Settling scores
No, those who snuck into Ioannina’s Jewish cemetery and desecrated four gravestones did not act out of solidarity with the suffering Palestinians, but that is what the vandals would probably have claimed had they been caught. Nor did those who splashed red paint on the wreaths at Thessaloniki’s Holocaust memorial, just two days after a ceremony in memory of the 50,000 local Jews killed by the Nazis, have the Palestinians in mind… If we vandalize temples and monuments, we become like the people we castigate. If we criticize Israeli troops for dishonoring a shrine like the Church of the Nativity, while we vandalize the monument which protects the memory of thousands of Greek Jews who were killed by the Nazis, then our solidarity and morality are purely ostensive: We have lost our moral superiority, just like Israel has. The perpetrators would probably invoke their anger at the incursions by the Israeli tanks and helicopters. They’d say they are shaken by Palestinian suffering. But how credible would they be? It seems, in other words, that some are not truly driven by solidarity with the Palestinians but by a desire to exploit the present opportunity and settle old scores, turning – once again and with the same old racist «arguments» – against the Jews as a whole. Like those who portrayed themselves as warm supporters of the Kurds, while, in truth, they only wanted to see Turkey in pain, they now follow the same moral and political code. While they shout pro-Palestinian slogans, in fact, they only wish to revive old dogmas… against all things Jewish. It is these same people, more or less, who never accepted that Auschwitz and Dachau actually existed and who are confident that these are all part of a Jewish conspiracy – just like communism, psychoanalysis and all «the world’s evils.»
