An excellent piece from Samar Jabr, a psychiatrist practicing in the West Bank and her native Jerusalem.
FOR MY RECENT article on the neurotic obsession with anti-Semitism and on using the fear of a “future holocaust” as camouflage for colonialism (see “Searching for the Elusive Israeli Partner,” December 2008 Washington Report, p. 26), I have paid a heavy price: the ending of a significant relationship which sustained me through several adversities over the past two years. I was informed that my words demonstrated that I “hate all Jews and don’t know enough or don’t empathize enough with the Jewish experience of man’s brutality to man.”
But learning about other people’s experience of injustice has been my own “neurotic obsession”: I read books, watch documentaries, visit museums, listen to people’s testimonies, and write frequently about oppressors and the oppressed throughout history. My “sin,” apparently, is that while I don’t exclude the Jews from my efforts to learn, I don’t believe in the special status of their experience. I reject the ranking of human suffering, and I certainly protest against the exploitation of that experience (what author and scholar Norman Finkelstein terms The Holocaust Industry) which has resulted in my own people’s experience of man’s brutality to man. Read the rest of this entry »
