When a mental patient justifies his most flagrant activities
by the fact that someone else rejects them, you know this patient is
dangerously paranoid, and past the point of recuperation. You get a sense of
this when you try to follow the logic of Daniel Schwammenthal the way he
expresses it in the article he wrote under title: “Scarlett Johansson, War
Criminal?” and the subtitle: “SodaStream is a model of cross-cultural
collaboration.” It was published in the Wall Street Journal on February 7,
2014.
Having an idea already that the article takes up the subject
of an Israeli company operating in the occupied territory of Palestine Israel
as committing war crimes is to call the actress a war criminal.
He then asserts that: “In a sane world, Israeli company
SodaStream would be a poster child for corporate responsibility.” And he tells
why. He says that the factory employs both Israelis and Palestinians where:
“All workers receive equal pay, which in the case of the Palestinians is
several times the average salary they would normally make.” And there it is.
There is the revelation that stirs your bile. It is that he says the
Palestinians who work for Israelis make more money than they would otherwise,
which prompts you to ask a pertinent question.
The question is this: why is that? The answer is that Palestine is under
Israeli occupation. And this happens to be the reason why Israel is
viewed as committing war crimes. Thus, it comes to light that the point of
contention has nothing to do with Scarlett Johansson per se or even SodaStream;
it has to do with the fact that neither the actress nor the company would be
there, doing what they do were it not for the Israeli army that is occupying
the land, allowing among other things, the continued building of Jewish settlements
there, acts recognized under international law to be war crimes.
And what does the author of the article do after that? He
repeats the argument considered by normal human beings to be an invitation to
gas and incinerate the Jews. Here it is: “No matter that the factory is in a
location that would most likely remain Israeli in a future peace agreement.”
What he says here is that because there is a chance the Palestinians will trade
the location on which the factory stands for another peace of land, why wait
for the negotiations to happen or wait to see what the Palestinians will get in
return. Transfer the land to Israel
now, get it over with, and negotiate later if this will ever happen. To which
the world has already said that – by the same token – because this mentality
has always sent the Jews to the gas chamber and the incinerator, why wait for a
crazy guy to come along and do it, let's see the Jews do it to themselves now
and get it over with. We'll even build a holocaust memorial later … or maybe
not.
But what does he do to justify this mentality? What he does
is simple; he pulls the same old tricks. He accuses the Palestinians of
inciting each other against the Jewish state. This being an old refrain, the
Israelis were once asked to show the proof, and they did. They showed a couple
of Palestinians complaining about the checkpoints that make life difficult for
them – one example being a woman on her way to hospital being retained at a
checkpoint where she delivered the baby on the street. Most of the time,
however, it turns out that the Jews don't even have a proof to show. Instead,
they continue to throw accusations as easily as they breathe because they
believe that someone out there is listening to them.
And when they want to go beyond accusing the Palestinians of
what they are not, and wish to damn them even more strongly, the Jews paint a
fictitious portrait of them. What they say about the Palestinians is that they
are bad people whereas the Jews are good people. And so, Schwammenthal demands
that pressure be applied on the Palestinians to accept a negotiated deal
because absent such pressure the evil Palestinians will feel they have carte
blanche to break up the peace talks over those settlements.