Israel : the Dream of Normalization

Introduction :

A few weeks before Israel’s 60th anniversary, these words appeared in the Israeli daily Haaretz. They deplored the blank support for Israel that Chancellor Merkel had reiterated in Jerusalem. Quite a few Israelis believe that such support undermines Israel by allowing it to act with impunity. They also believe that Israel has long deserved to be treated as a normal state rather than a self-appointed legatee of the Holocaust. While the German state’s concern about the human condition of its victims helps them lead a more decent life, its blank support for the state of Israel not only undermines the future of its inhabitants but also ignores the lessons many German Jews drew from the Holocaust.

Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish refugee who fled the Nazis to the United States, wrote about Nazi crimes in terms of “banality of evil”. She firmly believed that murderous amorality is not limited to one nation or one ideology. Quite a few prominent Jews of German origin drew similar lessons from the history of the Nazi genocide. Hannah Arendt, alongside with the theologian Martin Buber, the philosopher Ernst Simon and the physicist Albert Einstein, warned against the inherent danger of exclusive ethnic nationalism. This is why, in the wake of the Second World War, they supported the idea of a common state for all inhabitants of Palestine : Arabs and Jews.

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  Israel : the Dream of Normalization

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