitz “Judo-Nazi”. Yes, many of the actions of the Israeli occupation forces often resemble those taken by the German occupation forces in Europe, but not to the depraved extent of the Nazi regime. Somehow, comparing the Israeli occupation to the Nazis both diluted the pure evil of one and misrepresented the other.


As I read about the Israeli government’s decision to deport 400 children of foreign workers, mainly born in Israel, I can’t help but think that the Nazi evil did not begin and end with the crematoria, but was an entire system of hatred and persecution, all carried out in the name of the good of the Aryan race. Deporting 400 Israeli born, Hebrew speaking children to countries they have never known does not compare to Auschwitz and Treblinka, but it is certainly an act worthy of the evil that should have been erased in the spring of 1945.

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