Dmitry Sidorov is a Russian (and Jewish, although the name is highly unlikely) journalist. With kind assistance of the Google translator and some nudges here and there, I have translated (meanwhile without permission) his article that appears here in Russian.
This is not a fact- based review of the Gaza war, neither is it a highbrow political discourse, just a cry of a soul, emotionally charged to the utmost degree. I rarely lean in that direction myself, but at certain moments (like today, reading all that highbrow crap in the media) this is just what the doctor prescribes. So enjoy.
January 7, 2009: Dmitry Sidorov
In this text, you will not find quotations from the Torah, archaeological examples or excerpts from the 1947 UN decision, confirming the right of my people to live and to enjoy their country and not to respond to invasions or missile attacks from its «good» neighbors.
I’m not going to ask you for help or sympathy, because there is no need, but even if there was, it wouldn’t be you who would be facing my requests. Moreover, I will not put up a list of names of young children, the elderly, women and children killed or injured as a result of terrorist activity in the 60 years of existence of Israel. I think that neither Israel nor I need it. We remember them, and this is the most important.
You shall no longer hear from me any criticism of EU, UN, Russia and other countries and the international organizations that demand an immediate Israeli cease-fire. Cease-fire, which will allow them to feel themselves “peacemakers”, and will allow a terrorist organization – Hamas and its sponsors to declare victory over the Israeli “aggressor” and to continue the killing of people living on the other side of the border.
Persistence of the governments of these states does not fill me with respect. Their political dirty dancing during past 60 years has shown that it is difficult to get more dirty, waltzing on the corpses of people who are ready to defend their country till the last breath.
I have to live with you, but not to share the bread or to shake hands. I am disgusted by your constant demands of a peaceful, diplomatic solution to the conflict with terrorist organizations, recognized as such by many countries, including those where you live. I am disgusted by your permanent false concern for the lives of innocent civilians in those areas from which rockets and bullets are flying, but the lack thereof in the case of people they kill or force into bomb shelters.
I have no desire to ask you any questions. I do not want even to drive you to the impasse of your centuries-old mentality that shows your kinship with the people who dream of throwing the Israelis into the sea. I know your thought patterns, your arguments and rhetoric, since you have enough intelligence to make them available to the public.
Do not expect that I will start digging through history in search of numerous peace agreements that Israel has signed and that the Palestinians subsequently violated. Do not expect me to mention the (literally) suicidal concessions that were forced on or voluntarily signed by various governments of Israel, trying to bring peace to their country.
I am not going to force you to explain why the armed forces of the country under the constant rocket fire (violating the terms of truce), should call the homes of terrorists, warning them of the upcoming attack. If you are excited by the peril to the civilian population of Gaza, then ask yourself why your parents or your grandmothers and grandfathers did not go to the streets in their thousands to protest against the bombing of Nazi Germany during World War II.
Probably because they were at that time sitting in bomb shelters, digging trenches, fighting and cursing Hitler and his associates, believing that any people are responsible for the Government which they elected and which they are assisting.
And I’ll tell you something else: it is very convenient to scream about a truce when it comes to a country that is in 60 years of war with terrorism, but not to insist on talks with Osama Bin-Laden or Al-Qaeda*.
Israel does not need you, even though your “progressive” views may cause a premature end of the operation in Gaza. It’s pointless to try to convince those who believe that some people have the right to kill with impunity, while others should be allowed only weak snapping back.
I think that, apart from extreme interest in the uninterrupted supply of oil or a possible rise of oil prices, most of you continue to treat us with an incredible disdain for many generations. Generations that, at best, considered us to be a necessary evil when it was profitable, and “dirty swine” when a next victim was required. If you believe that after all this we’ll listen to your bombastic speeches – the last few millennia did not teach you anything.
And the last. You persevere in denying that your peacemaking efforts, coupled with pressure on Israel, has brought Israel nothing but a large number of dead and wounded. Crediting yourself with ending the war on Hezbollah in 2006, you continue to ignore the increase in the supply of weapons to this terrorist organization by Iran and Syria.
Calling for a truce now, you know that you will not be able to control the “Philadelphi” Route via which Hamas receives its new missiles whose range has increased at least twice since the conclusion of the “truce” with Israel.
By insisting on a peaceful solution, you are actually offering Hamas to stop the killing of Israelis today, only to continue it in a week. That is why the fruit of your activity is so like the Chamberlain’s “umbrella”, victoriously raised in London after the conclusion of “peace” with Hitler in 1938. Criminally assured that he saved Europe and the world from the great war.
(*) I just couldn’t resist this: in fact, there are quite a few of the “stoppers” that insist on talking with Bin Laden, so it is actually worse than Mr. Sidorov thinks.
Cross-posted on SimplyJews.
Hear hear!
In a certain odd sense I have a smidgen of sympathy for some of the people to whom Sidorov refers, the people who, as he writes, have been conditioned in their response to Jews by thousands of years experience.
We all tend to cling to our worldviews and the world has had a view of Jews as passive. My mother was born in what is now Poland, then the Russian Empire, and once remarked that where she was born people saw Jews as “direct objects–someone you do something to.”
We can see this in the plaintive mourning of westerners who find Israel departing from the principled and moral lives Jews have led and who would love to support Israel if only it would return to such a high plane of conduct. Jews with actual power disturb them.
And for the Arabs I genuinely do have a little sympathy, if only for the cognitive dissonance that Israel produces, especially among a people whose culture does not admit a great deal of reflection or contrary information. Until western anti-semitism creeped in they tended to regard Jews less as tools of the devil and more as despised, downtrodden, passive.
Being defeated in wars by Jews and being defeated handily is a humiliation for Arabs that I think few westerners can understand. Defeat by the temporarily powerful west can be dealt with, but by Jews? That really is more than the culture can stand. I can understand–not condone or approve–but understand the Arabs’ inability even to consider seriously a true peace with Israel. A culture that willingly, even eagerly, sends its children off to their deaths is not one that is particularly amenable to the compromise and negotiation that brings real peace.
But I think the Israelis understand this and have decided that rather than accomodate themselves to this worldview they’d rather survive.
“Jews with actual power disturb them.”
As I’ve said before, there are an awful lot of people in the world who are made very nervous, even driven to hysteria, by armed Jews defending themselves against genocide, and I can only wonder why.