A University of Toronto student named Jennifer Peto recently achieved fame by submitting a thesis called:
“The victimhood of the powerful: White Jews, Zionism, and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education”
While only in academia could one maintain respectability after making the insidious argument that those who support Holocaust Education are guilty of racism, Peto’s broader narrative, that Jews have become a “privileged” class, (in some form or another) may be more widely accepted than you might originally think, needs to be taken seriously, and aggressively refuted.
The idea that Jews, who (65 years after the Holocaust) now represent a meager 2/10 of 1% of the world’s population, and have but one state to call their own, are now seen as “the powerful” in the diaspora, and the proverbial “Goliath” as a nation-state, is a narrative which shows the profound moral pathos which informs much of the anti-Zionist discourse coming from the activist left.
In this distortion the mere fact that Jews are relatively successful and more capable of defending (or at least advocating for) their own interests, both in the diaspora and in Israel, is, in itself, evidence that they’ve lost the mantle of victim and now represent something closer to an oppressor.
Of course, far from being an oppressor, Israel (as this blog continuously documents) has become merely the Jew writ large. That is, the same historical D’s – double standards, demonization, and delegitimization – employed against Jews throughout centuries of anti-Semitic oppression have now, in large measure, been transferred to the Jewish state, as she represents in the minds of many the Jewish collective.
Far from being privileged, Israel is held to standards that no other nation is held to – the definition of bigotry in its broadly understood term – and asked to live up to ideals that no nation in the world could uphold.
Not only aren’t Israelis privileged but something approaching the opposite is closer to the truth.
Here are the advantages (privileges) of waking up in the morning as a citizen of a nation other than Israel – the daily effects of non-Israeli privilege:
1. You can be sure that your country’s very right to exist won’t be questioned.
2. You don’t have your national aspirations characterized as inherently racist.
3. You can be sure that anger over your country’s actions won’t result in violent attacks against citizens (throughout the the world) who happen to share the majority ethnicity in your state.
4. Your nation’s democratically elected leaders won’t face arrest warrants when entering other countries.
5. Terrorist attacks against innocent civilians in your country won’t be described as mere “resistance”, or otherwise excused, by commentators in the mainstream media.
6. The United Nations won’t pass an egregiously disproportionate ratio of resolutions against your country condemning you for human rights abuses while ignoring far worse abuses by nations in the rest of the world.
7. Your nation won’t be subject to international calls for boycotts, sanctions, and divestment.
8. You can be sure that even when others criticize your country it won’t be compared to Nazi Germany.
9. When enemies committed to your state’s destruction fire missiles into your civilian territory, you can be positive the international community won’t condemn your nation for retaliating.
10. Your national passport won’t make you persona non grata in neighboring countries.
I’m sure I missed a few, so please feel free to comment on other ways non-Israelis are privileged.
