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Killing and cruelty, but no genocide By Gideon Levy Tags: Holocaust, Israel News The soldiers were playing backgammon in their tent. The Palestinian ambulance was waiting outside with its red lights flashing. Not one of the soldiers bothered to stop the game at the sight of the ambulance, which was carrying a female patient writhing in pain. So it continued for over half an hour, until my patience and tolerance were completely shattered. This was at Checkpoint No. 250, near Jenin, at the height of the second intifada. The ambulance driver had told me he was used to waiting a long time. "They always leave us sitting here like this," he told me in fluent Hebrew. I went to the soldiers, shouting and upset, and asked them how they would feel if it were their father or mother lying in the ambulance. This question confounded their brainwashed minds, which were apparently unable to conceive of the Palestinian as a person. Afterward, in a fury, I said that only monsters could play backgammon while a sick woman was in agony right next to them. They aimed a rifle at my head. Aimed and cocked it. In an investigation conducted later, the soldiers claimed I had called them Nazis. To them, monsters and Nazis are one and the same. I have never called Israel Defense Forces soldiers Nazis and I shall never do so. The Holocaust and the Nazis can never be compared to any other instance of inhumane behavior. At least so far. Advertisement In Europe, though, it has become ever more common: The IDF is Nazi and Israel is Nazi. Everything they did to you, you now do to others, people say. A growing number of the world's leftists - including some who consider themselves friends of Israel, and some who are Jewish - view the Israeli occupation as a manifestation of Nazism. I always angrily and contemptuously reject this vile comparison. It is incorrect, utterly outrageous and damaging to the just Palestinian cause. The occupation is cruel enough and the comparison to Nazism not only cheapens the memory of the Holocaust - it also does an injustice to the injustices of the Israeli occupation. There is no single, absolute evil. Comparing the Israeli occupation and Nazism is like comparing flies and elephants. What do they have in common? Hardly anything. I'm not sure who started it. It may have been us, in fact. Abba Eban, the legendary foreign minister from the Labor Party, called the 1967 borders "Auschwitz borders"; decades later, Benjamin Netanyahu called Iran's Mahmoud Ahmedinejad "a modern Hitler." The Portuguese writer Jose Saramago was also tempted to make the comparison. After a 2002 visit to the occupied territories, he said they reminded him of Auschwitz. A few days later, MK Issam Makhoul gave the straight-armed salute from the Knesset podium and said to the then prime minister: "Heil Sharon!" From right and left, in Israel and abroad, the comparisons arise. And all of them need to be rejected. Those who compare the 1967 borders to Auschwitz and the Iranian president to Adolf Hitler are just as infuriating as those who compare the IDF to Nazis. The Israeli occupation is brutal and cruel, and Israel of 2009 is becoming more and more reminiscent of Germany of the early 1930s. The dehumanization process of the Palestinians, encouraged by the gung-ho media and executed by the IDF, recalls some terrible events. Anyone who stands before the electronic barbed-wire fence that surrounds Qalqilyah, for example, cannot help but think of a concentration camp. A concentration camp, but not an extermination camp by any means. Whoever sprayed graffiti on the separation fence calling Abu Dis, which is divided by an eight-meter-high concrete wall, a "ghetto," was right. The pervasive racism toward Israeli Arabs should also be cause for deep concern. Arab students are unable to rent an apartment in Jewish cities, and a grocery store owner in Ramat Aviv says that more than a few customers in this enlightened neighborhood do not want Arabs to deliver their groceries. This, too, should bring back memories. Arab employees are dismissed from Israel Railways, essentially because of their nationality, and others have trouble finding employment in government companies, for the same reason. The selektzia - yes, that's what they call it at the big city nightclubs - keeps young Arabs out. Sometimes Ethiopians, too. The security check at Ben-Gurion airport, which separates people according to ethnicity, and the screening at the airport gates done in accordance with a person's accent, are also nauseating. There are a number of IDF regulations and Knesset laws that, if translated into German, would sound horrific. Like the call for a loyalty oath from Arabs, which would seem perfectly awful if translated in German. The all-too-common notion that if we would only make the Palestinians disappear behind fences or across the borders, Israel's problems would be solved is just as appalling. The "demographic threat" is an expression that ought to sound familiar to the generation of the Holocaust and the succeeding generations, as should the debate, which has become sickeningly legitimate, of the ways to deal with this "threat." The Citizenship Law ought to ring a bell here. Nearly 5,000 Palestinians killed in nine years and 1,300 killed in three weeks in Gaza, including hundreds of women and children - these are terrifying statistics that ought to be enough to keep awake at night any Israeli who cares about the face of his nation. But a Holocaust it is not. Far from it. The early-warning signs need to be noticed now, and not ignored. It is acceptable and necessary to compare them to similar signs that were evident in Nazi Germany. The differences may exceed the similarities, but still they cannot be ignored. The occupation in the territories and the racism inside Israel are plunging down a slippery slope. Things that people found horrifying two decades ago have become a matter of routine. In 1989, when I published the story of the first Palestinian woman in labor to lose her baby at an IDF checkpoint, it caused a bit of a stir and the matter was even discussed at the cabinet table. Since then, dozens of Palestinian mothers have lost their babies at checkpoints; it's no longer a story. During the first intifada, America's CBS television network broadcast shocking pictures of Israeli soldiers, who'd broken the arms of a Palestinian youth with rocks. Israel and the whole world were in an uproar. Today, you have to wonder if anyone would even bother publicizing pictures of that sort. They're not a story anymore. During the second intifada, executions carried out by soldiers from special IDF units were a terrible but routine matter. No one was shocked any more. The targeted assassinations, the separation fence, the mass detentions (some without trial), the blatant and systematic discrimination in employment and in the legal system, the ubiquitous racism - all need to be heeded as early warnings. In Germany, the society sunk into a moral coma, too. The alarm must be raised against this, as much as possible. But a Holocaust it is not. Even Cambodia, Rwanda and the Congo were not Germany and Poland. It's almost embarrassing that one has to remind people that there is no policy of genocide and no Final Solution. There was ethnic cleansing, there is mass killing and systematic theft, but a Holocaust it is not. A few weeks ago, when I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, a visitor remarked to me snidely: "Oh, don't tell me you take an interest in our suffering, too." Yad Vashem is not the place for this, I replied to the man. But during the week when Holocaust Memorial Day is observed in Israel, it must be remembered: The occupation is no Holocaust. However, the early signs do not bode well. They bear thinking about, between the memory of Treblinka and the legacy of Auschwitz, which must never be forgotten and need not be compared to anything else. In his book, "The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals," philosopher Adi Ophir warns that we should not think that we are "after Auschwitz" once and for all. It is always possible that we are heading toward it, and we must be ever mindful of just where we are situated on that slope. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Swine killed over flu Egypt orders pigs killed in anticipation of pandemic. 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