Jewish Leftists greatest Loss-- Their moral compass

I found the following article extremely offensive, and have a hard time understanding the though processes of its author.
I am fully inserting it here, with my comments in italics and red. You can find the original at(http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/israel-s-greatest-loss-its-moral-imagination-1.295600)

Israel’s Greatest Loss: Its Moral Imagination

Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a former Senior Fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations and, before that, was national director of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994.

If a people who so recently experienced such unspeakable inhumanities cannot understand the injustice and suffering its territorial ambitions are inflicting, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Following Israel’s bloody interdiction of the Gaza Flotilla, I called a life-long friend in Israel to inquire about the mood of the country. My friend, an intellectual and a kind and generous man, has nevertheless long sided with Israeli hardliners. Still, I was entirely unprepared for his response. He told me—in a voice trembling with emotion—that the world’s outpouring of condemnation of Israel is reminiscent of the dark period of the Hitler era.

He told me most everyone in Israel felt that way, with the exception of Meretz, a small Israeli pro-peace party. “But for all practical purposes,” he said, “they are Arabs.”

Like me, my friend personally experienced those dark Hitler years, having lived under Nazi occupation, as did so many of Israel’s Jewish citizens. I was therefore stunned by the analogy. He went on to say that the so-called human rights activists on the Turkish ship were in fact terrorists and thugs paid to assault Israeli authorities to provoke an incident that would discredit the Jewish state. The evidence for this, he said, is that many of these activists were found by Israeli authorities to have on them ten thousand dollars, “exactly the same amount!” he exclaimed.

When I managed to get over the shock of that exchange, it struck me that the invocation of the Hitler era was actually a frighteningly apt and searing analogy, although not the one my friend intended. A million and a half civilians have been forced to live in an open-air prison in inhuman conditions for over three years now, but unlike the Hitler years, they are not Jews but Palestinians. Their jailers, incredibly, are survivors of the Holocaust, or their descendants. Of course, the inmates of Gaza are not destined for gas chambers, as the Jews were, but they have been reduced to a debased and hopeless existence.

What was the shock? Where was the indignation at the cold blooded planning to create an international incident, to cause Jews to kill "civilians" to gain political and strategic advantage over Israel?
Where was the horror at Turkey's complicity with IHH, or even a mention of that complicity?

Fully 80% of Gaza’s population lives on the edge of malnutrition, depending on international charities for their daily nourishment. According to the UN and World Health authorities, Gaza’s children suffer from dramatically increased morbidity that will affect and shorten the lives of many of them. This obscenity is a consequence of a deliberate and carefully calculated Israeli policy aimed at de-developing Gaza by destroying not only its economy but its physical and social infrastructure while sealing it hermitically from the outside world.

Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas. Unless you are advocating the overthrow of that regime by Israel through force and violence, they are in control of the population that elected and supported them. When they stop firing missiles, return the soldier they captured, and accept the agreements made with the PLO before them, then we can talk about being humanitarian.
To hold a population captive, and accuse your enemies of starving and abusing your population has gotten a bit old.

I don't know of any deliberate plan such as the one you describe. It is a pile of lies, and does not have any foundations in fact. Tell me where this plan is. How you arrived at this conclusion? How you support it?

Particularly appalling is that this policy has been the source of amusement for some Israeli leaders, who according to Israeli press reports have jokingly described it as “putting Palestinians on a diet.” That, too, is reminiscent of the Hitler years, when Jewish suffering amused the Nazis.

What are these press reports. If they really exists, they are reprehensible, but I have not seen them in Yidiot or in my searches through the internet. Again why not source the accusations you are spewing?

Another feature of that dark era were absurd conspiracies attributed to the Jews by otherwise intelligent and cultured Germans. Sadly, even smart Jews are not immune to that disease. Is it really conceivable that Turkish activists who were supposedly paid ten thousand dollars each would bring that money with them on board the ship knowing they would be taken into custody by Israeli authorities?

