DIFFERENTIATION.

Imagine this. The year is 1995, and you are a 72-year-old British RAF Veteran, sitting in your lounge room. Your grandkids are lying on their stomachs on the floor, chins resting on the heels of their cupped hands, watching television. In a glass frame, sitting on the mantlepiece is a young man in an RAF Uniform. His head is crowned with a cap. That man was you.

A documentary commences about the bombing of Dresden. This was an event in which you took part. 20,000 feet above the city, you were in a Lancaster bomber, and you heard your navigator call out, “Left-left,” and you guided the plane that way, and shortly afterwards, the bomb aimer said, “Bombs gone,” and you tuned around to begin the equally hazardous flight home. You knew that people sheltering in bunkers were melted and the phosphorus that was later dropped contributed to this. They were mainly women and children. You knew, at the time, that you were only obeying orders, but you mellowed, and you realised that not all Germans were Nazis, but they had to be silent, and that not all Nazis were German, either. You saw black-booted thugs with shaved heads and swastika emblazoned jackets too young to have been born at the time of the Dresden raid.

You can differentiate between Germans who opposed the war and committed Nazis, and you wonder what might have become of those who died in those shelters after the war, had they not died.

My Year Five Teacher was born in Germany during the Second World War, and she was somewhat like Heinrich Himmler (no, she wasn’t a murderess). She would become upset about cruelty to animals yet could be devoid of compassion towards us kids. I remember her blasting a boy for not doing his homework and cut him little slack when she learnt that it wasn’t because he was lazy, but because his mother was dangerously ill, and he was upset.

One person I had the misfortune of dealing with was called a Nazi, even though they weren’t even born at the time, and the story seems to change. If a high school kid called a kid who emigrated as a toddler a Nazi, you would hope that a teacher would say, “Look, there were plenty of Germans who joined the Army either because they had to or they were starving, and it was a way to get three meals a day,” but for a kindergarten kid to call another kid a Nazi should have had the teacher take the kid aside and say, “How do you know what a Nazi is?” is explain that it wasn’t necessary.

The main victims of the Nazis were Jews, and just like the Nazis didn’t differentiate between the financiers and the average Jews, the Israeli Zionist leaders are equating a desire for a ceasefire in the Middle East and criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. There are Jews who deplore Zionism. I sympathise with the innocent civilians who are dying, and oppose Zionism, but I am not anti-Semitic. Okay, I don’t find Seinfeld funny, but that doesn’t make me anti-Semitic, either. I have Jewish friends. I can differentiate between Jews and Zionists. I can differentiate between Germans and Nazis. I can differentiate between trumpists and Americans.