A good and subtle Middle East piece in the Times by David Aaronovitch who (I seem to recall) had a Tough Left reputation at Oxford when I was there in the early 1970s but now offers deft analysis.
He swipes aside a now modish comparison between Israel and the Nazi villains who perpetrated the Warsaw Ghetto massacres, pointing out that Israel would need to have murdered some 500,000 Palestinians to achieve that level of wickedness:
So why the philistine insistence on this particular match? Partly, I imagine, so that the matcher can mention the “irony” of Jews supposedly doing to others what the Nazis “did to them” – as if there weren’t a thousand other closer, but far less narratively satisfying, comparisons.
He makes a deep point on Responsibility:
When 13.75 million German voters put their cross against the overtly Jew-hating National Socialist list in July 1932, didn’t they make themselves complicit in the events that ended up with Hanna’s choice? Or, to put it another way, couldn’t people that you might fall in love with, be capable – depending on the circumstances, created by millions of others – of doing terrible things?
This is another way of posing the question of the Exception – or not – of Evil.
To be continued.
For ever?