What conspiracies are you talking about, you have the disease! In Freud's famous phrase. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a conspiracy, actually exists, and to ignore it is delusional. It is totally conceivable that Turkish activists were paid, and paid only after they were on the ship. That they were convinced they would "repel" the Israeli's sail into Gaza, and provide the money to their families, friends or the Hamas Regime. It seems you cannot conceive of terrorist winning a battle against the Israelis, and this conceit of superiority leads you to your conclusions.

That intelligent and moral people, whether German or Israeli, can convince themselves of such absurdities (a disease that also afflicts much of the Arab world) is the enigma that goes to the heart of the mystery of how even the most civilized societies can so quickly shed their most cherished values and regress to the most primitive impulses toward the Other, without even being aware they have done so. It must surely have something to do with a deliberate repression of the moral imagination that enables people to identify with the Other’s plight. Pirkey Avot, a collection of ethical admonitions that is part of the Talmud, urges: “Do not judge your fellow man until you are able to imagine standing in his place.”

If we want to help the common human condition, are we obliged to remove the Hamas regime before they terrorize and enslave their people further? Were we suppose to overthrow the African regimes that killed millions before they completed the tasks? How about Iran before they build an atomic bomb? How about Germany before they killed 6,000,000 Jews?
Or are we to stay with our hands folded, allow murderers to flourish, and only respond when they fill ready to attack us? The second row maximizes casualties, and ensures our destruction. In WWII that approach resulted in over 60,000,000 deaths, overwhelmingly civilians.

Of course, even the most objectionable Israeli policies do not begin to compare with Hitler’s Germany. But the essential moral issues are the same. How would Jews have reacted to their tormentors had they been consigned to the kind of existence Israel has imposed on Gaza’s population? Would they not have seen human rights activists prepared to risk their lives to call their plight to the world’s attention as heroic, even if they had beaten up commandos trying to prevent their effort? Did Jews admire British commandos who boarded and diverted ships carrying illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the aftermath of World War II, as most Israelis now admire Israel’s naval commandos?

Israel did not "impose" anything on the Gaza population. If Hamas lives in peace with Israel that will be reciprocated. Israel should never have left Gaza, only by remaining in actual control could it be "kind" to that population.

Who would have believed that an Israeli government and its Jewish citizens would seek to demonize and shut down Israeli human rights organizations for their lack of “patriotism,” and dismiss fellow Jews who criticized the assault on the Gaza Flotilla as “Arabs,” pregnant with all the hateful connotations that word has acquired in Israel, not unlike Germans who branded fellow citizens who spoke up for Jews as “Juden”? The German White Rose activists, mostly students from the University of Munich, who dared to condemn the German persecution of the Jews (well before the concentration camp exterminations began) were also considered “traitors” by their fellow Germans, who did not mourn the beheading of these activists by the Gestapo.

What Israeli human rights organization has been shut down? If some exasperated citizens what to do this, its called Free Speech. Are you opposed to that when it disagrees with you?

So, yes, there is reason for Israelis, and for Jews generally, to think long and hard about the dark Hitler era at this particular time. For the significance of the Gaza Flotilla incident lies not in the questions raised about violations of international law on the high seas, or even about “who assaulted who” first on the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, but in the larger questions raised about our common human condition by Israel’s occupation policies and its devastation of Gaza’s civilian population.

Agreed! We must remove government which threaten us and oppress their population, and establish a more humanitarian rule in Gaza!

If a people who so recently experienced on its own flesh such unspeakable inhumanities cannot muster the moral imagination to understand the injustice and suffering its territorial ambitions—and even its legitimate security concerns—are inflicting on another people, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Again, I don't know what you are talking about! Israel left Gaza, not conquered it! They fire missiles at Israel's civilian population not the other way around. They hold Israeli soldiers without access to the Red Cross! In what Universe do you live?