You must not tell the truth! And chutzpah defined
Some of us do not believe what our politicians say especially when the subject is Israel’s behaviour – its ongoing colonization of the occupied West Bank for the purpose of making peace impossible except, perhaps, on terms which require the Palestinians to surrender to Zionism’s will. The responses of some Jewish supporters of Israel right or wrong to one British MP who did dare to tell the truth illustrate why most politicians throughout the Western world won’t. That’s yesterday’s story but I am driven to comment by the hypocrisy on display, hypocrisy which takes chutzpah to wild extremes.
For those readers who might not be fully familiar with chutzpah, let’s begin with a definition of it.
Chutzpah is a Talmudic word that means many similar things, chief among them being shameless audacity, impudence and arrogance, each and all laced with incredible self-righteousness.
In the context of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, chutzpah represents an Israeli (Jewish) way of saying to the world without actually saying it something like: “We know we shouldn’t have done this. We know it’s wrong. But we’ve done it because we also know there’s nothing you can do about it.”
As I say in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, if there is one single word that sums up the whole Zionist enterprise, it is chutzpah.
Sunday 27 January is Holocaust Memorial Day and this year marks the 68th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp where more than one million people, mostly Jews, died. As this day approached, the Holocaust Educational Trust placed a Book of Commitment in the House of Commons to give MPs the chance to sign it and honour those who were slaughtered during the Nazi holocaust and subsequent other genocides, and commit themselves to encouraging constituents “to work together to combat prejudice and racism today.”
Among those who signed the book and pledged his commitment (I’d be somewhat surprised if there was a single available MP who didn’t sign) was David Ward, the Liberal Democratic member for Bradford East, a 59 year-old new comer to the House, elected in 2010.
On his web site he then said this:
Having visited Auschwitz twice – once with my family and once with local schools – I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.
Then, in an update after he was condemned by his party and reviled by Jewish supporters of Israel right or wrong, he added this:
For my entire political career I have fought prejudice. I have just returned from Bradford’s Holocaust Memorial event where people across cultures and faiths joined together to say, “We bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust and will never forget its lessons.”
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