Entfernung and “occupation”

The magic word occupation has several roles in the lexicon of this century.

The first one is that, for Europeans, “fighting occupation” justifies any crime -horrendous as it might be.

If there is “occupation” around, nothing else has to be said. Just blame the Jew for everything.

Since for the average European anything Israeli can be linked to “occupation,” at no case Israel would be the victim of anything.

Even when Jewish children are killed and the murderer brags about his crime, it will always be explained as the result of the despair to which the occupied people were pushed. Needless to say, for the Europeans there is only one occupation on Earth, and only one people under despair.

“Occupation” is the most useful word to ascribe blame in all circumstances but, alas, most people have no idea of what it really means, since the vast majority of Palestinians aren’t governed by Israel.

This confusion is exactly what Israel’s enemies want, as it already happened one century ago.

Nazi Judeophobia was unprecedented. It was so radical and uncompromising that it couldn’t appeal to the Germans. It needed a semantic smoke curtain to conceal its true aims.

Most Germans (and Europeans in general) did share antipathy for the Jews, and were willing to solve the nonexistent “Jewish problem,” but most of them did not wish to engage in mass murder as the Nazis eventually did.

Therefore it was necessary to coin a less brutal wording to convey the Nazi message at the level of hatred that people did already harbor.

They began using two ambiguous terms: first removal of the Jews (Entfernung) which not necessarily implies mass murder, and then elimination (Ausschaltung) that could be understood as a metaphor.

Thus worded, Judeophobia did not sound excessive but undistinguishable from the terminology endorsed by the majority of the population.

When at the first stage Hitler spoke of removal, it had a clear meaning for him and other Nazi ringleaders since the 1920s, yet for his fellow Germans it could also refer to “diminishing Jewish influence.”

The ambiguity was seldom exposed, as in the brutal SA song:  “When my knife spills Jewish blood, everything is twice as good” (which today sounds as usual Palestinian incitement.)

One of the most chilling documents of WW2 exemplifies the choice of the appropriate vocabulary. During the Posen speech, delivered in Poland on October 4, 1943 at a closed meeting of the SS officers, Himmler explicitly referred to the extermination of the Jews, demanding from his subordinates the loyalty they had displayed in other atrocities. “This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and not it will never be,” he said. “I want to openly refer to a very difficult subject, the evacuation… extermination (Ausrottung) of the Jewish people.”

Interestingly enough, before uttering the word extermination, Himmler hesitates “Aus… schaltung der Juden, Ausrottung, machen wir” (“elimination of the Jews –extermination, is what we are doing.”)

He was double-checking whether among his crowd there would be objections to the second, straightforward term.

One year before Goebbels had hesitated in reverse order. In his “Total War Speech” in Berlin he started with “Ausrottung des Judentums” (“extermination of Jewry”) and quickly replaced it with “Ausschaltung” (elimination) which could stand a less bloody interpretation.

Nowadays the enemies of Israel don’t use Nazi-Deutsch, but they resort to an equally oblique vocabulary to enable a gradual acceptance of their aim -the utter annihilation of the Jewish State.

The key word is occupation, which can make many people believe that the conflict is about some thousands of usurped square miles. Obviously, it is not the case.

What the ayatollahs say openly, the Arabs and Europeans hide under “occupation.”

Ausrottung was replaced by Entfernung in the past, and by “resistance to occupation” today.

Thus Germanic semantics remove all obstacles and allow the commission of atrocities, as long as they comply with the one and only European requirement: stick to “removing the occupation” instead of “exterminating Israel.” –which is still too  frank.