Cape Argus

Israel argument fails

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ZIYAAD Ibrahim Patel’s opinion piece refers. Volumes have been written and the greatest minds have debated, analysed, studied and sought to understand the antiSemiti­sm phenomenon. According to Patel there is a simple answer: the state of Israel and her policies.

But the state of Israel was establishe­d in 1948. Yet four to eight years prior to this, Hitler was marching Jews to the gas chambers. In fact, 6 000 000 of them.

The state of Israel also did not exist during the Spanish Inquisitio­n or during the Chmelnitzk­y massacres in Eastern Europe in 1648-49. There was no Israel when Jews were expelled from France, Spain or Portugal, or during the Kiev pogroms of 1919 when about 70 000 Jews were massacred. In the Middle East, long before the establishm­ent of the state of Israel, Jews were victims of innumerabl­e massacres: the Tiberius massacre of 1938, the Hebron massacre of 1929, the massacre in 1830 of the Jews of Tabriz and Baghdad.

I could go on and on. From antiquity to the present, Jews have been expelled from their countries of birth, beaten, tortured or murdered simply because they were Jewish. Jews have been hated because they were different, hated when they tried to fit in, hated as communists, hated as capitalist­s. Patel would do well to study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_ antisemiti­sm, detailing anti-Semitic acts from antiquity.

Today human rights advocates detest racism, and will avow that they could never be anti-Semites. To hate the Jew is today politicall­y incorrect, yet this hatred has not abated. As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks says, it has mutated into a hatred for the nation state of the Jewish people. People like Patel can hate the Jewish state, blame it for all evils and wish for its non-existence while still maintainin­g an aura of human rights.

But to deny the Jewish people their nation state – granted to every other people – or to hold one nation state to a higher standard than all others – is to single out Jewish people for different treatment. And that, Mr Patel, constitute­s pure, unadultera­ted anti-Semitism. MONESSA SHAPIRO Glenhazel

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