This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.

I first met Paula Abrams at the “Republikanischer Klub,” a club founded in 1986 by Austrian intellectuals to fight the antisemitic campaign of Kurt Waldheim, who became president of Austria.

Paula Abrams was born in 1940 to Jewish parents in Cleveland, Ohio. She studied dance and music in Toronto, New York and Salzburg. She worked for many years at the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) in Vienna and could not, therefore, have any illusions about antisemitism in Austria.

She found out that combating antisemitism in Austria is not a very popular pastime. But if you demonstrate in the center of Vienna against Israel, many antisemites from the right, the center and the left will praise you as a “good Jew.”

Paula Abrams married a Palestinian writer and founded, in 2001, the Vienna chapter of the protest group Women in Black. She is also member of the executive of European Jews for a Just Peace in the Middle East, which declares as follows: “As Jews we will not make the same mistake which we have often blamed others for, silence about crimes against humanity. On the eve of 9 November, the monstrous November Pogrom of 1938, we state loudly and clearly that the State of Israel, with these acts, is desecrating the name and reputation of Jews everywhere.”

By using this kind of language, they compare the state of Israel to the German and Austrian National-Socialist “Volksgemeinschaft.” No wonder that these very small groups enjoy great popularity in Germany and Austria: they express what so many people like to hear, that the Jews of Israel are no better than the Nazis.

On January 4, the Vienna daily “Kurier” published a two page interview with Abrams in which she vowed to protest in front of the Israeli Embassy in Vienna against IDF “war crimes.” Conny Bischofberger, the journalist who interviewed her, was impressed with the good coffee her husband Fayssal Hourani prepared in the kitchen.

Here the main part of the interview:

How come that you as a Jewish woman do not take a stand for Israel?

I am accused of this very often, that I am influenced by my husband, who is a Palestinian. But already before I met Fayssal, I distanced myself more and more from Israel. The more I’ve traveled to the occupied territories and have seen the crimes of the Israeli armed forces - killings, massacres, destruction - so much more was I sure never again to take Israel’s side.

But the other side is also killing - 10,300 rockets were fired by Hamas since 2001 on Israeli border towns.

That is right and I won’t defend Hamas in any case. But one can absolutely not compare the handicraft rockets with the high tech weapons of Israel, a nuclear power . Besides what is expected from people who are since many decades enclosed in an open-air prison, in a ghetto, surrounded by high-security and walls, from where there is no escape.

Israel is justifying its action with the argument, that it has to defend its inhabitants from the suicide-assassins and rockets of the Palestinians.

Israel is trying to justify this in order to hush up its crimes against humanity. Concerning the acts of despair of Palestinians, the dependence on Israel makes them simply furious, because Israel decides if water, electricity, food and medication are allowed into Gaza. Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” This fits also the situation in the Gaza Strip.

Do you understand those Israelis who nevertheless want their state to remain Jewish?

You can’t speak about that with most Israelis. Here the Holocaust is always mentioned. But democracy should be more important than religion. I am afraid that what is happening in Gaza will make antisemitism stronger in the world and will ultimately endanger world peace. Because of that, more and more Jews demand sanctions and boycotts against Israel. One does not hear these voices enough. And there are no reports on that.

Have you no fear as a Jewess to voice those reproaches against Israel so openly?

No, this is the luxury of old age, that I can say everything I am convinced of.

Are you disappointed in your president, Barack Obama, who until now has not gave his view about this tragedy in the Middle East?

He is not my president! My president is Heinz Fischer, I am since last year an Austrian. I cannot thinkmuch about Barack Obama, except that he gave his very first speech to the Israeli lobby.

What do you mean by that?

That Israel could not engage in its brutal action without the superpower America backing it. The real tragedy is that the European Union also follows this line, just like many Arab states which depend on the USA.

In the past, have criticized the Austrian Women in Black as an organization delivering “arguments” to the antisemites in Austria. I have accused them of not caring a fig about the human rights of Palestinians and of being interested only in making propaganda against Israel. They confirmed my doubts by declaring: “It is not our task - and it cannot be ours quite simply - to criticise the problems of the Palestinian and Muslim society, as for instance the status of the women or the question of ‘mixed marriages’ with Jews. [I wrote about the many cases of muslim women murdered because they were suspected to have relations with Jews or Christians, and about the Sharia forbidding muslim women to marry a Jew or a Christian - KP.] After all religious Jews and Catholics - to put it mildly - don’t approve of marriages with people of a different religion. Therefore we leave sociological analysis to others, above all to the Palestinians themselves.”

However, examples of Jewish or Catholic women murdered because of such marriage are practically non-existent. In addition, such marriages are not forbidden by the allegedly racist Israeli legal system. Why should this be any different for Muslims?