Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  I understood that the editorial, speaking of the cost of the establishment of Israel—not of any particular policies—implied that Israel’s very right to exist is somehow still at issue. (One cannot imagine something similar being formulated about, say, Russia, in response to its battle with Chechen rebels, however much The Guardian might have disagreed with that country’s policies.) And this reminded me inevitably of the situation of the Jews in 1940s Europe, where simply to be was an unpardonable crime.

  I had somehow believed that the Jewish Question, which so obsessed both Jews and anti-Semites in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had been solved—most horribly by Hitler’s “final solution,” most hopefully by Zionism. But more and more I feel Jews being turned into a question mark once again. How is it, the world still asks—about Israel, about Jews, about me—that you are still here? I have always known that much of the world wanted Jews simply to disappear, but there are degrees of knowledge, and after September 11 my imagination seems more terribly able to imagine a world of rhetoric fulfilled.

  There are five million Jews in Israel and eight million more Jews in the rest of the world. There are one billion Muslims. How has it happened that Israel and “world Jewry,” along with the United States, is the enemy of so many of them? To be singled out inside a singled-out country is doubly disconcerting. There are a lot of reasons why modernizing, secularizing, globalizing America, whose every decision has universal impact, would disturb large swaths of the world; we are, after all, a superpower. Surely it is stranger that Jews, by their mere presence in the world, would unleash such hysteria.

  And yet what I kept hearing in those first days in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center is that it was our support of Israel that had somehow brought this devastation down on us. It was a kind of respectable variant of the belief that the Mossad had literally blown up the World Trade Center. It could of course be parried—after all, the turning point in Osama bin Laden’s hatred of the United States came during the Gulf war, when American troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia. But it had a lingering effect; it was hard to avoid a certain feeling that there was something almost magical about Israel that made it toxic for friends and foes alike.

  This feeling will not go away, if only because our support of that nation makes it harder to maintain our coalition. Israel has somehow become an obstacle to war and an obstacle to peace simultaneously.

  Lately, of course, bin Laden has added treatment of Palestinians to his list of grievances, and this may revive the sense that Israel bears some measure of responsibility. Large lies can be constructed out of smaller truths. The occupation of the West Bank by Israel, though it grew out of a war Israel did not want, has been a nightmare for the Palestinians and a disaster for Israel morally, politically, and spiritually. It is a peculiar misery to feel this way and to feel, at the same time, that the situation has become a weapon in the war against Israel. Bin Laden would not want a Palestinian state on the West Bank, because he could not abide a Jewish state alongside it.

  Neither could many of our allies in the Muslim world, who keep euphemistically suggesting that if only the “Mideast crisis” were resolved, terrorism would diminish. It has a plausible veneer—and indeed, it would be an extraordinary achievement if the Palestinians got a homeland and Israel got safe borders. But since most of the players in the Middle East do not accept the existence of Israel, since “solving the Mideast crisis” would for them entail a modern version of Hitler’s final solution, the phrase takes on weird and even sinister overtones when it is blandly employed by well-intentioned governments calling for a speedy solution. And this Orwellian transformation of language is one of the most exasperating and disorienting aspects of the campaign against Israel. It has turned the word “peace” into a euphemism for war.

  I grew up in a post-Holocaust world. For all the grim weight of that burden, and for all its echoing emptiness, there was a weird sort of safety in it too. After all, the worst thing had already happened—everything else was aftermath. In the wake of the Holocaust, American anti-Semitism dissipated, the church expunged old calumnies. The horror had been sufficient to shock even countries like the Soviet Union into supporting a newly declared Jewish state. Israel after 1967 was a powerful nation—besieged, but secure. American Jews were safe as houses.

  I am not writing this essay to predict some inevitable calamity but to identify a change of mood. To say aloud that European anti-Semitism, which made the Holocaust possible, is still shaping the way Jews are perceived; Arab anti-Israel propaganda has joined hands with it and found a home in the embattled Muslim world. Something terrible has been born. What happened on September 11 is proof, as if we needed it, that people who threaten evil intend evil. This comes with the dawning awareness that weapons of mass destruction did not vanish with the Soviet Union; the knowledge that in fact they may pose a greater threat of actually being used in this century, if only in a limited fashion, is sinking in only now.

  That a solution to one century’s Jewish problem has become another century’s Jewish problem is a cruel paradox. This tragedy has intensified to such a degree that friends, supporters of Israel, have wondered aloud to me if the time has come to acknowledge that the Israeli experiment has failed, that there is something in the enterprise itself that doomed it. This is the thinking of despair. I suppose one could wonder as much about America in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, since many American values will now be challenged and since, in fighting a war, you always become a little like your enemy, if only in accepting the need to kill. I grew up at a time when sex education was considered essential but what might be called war education, what a country must do to survive, was looked upon with a kind of prudish horror. I suppose that will now change. In any event, Israel has been at war for fifty years. Without that context, clear judgment is impossible, especially by those accustomed to the Holocaust notion that Jews in war are nothing but helpless victims—a standard that can make images to the contrary seem aberrant.

