Israel and Gemany

Of the many things about the state of Israel that are beyond me, the biggest is the question of why the Israelis are so interminably vicious with the Palestinians, when you would think that, because of the enormous amount of suffering and genocide that a huge number of people of their persuasion suffered at the hands of the Germans in the 1930's and '40's, their unending bile would be directed entirely against the Germans instead.   After all, it is beyond all doubt that there wasn't one Palestinian guard at Auschwitz or policing the cattle cars on the railway routes to any of the other German concentration and extermination camps.   But isn't totally illogical thinking and acting of a piece with how the 9/ll airliner hijackers were largely from Egypt and especially Saudi Arabia, with none from Afghanistan or Iraq, yet it was those latter two countries and not at all the first two that the GWBush administration hit hard in reprisal?

A year or two ago I read that a lot of Israelis are taking out insurance policies in the form of getting passports and visas to Germany, against the event of things getting too hot in and around Israel.   I wasn't sure of the veracity or the reasoning behind that till on the BBC News site I saw an article saying that in the Berlin area, as many as 25,000 Israelis are now thought to be happily living.

So here you have Israelis moving back in with the Germans, while the Netanyahus and the Liebermans remaining behind in the Promised Land have, in dealing with the Palestinians, used  techniques perfected by the Nazis to eliminate Jews, especially  the Goebbels tactic of presenting lies as truths.

These Israelis settling back in Germany aren't your ordinary "common man" people.   They are instead artists, intellectuals, and others of that ilk, who paint a picture of Israel as being a gray, culturally deprived place that doesn't offer a good atmosphere for creative and benign activities, and they say that Germany, or at least the area in and around Berlin, offers much better opportunities for that kind of the good life.

That may be so.   Still, if I were them, I wouldn't trust the Germans too much in that respect.

Yet who am I to be saying that, when here I am, a person to whom many in their less guarded moments would apply the notorious "n-word," born and raised in strongly liberal D.C., yet now living not  overjoyously but at least reasonably contentedly enough in the heart of rural Virginia, the former capital and most important of the Confederate states and the first of the slave states?

Yet I don't fully trust Virginia either, and I'm not here because of that state's prevailing winds and philosophies, as reflected these days in factors like its fondness for executing people, for electing Republican regressives, and for allowing those idiots to put into place policies that include some of the deadliest anti-woman measures of any state in the Union.   I'm here mostly because I wanted to have a big garden and to build my own house -- amenities that, as I used to like to say, though invariably the responses would be a dead silence accompanied by frowns  of resentment, "weren't available in D.C. even to Ronald Reagan."
 
From all that I've been able to see, blind unreasoning bigotry doesn't die easily in the human soul.   In fact, it never dies at all.   Instead its practitioners, in the times when they've been subdued, merely keep their heads down while sharpening their knives and waiting for their chances to re-emerge and assert themselves once again, because enlightenment doesn't burn brightly forever, anywhere.

No one should know that better than Israelis.   Yet, whether in and around Tel Aviv, Berlin, or the halls of the U.S. Congress, they seem to have dumped all awareness of that perpetual truth.