The Occupation Industry

Israelinurse
CiF Watch
15 February '10

When I first came to Britain in late 2006, aside from the practical reasons for our being here, one other thing I was rather hoping to get from our stay was a little respite from the tumult of the Middle East. A few months previously we had spent over four weeks under constant attack from Hizbollah rockets and prior to that of course there had been the traumatic years of the Second Intifada. I was looking forward to a ‘time out’ from being a target of aggression simply because I am Israeli, and there was in my mind no reason to think that I could not achieve that in the small, quiet English market town in which we had come to live, where the biggest crises seemed to relate to the local council’s tardiness about collecting the recycling.

It took about six weeks before I encountered my first ever meeting with antisemitism – a verbally abusive PSC campaigner blocking the exit from the supermarket – and I must confess that I was so shocked by this totally unexpected experience that I had no idea how to deal with it. What I did understand however was that just like back home, I had been a target of aggression simply because of what I am.

Reading Yoav Shamir’s recent CiF article last month I could not help finding some of his statements very problematic precisely because I know exactly how insignificant a role antisemitism plays in day to day Israeli life. Because one does not experience it personally, even when hearing about an attack on Jews in France or reading an article about pre-war Germany, it is still very difficult to relate to it on a deep personal level. Until, of course, out of the blue, it happens to you too. But according to Yoav Shamir, we have only ourselves to blame. “[b]ut she is a reminder of the vicious cycle that Zionism became caught in – the state that was supposed to be a cure for what antisemitism started, as both Foxman and Finkelstein are actually saying, has ended up generating antisemitism.”

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