Ronald Hilton e Robert Whealey chamam a atenção para o precedente da República de Weimar: os israelitas extremistas estão a desafiar o governo de Israel.
"As a 9-year old I saw with my own eyes the collapse of the German republic that came into being after World War I. Some months after its breakdown, we fled Germany and thus our lives were saved. How could such a thing happen? How could a gang of thugs with an inhuman ideology take over a state that, in its time, was perhaps the most cultured country in the world? Can it happen here in Israel? Today, there is no escape from the terrible answer: Yes, it can happen here. If we behave like the people of Weimar, we shall suffer the same fate as the people of Weimar.
Generally, the taboo on references to Nazi Germany was observed. Not any more. In their fight against the "rotten" Israeli democracy, the settlers have adopted the Holocaust symbols. They are ostentatiously wearing the Yellow Star that was imposed by the Nazis on the Jews before their extermination, only substituting orange for yellow. They inscribe their forearm with their identity number, like the numbers the Nazis tattooed on the Auschwitz prisoners. They call the government the"Judenrat", after the Jewish councils appointed by the Nazis in the ghettoes, and liken the evacuation of the settlers from Gush Katif to the deportation of the Jews to the death camps. All this live on television. So, there is no reason anymore for not calling the spade a spade: a large fascist camp is now threatening Israeli democracy.
What happened last week in Israel is the beginning of an attempt to overturn by force the democratic system itself. Confronting Israeli democracy now is the hard core of the settlers, which practically all the settlers accept as their spokesmen.
What is this ideology? It was proclaimed loudly, again and again, by the central spokesmen of the movement: God gave us this country. All the land and its fruits belong to us. Anybody who gives away even one square meter of it to foreigners (meaning the Arabs, who have been living here for many generations) is violating the commandments of the Torah. The Torah is binding. All government decisions, Knesset laws and court judgments are null and void if they contravene the word of God, as conveyed to us by the rabbis who stand above the cabinet ministers, the Knesset members, the Supreme Court judges and the army commanders. Like in
Khomeini's fundamentalist Iran.
A large part of this camp openly adheres to the teachings of Meir Kahane, whose face was displayed everywhere by marching settlers on their shirts, flags and posters. Kahane publicly preached what many of the settlers, and perhaps most of them, say in private: that God not only promised us this country, but also commanded us (in the book of Joshua) to eradicate the non-Jewish inhabitants.
One of the leaders of the march, Tsviki Bar-Hai, declared on TV: "The struggle is about the character of the state." Ninety-nine percent of the many thousands seen on TV this week wore kippas, and many of them had beards and peyoth. The women wore long skirts and had their hair covered. All of them are "born-again Jews" or belong to the "national-religious" camp - a nationalist-messianic sect that believes that it is paving the way for "redemption". It must be clearly understood: in Israel, the Jewish religion has undergone a mutation that has completely changed its face.
RH: Some Jews argue that it is a return to authentic Judaism.
TEXTO COMPLETO http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1122164675.
