Israel and Genocide

Gershom Gorenberg's article at TAPPED, "The Israeli Government's Genocide Politics" accurately sums up the hypocrisy of Israel's policy toward Darfur refugees and the Armenian genocide. While Gorenberg's ignores Israel's own policies toward the Palestinians, he turns a white hot lamp on the failure of Israel to embrace Darfur's refugees and to go along with Turkey's continued denial of their 1915 massacre of Armenians.

Is it too much to ask of Israel to have them stand in as a leader of world human rights given the conditions leading to the founding of the country? I would say no, but perhaps I am asking too much of a vulnerable nation surrounded by enemies. However, as Gorenberg points out, "The underlying issue is that, pragmatically, Israel can claim it must protect its interests, even if that means indulging an ally ashamed of its history. It can argue that refugees pose a security threat. It can reject refugees in order to maintain its ethnic balance. But if it does those things, it has no grounds to speak about Western countries who turned away Jews in 1938."

Absolutely. What Israel can't do is have it both ways. They can't act as cold-hearted as the rest of the world to suffering while forcing everyone else to remember what happened to the Jewish people in the 1930s and 1940s. That is rank hypocrisy. Personally, I think we do need to remember the Jewish Holocaust all the time. But we also need to remember the Armenians, the Native Americans, Darfur, Australian aborigines, and other peoples who the world has failed.