[(Continued from p.3)]
sentation of the conflict, a dangerous manipulation that feeds the hatred and the anti-Semitism.
Tobiass: Our remarks add up to an indictment of the European media.
Pilar Rahola: What I want is to launch an appeal to the collective European way of thinking, and especially to the intellectuals and journalists, because, from my point of view, they are in the process of creating a collective reality that is Judeophobic. Today one must prove oneself to be on the left; it is necessary to be anti-Semitic to have credibility. Things have reached the point where, for instance, Sharon is always guilty, while Arafat is seen as an honest figure, innocent, a tireless old resistance fighter, a heroic figure, a kind of Gandhiin brief, a person gussied up in romantic finery, when in reality he is head of an oligarchy that has so much blood on its hands.
Israel is not (just) a country that is trying, for better or worse, to survive for fifty years, but it is reduced to one sole image: a country that occupies the territories and whose vocation is to make life miserable for the poor Palestinians. The history of the Holy Land is being reinvented. Everything takes place as if there were instructions: Never recall the faults and errors of the Palestinians, never recall their alliances with dangerous countries such as Iraq, in order to heap more shame on the United States and Israel. The profound reasons for this war are never made clear, never discussed.
Tobiass: There is a comment in your text that sent shivers down my spine. You say that Judeophobia is, in the final analysis, the common denominator between Europe and the Palestinians.
Pilar Rahola: It's true that there are in Europe non-Jews who are sensitive and respect the Jewish soul, which is also part of the foundation of Europe, but they constitute a minority. The majority, the unconscious European collective, does not understand, does not absorb, nor accept, the Jewish phenomenon. And it is there that the essential meeting point between the European and the Palestinian takes place. Palestinian identity is not just a recent phenomenon, but it is, above all, built on hatred of Israel, hatred of the Jews.
If the Palestinians renounced their hatred of the Jews, they would at the same time lose a significant part of their identity. To get beyond this violence, they would have to get beyond the hatred and thus change their identity. In other words, they would have to reinvent themselves. It is on the basis of this hatred that the Palestinian meets and agrees with the European. Often, this takes place with people of the left, which is a veritable calamity for people like myself, as we are of the left. We are Europeans, but we do not accept Judeophobia, just as we do not accept the anti-Zionism that justifies and nourishes the anti-Semitism of the Spanish left today.
I believe that if the left has failed as a great world ideology, it is because the left did not succeed in breaking with the worst of its dogmatic thinking. The left can be very progressive, but it can also be very dogmatic. Unfortunately, the left became infatuated with such infamous dictators as Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin, and now it is in love with Arafat. The left should be critical, and in the first place, self-critical.
Marc Tobiass: And what is the dogma that worries you the most today?
Pilar Rahola: The most absurd thing is to watch leaders of the left today greet and celebrate Arab leaders, even when they are fundamentalists. For example, in the debates that followed the attacks of September 11, we heard an anti-American discourse here, pooh-poohing the victims, something which is in and of itself terrible! And there were those who tried to downgradewith that tawdry third-worldism which characterizes some circles of the leftthe danger embodied in individuals like Bin Laden, who is, in fact, an authentic fascist.
I believe that for the moment the world remains blind to the biggest totalitarianism of the twenty-first century, which is Islamic fundamentalism. Now we must prepare ourselves seriously to face this danger: For me, this totalitarianism is without any shadow of a doubt comparable to Stalinism and Nazism, the biggest scourges of the twentieth century.
I find it shameful that in Italy there should be a procession of individuals dressed as suicide bombers who spew vile abuse at Israel, hold up photographs of Israeli leaders on whose foreheads they have drawn the swastika, incite people to hate the Jews. And who, in order to see Jews once again in the extermination camps, in the gas chambers, in the ovens of Dachau and Mauthausen and Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, etc., would sell their own mother to a harem.
I find it shameful that the Catholic Church should permit a bishop, one with lodgings in the Vatican no less, a saintly man who was found in Jerusalem with an arsenal of arms and explosives hidden in the secret compartments of his sacred Mercedes, to participate in that procession and plant himself in front of a microphone to thank,
[(Continued on p.5)]
Outpost - 4 - January 2003