The New Jews and The New Nazis

Every once in a while someone will say something to the effect of "the Palestinians are the new Jews."

What's meant by this is that if the Jewish people in the past deserved some sympathy for being an oppressed people, today it is the Palestinians, not the Jews, that deserve that sympathy.

It is the Palestinians who are now the icon of oppression and thus in need of our sympathy. In this way, they are "the new Jews."

Leaving aside the truthfulness of this notion, it is interesting to me the many ways in which the Palestinians, and their supporters, often seek to undermine and appropriate Jewish history, identity, and imagery.

For example, here is an image of Jewish icon Anne Frank wearing a keffiyah. It is an image that projects the same idea. Anne Frank with keffiyah is Anne Frank as Palestinian and thus Palestinian as the new Jew.  The inversion also suggests that if Anne Frank was a victim of the Nazis, this means that if the Palestinians are the new Jews than the Jews are the new Nazis.

In this way the artist uses Anne Frank as club to beat the Jews and robs us of a cherished image, giving that image over to the Palestinian Arabs.

One might call it cultural theft and it is one of the unacknowledged weapons used against the Jewish people in the long Arab / Muslim war.

Another example of this is the claiming of Jewish historical or religious figures for Islam. Thus Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, religious figures who lived millenia before the birth of Mohommed somehow become Islamic religious figures... this despite the fact that Islam had yet to be invented. And therefore the Cave of the Patriarchs, where these figures are allegedly buried, gets transformed from a Jewish holy place to a mosque.

Another example, of course, is when a Palestinian will refer to Jesus as the first Muslim shaheed or martyr. This takes the figure of Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, and transforms him into the equivalent of a Palestinian suicide bomber, a shaheed, a martyr for the cause.

This cultural theft, or transference, of Jewish history, identity, and imagery has been going on for many centuries and includes, as another example, the building of the Dome of the Rock directly on top of the remains of the Second Temple. None of this is accidental. It is one of the primary methods designed to undermine the Jews and to strip us of our history and identity.

In a certain kind of way, it is pathetic, however. Do the Palestinians, or those Arabs or Muslims who are intent on driving the Jews out of our traditional homeland along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, have so little regard for their own history and identity that they must seek to appropriate ours?

It's Pathetic.