It' very difficult for a Jew born
after World War II into a non-Orthodox milieu to imagine what
Judaism might be like had the Holocaust never happened, especially
before the turn toward ritual now taking place even among American
Reform Jews. But to do so is an academic exercise. For Israelis,
on the other hand, it may soon become a matter of life and death
to try to imagine Israel without the Holocaust. For an assault
on Israel's legitimacy is about to be launched, not by Holocaust-deniers,
but by Holocaust-asserters.
In what I call the "myth of the myth of the Holocaust,"
there are two groups of people. One are people of good will, like
England's David Caesarani and Chicago's Peter Novick, who sincerely,
if puzzlingly (because without evidence) believe that the world
paid no attention to the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period.
Ignoring the wealth of evidence to the contrary, these people
are guilty of no more than taking a childish pleasure in claiming
responsibility for a recovery of memory --- a memory that in fact
was never lost.
However there is a more sinister variant of Holocaust-myth mythmakers.
And these are people who believe that the (mythical) recovery
of the memory of the Holocaust is part of a sinister geopolitical
plot, orchestrated by Israel and World Jewry, to legitimize Israel's
victory in the 1967 war, and the actions later forced upon her
by the Arab belligerent's refusal to make peace with
Israel.
Novick and Ceasarani are making the same absurd argument: that
the world, and the Jewish community, paid no attention to the
memory of the holocaust before Israel's 1967 victory. But they
are merely silly and tendentious - and they represent the past.
Here is the future: Norman Finkelstein of NYU, as described in
the London Evening Standard (a newspaper with a mild but distinctly
anti-Zionist - but not anti-Semitic - views):
QUOTE: The Holocaust, [Finkelstein] argues, was barely mentioned
in America, or anywhere outside the Jewish State, for the first
two decades after the war, when memories were freshest. "I
do not remember the Nazi Holocaust ever intruding on my childhood.
The main reason for this was that no one outside my family seemed
to care about what happened," he says.
QUOTE: It was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 that the Holocaust
"industry" began to boom. "I sometimes think that
the worst thing that ever happened to the Nazi Holocaust was that
American Jewry discovered it."
QUOTE: The Holocaust was "reinvented" mainly to underpin
US strategic interests. Israel became America's surrogate in the
Middle-East and the Holocaust was used to justify the alliance
and, later, Israel's policy towards its Arab neighbours. The Holocaust
has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Through
its deployment, one of the world's most formidable powers, with
a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a 'victim
state' and the most influential 'ethnic group' in the US has likewise
acquired victim status." END QUOTE
This is a new thing. Finkelstein will be citing the mistaken beliefs
of those who feel that the Holocaust has been ignored or suppressed
- in order outrageously to attack the legitimacy of the Jewish
state! I think that this is the real danger about the Holocaust.
Not from cranks like David Irving, who deny that such an obvious
thing ever happened. But from scholars who argue two things: First,
that Israel's existence was merely a reaction to the sufferings
of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe - an understandable but fundamentally
unfair consequence of someone else's sin. This is a line often
taken by Arab intellectuals and governments.
Secondly, that the 'suppression' of the Holocaust was followed
by its promotion - at the moment when Israel was (by defending
its right to exist) becoming a power just as evil as the other
Western Imperialist states.
We can see both strains at play in the casual remark of a frightening
but not unappealing or wicked man, the "Post-Zionist"
Israeli political scientist Tom Segev. Segev, who wishes that
Israel could just, like, become a modern, Western secular state.
In that spirit he wrote approvingly earlier this year
that "more Israelis than ever before live today for the sake
of life itself, very much in the spirit of the American "now"
culture." Here, just as oblivious to the dangers facing Israel,
quoted by Herb Keinan in the Jerusalem Post, he takes issue with
a Yoram Hazony, a talented critic of trendy Israeli "post-Zionism":
QUOTE Segev says that not only did Hazony fail to convince him
that Israelis have ceased to believe in the justice of their cause,
but that the romantic notion of Israelis believing in themselves
fully in the "good old Ben-Gurion" days is not based
in reality. "Then, the immigrants came here not because they
wanted to, but rather as refugees - from the Holocaust or from
Arab countries. Most of them did not necessarily feel the justice
of the cause."
QUOTE Segev also takes issue with Hazony's argument that Israel
is becoming progressively less Jewish. "This country is all
the time becoming more and more Jewish," he argues. "Hundreds
of thousands of Jewish students go to Auschwitz all the time.
END
QUOTE Both points Segev makes are important and symptomatic. He
assumes automatically that the parents of modern Israelis were
fleeing from something rather than seeking something, a fact which
must call into question the justice of the Zionist cause. He also
assumes, without thinking, that because thousands of students
study the Holocaust (or at least go on a cool field trip to Auschwitz)
that one need not worry about the degree of "Jewishness"
of post-Zionist Israelis. These points are so obvious to him that
he needn't
justify them to his interviewer. But blindly to assume that either
notion is true poses a danger to the security of the Jewish state.
Israel would have existed had there not been a Holocaust. It would
have been populated by Zionists. And it would have been bitterly
opposed. And a strong IDF, with defensible borders for Israel,
will do more for the survival of Israel's Jews than hundreds of
thousands of trips to Auschwitz.
Israel must watch out. Finkelstein's arguments about the exploitation
of the Holocaust are far too convenient for far too many enemies
of Israel's legitimacy to be ignored. And Finkelstein is no Holocaust-denier-indeed,
many of the points he makes about the tastelessness and overexploitation
of the Holocaust (he himself is a child of survivors) are sympathetic
to me.
But his arguments are deployed as part of an outdated view of
the West as the cat's-paw of a great Imperialist force - a view
which will reduce Israel to an unselfconfident and indefensible
rump state. (Many argue that Barak's current "peace"
policy is to bring this mythical state of affairs into sad actuality!)
The ritual of welcome to Israel, in which Pope, or King, or President,
or Basketball Player, is solemnly ushered through Vad Yashem,
may become something that Zionists will come to regret. Let me
say it clearly: despite the arguments of Finkelstein and Segev,
it would have been far better for Israel and the Jewish people
had the Holocaust never taken place.
=======================
JWR contributor Sam Schulman is deputy editor of Taki's Top
Drawer, appearing in New York Press, and was formerly publisher
of Wigwag and a professor of English at Boston University.
++++++++++++++++++
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/sam/schulman.html
Sam Shulman <[email protected]>
Jewish World Review <[email protected]> 25
July, 2000
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