Benjamin Netanyahu raised eyebrows in the media when he told German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier that the West Bank must not become “Judenrein.”
Reuters called it “an especially tainted term,” used in “jaw-dropper defiance.” But even more over-the-top was its headline’s overdramatic exclamation point:
Judenrein! Israel adopts Nazi term to back settlers
And Peter Beaumont of The Observer wrote a whole op-ed slamming the Prime Minister:
The evocation of Judenrein by Netanyahu and by other commentators is the most cynical of ploys in a negotiation that his government feels that is going against it. Under pressure from Obama to freeze settlement building completely – including the construction that Israel likes to label as “natural growth” – it is being forced into ever more extreme language to defend the continued existence of the settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories in language, like that used with Steinmeier, to embarrass and cajole.
UK wonk Robin Shepherd responded to Beaumont:
Beaumont’s argument is straightforward. International law, he says, condemns the settlements as illegal. It is because they are settlers, not because they are Jewish settlers that they have no right to be there. Beaumont is also astute enough to refer to the fact that Jews lived in the West Bank for thousands of years, apart from the period between 1948 and 1967 when Jordanian control ensured that the land was free of Jews. He might also have referred to the Jews of Hebron who were expelled from their homes following a vicious anti-Semitic pogrom perpetrated by Palestinians in 1929 in which 63 Jews were killed.
But this would take him too close to the core issue that his piece ignores. For it is precisely the hatred of Jews qua Jews that has always lain at the heart of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim opposition to the existence of any Jewish state, whatever its borders, and regardless of who does or does not live in the West Bank. It was this hatred that led Mohammad Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the leading Palestinian political figure of the 1930s, to join up with the Nazis in World War II.
Judenrein? The Prime Minister was telling it like it is.
