Oxfam et les "chambres à gaz" israéliennes

Oxfam et les archétypes
antisémites, dans cette affiche
le thème du Juif et du sang

C'est un épisode peu connu de la propagande anti-israélienne de l'ONG européenne Oxfam que rapporte le site Harry's Place. Brian W. Walker, ancien directeur général d'Oxfam, écrivit en 1977 une lettre à une ministre britannique dans laquelle il portait de nombreuses accusations contre Israël, notamment: "La politique suivie par Israël [envers les Palestiniens] n'est en aucun sens differente de celle de l'utilisation des chambres à gaz par les nazis - car vivre dans des conditions de mort pour un "vivant", à bien des égards, est pire que la mort elle-même."   Il est instructif de lire la lettre en entier ICI. James Vaughan souligne que, lorsqu'Oxfam compare les politiques menées par Israël en Cisjordanie aux méthodes d'extermination industrielle utilisées par les nazis pendant l'Holocauste et que l'ONG introduit cette comparaison dans le cadre d'une tentative pour influencer un ministre britannique, Oxfam va bien au-delà de tout ce qui pourrait être qualifié de critique responsable. L'ONG propose également de tromper les autorités israéliennes...  Belle mentalité!

James Vaughan @ Harry's Place (From the archives: Oxfam and the Israeli “gas chambers”)

Oxfam has recently been embroiled in the Israel-Palestinian conflict; the result of a minor political storm surrounding Scarlett Johansson’s involvement with the Israeli-owned company, [...]

A less well-known episode, but one that reveals much about the evolution of Oxfam’s attitudes towards Israel, occurred in October 1977. Oxfam’s then director-general Brian W. Walker had just returned from a visit to Jordan and Israel. His observations in the West Bank prompted him to write to Judith Hart, the Minister for Overseas Development in James Callaghan’s Labour Government. His letter contained a number of remarkable suggestions, not least of which was that Oxfam would be happy to assist a British minister to “travel incognito” into Israeli occupied territory via Jordan.

By far the most disturbing aspect of Walker’s letter, however, was the allegation that Israeli policies in relation to West Bank water resources amounted to a crime against the Palestinian people that could be compared to the Holocaust.  “The policy being followed by Israel,” Walker declared, “is in no real sense different from the use of the gas chambers by the Nazis – for a ‘living’ death is, in many respects, worse than death itself.”


It becomes wearisome continually to have to state the obvious fact that it is perfectly possible to engage in responsible criticism of Israeli policies without the need to deploy historically illiterate and, to put it mildly, deeply insensitive analogies. Oxfam’s comparison of Israeli policies on the West Bank to the industrial extermination methods used by the Nazis during the Holocaust, and its introduction of this comparison as part of an attempt to influence a British Cabinet minister, went far beyond anything that might be called responsible criticism.


“We do not serve the past by misdescribing it,” Howard Jacobson once wrote, “Turn every abomination into a whatever-takes-your-fancy-holocaust, and there never really was one. Little by little, the thing itself is washed away.”