Humanity Flickers in Israel?

Israeli soldiers' treatment of Palestinians rarely receives praise, but recent reports have been especially bad. Most outrageous to Israelis has not been the shooting of a 13-year-old-girl by an officer who said he'd have done the same if she had been 3, nor ultra-orthodox soldiers mocking a Palestinian corpse by placing the head on a pike with a cigarette. What could be worse than all this?

According to the Guardian, it was video of soldiers forcing a Palestinian man at a checkpoint to play his violin while they made fun of him:

It may be that the soldiers wanted Mr Tayem to prove he was indeed a musician walking to a lesson because, as a man under 30, he would not normally have been permitted through the checkpoint. But after the incident was videotaped by Jewish women peace activists, it prompted revulsion among Israelis not normally perturbed about the treatment of Arabs.

The rightwing Army Radio commentator Uri Orbach found the incident disturbingly reminiscent of Jewish musicians forced to provide background music to mass murder. "What about Majdanek?" he asked, referring to the Nazi extermination camp.

People have in the past compared Israeli's mistreatment of Palestinians to German mistreatment of Jews, but this particular incident was a stark example of such comparisons being validated. Unfortunately, much outrage seems to have been over how the incident diminishes Jewish suffering, not over any Palestinian suffering:

The critics were not drawing a parallel between an Israeli roadblock and a Nazi camp. Their concern was that Jewish suffering had been diminished by the humiliation of Mr Tayem. Yoram Kaniuk, author of a book about a Jewish violinist forced to play for a concentration camp commander, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper that the soldiers responsible should be put on trial "not for abusing Arabs but for disgracing the Holocaust".

"Of all the terrible things done at the roadblocks, this story is one which negates the very possibility of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. If [the military] does not put these soldiers on trial we will have no moral right to speak of ourselves as a state that rose from the Holocaust," he wrote. "If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible. Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps."

Just so we are clear on this: the soldiers should be prosecuted not because they humiliated Palestinians or because they made Palestinians suffer, but because they harmed the memories of the Holocaust. Abuse of Arabs is not an offense to be prosecuted, but diminishing the memories of Jewish suffering is.

That's sick. There's just no other way I can put it. Suggesting that "humanity" might be "flickering" in Israel is a dangerous move considering the way the Nazis dehumanized the Jews, but that's how this story was titled over at Unfogged and I have trouble disagreeing with the choice:

My unprovable suspicion is that Israel maintained its humanity longer than other nations might have done in similar circumstances, but it's no use pretending that it maintains it still.

As bad as the mistreatment of the Palestinians is, it is arguable that those like Kaniuk who excuse and justify it are doing something even worse because they are making the abuses possible. They are communicating the message that current Arab suffering isn't as important as past Jewish suffering and this dehumanizes Palestinians in a manner that no just Jewish state should ever even contemplate, much less engage in.

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