Monday, September 12, 2005
The Boston Globe's coverage is interesting. The Arab burning of the synagogues comes off as something that just sort of happened as Palestinian Arabs celebrate. Imagine if those had been mosques. Never mind the Muslim reaction, do you think the Western press wouldn't have been all over it with judgement and scorn? You bet they would be.
Not that Israeli authorities don't have their own measure of responsibility. They should have removed the synagogues with the worshippers. The system failed in that regard.
Nevertheless, the vision of burning synagogues and the ho-hum reaction of the press is instructive.
Boston Globe: Palestinians assume control of Gaza Strip
At dawn, cars waved on by smiling Palestinian policemen sped down a road that the Israeli Army had blocked for five years, to the former settlement of Netzarim. There, a woman loaded scrap metal from a demolished Israeli guard tower onto a donkey cart while Palestinian police in blue camouflage lounged under trees. Nearby, black-masked Islamic Jihad militants and teenagers on bicycles surveyed the smoking rubble as a bulldozer tore into the pillars of a domed synagogue which had been burned overnight.
''I'm happy," said Fares Wahaidi, 56, whose house stands yards from the gap in the barbed-wire fence leading to the settlement. ''I didn't sleep all night."
''Today is the day of liberation," said Ehab al-Baz, 21, a supporter of the Islamic militant group Hamas who lives in the neighboring refugee camp of Nusseirat. ''We must make a new Gaza, a free Gaza, an Islamic Gaza."...
I'd say they're off to a rather typical start in that regard.
As if we all didn't see that coming.
The reaction that this is OK or not important displays contempt for the Palestinians not to hold them to normal standards of behavior that apply to everyone else.
It's sort of like saying . . . oh, well they don't know any better.
That seems to me to be exactly right -- the subtle racism of lowered expectations.
Pictures.
Even anti-Semites can find good uses for handsome synagogue buildings after they drive the Jews out. There is a large nursing school in Poland, housed in a former yeshiva. They give lectures in the hall that served as the yeshiva synagogue. Old synagogues make good lecture halls. And there are several Catholic Churches in Spain housed in former synagogues, Santa Maria del Blanco in Toledo is the most beautiful. The Spaniards hated the Jews, too. But they didn't tear down the synagogues, they turned them into churches.
The most awful part is that his destructiveness is the characteristic Palestinian response: violence.
There is a lot of hot air coming from Mahmoud Abbas about building a Palestinian future. But here the people of Gaza were handed a dozen large, handsome buildings. Buildings that could have been lecture halls for high schools, turned into mosques for new neighborhoods, even used as movie theatres. (There is a cinema in Naplio in Greece housed in a former mosque - the Greeks hated their Ottoman oppressors, but they didn't tear the old mosques down, they recycled them.)
So, what really worries me is the inability of the Palestinians to take anything that resembles a positive action. Give them a resource, a handsome assembly hall, almost new, clean, good condition, and what do they do with it? They torch it.
That is a great point.
The government's decision not to demolish the synagogues came at the last minute, and was a big surprise to everyone - including many of the ostensibly secular Jews who suddenly felt that they just couldn't do this. Perhaps it was a delayed release of the pent-up emotions surrounding the expulsion itself. The minister of defense, former general Shaul Mofaz, got visibly choked up when discussing this.
The rabbis who spearheaded the appeal against the synagogue demolishings were primarily concerned with Jewish communities and relics in the diaspora. The images of the Jews themselves tearing down synagogues would be all many non-Jews needed to justify their own desecrations/confiscations of Jewish holy places.
According to Jewish law, the building itself has no sanctity when it ceases to function as a synagogue. There is no desanctification ceremony as there is in Christianity - once the Torah scrolls, books, and mezuzahs are removed, it is no longer a holy place.
I agree with the previous poster - these buildings would have made great community centers, etc. Only one building has distinctively Jewish architecture. The mindless violence of the Palis is in evidence.
Why would anyone be surprised by this? The world community always emits a collective yawn whenever something like this happens. However, should a Koran ever approach a bathroom, look out!