  I have a different way of looking at the Israeli experiment than my friends who wonder about its failure. It is connected to how I look at the fate of European Jewry. When the Jews of Europe were murdered in the Holocaust, one might have concluded that European Judaism failed—to defend itself, to anticipate evil, to make itself acceptable to the world around it, to pack up and leave. But one could also conclude in a deeper way that Christian Europe failed—to accept the existence of Jews in their midst, and it has been marked ever since, and will be for all time, with this blot on its culture. Israel is a test of its neighbors as much as its neighbors are a test for Israel. If the Israeli experiment fails, then Islam will have failed, and so will the Christian culture that plays a shaping role in that part of the region.

  I am fearful of sounding as though I believe that the Holocaust is going to replay itself in some simplified fashion—that my childhood fantasy for my father is true for me, and it is I who am straining to hear Hitler’s voice break over the radio. I do not. Israel has a potent, modern army. But so does the United States, and it has proved vulnerable to attack, raising other fears. The United States spans a continent, and its survival is not in doubt. But experts who warn us about American vulnerability refer to areas the size of entire states that will become contaminated if a nuclear reactor is struck by a plane. Israel is smaller than New Jersey.

  I am aware that an obsession with the Holocaust is seen as somehow unbecoming and, when speaking of modern politics, viewed almost as a matter of bad taste if not bad history. I do not wish to elide Israel’s political flaws by invoking the Holocaust. But that very reluctance has been exploited and perverted in a way that makes me disregard it. “Six million Jews died?” the mufti of Jerusalem, a Palestinian Authority appointee, remarked last year. “Let us desist from this fairy tale exploited by Israel to buy international solidarity.” (The utterance is particularly egregious because the mufti’s predecessor paid an admiring visit to Hitler in 1941.) The dem
onizing language that is used about Israel in some of the European press, and about Jews in the Arab press, is reminiscent of Europe in the 1930s. I grew up thinking I was living in the post-Holocaust world and find it sounds more and more like a pre-Holocaust world as well.

  Ten years ago, I interviewed Saul Bellow in Chicago and in the course of the interview asked him if there was anything he regretted. He told me that he now felt, looking back on his career, that he had not been sufficiently mindful of the Holocaust. This surprised me because one of his novels, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, is actually about a Holocaust survivor. But Bellow recalled writing The Adventures of Augie March—the grand freewheeling novel that made his reputation—in Paris in the late 1940s. Holocaust survivors were everywhere, Bellow told me, and, as a Yiddish speaker, he had access to the terrible truths they harbored. But, as Bellow put it, he was not in the mood to listen. “I wanted my American seven-layer cake,” he told me. He did not wish to burden his writing at that early moment in his career with the encumbering weight of Jewish history. Augie March begins, exuberantly, “I am an American.”

  I, too, want my American seven-layer cake, even if the cake has collapsed a little in recent weeks. There is no pleasure in feeling reclaimed by the awfulness of history and in feeling myself at odds with the large universalist temper of our society. Thinking about it makes me feel old, exhausted, and angry.

  In the Second World War, American Jews muted their separate Jewish concerns for the good of the larger struggle to liberate Europe. I understand the psychological urge to feel in sync with American aims. But Israel sticks out in this crisis as European Jewry stuck out in World War II, forcing a secondary level of Jewish consciousness, particularly because the anti-Zionism of the Arab world has adopted the generalized anti-Semitism of the European world.

  The danger to America, which has already befallen us, and the danger to Israel, which so far remains primarily rhetorical, are, of course, connected. And though it is false to imagine that if Israel did not exist America would not have its enemies, people making the link are intuiting something beyond the simple fact that both are Western democracies.

  In Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery, Bernard Lewis points out that after Christians reconquered Spain from the Muslims in the fifteenth century, they decided to expel the Jews before the Muslims. The reason for this, Lewis explains, is that although the Jews had no army and posed far less of a political threat than the Muslims, they posed a far greater theological challenge. This is because Jews believed that adherents of other faiths could find their own path to God. Christianity and Islam, which cast unbelievers as infidels, did not share this essential religious relativism. The rabbinic interpretation of monotheism, which in seeing all human beings as created in God’s image recognized their inherent equality, may well contain the seeds of the very democratic principles that the terrorists of September 11 found so intolerable.

  Is it any wonder that in the minds of the terrorists and their fundamentalist defenders, Americans and Jews have an unholy alliance? Expressing my separate Jewish concerns does not put me at odds with our pluralistic society—it puts me in tune with it, since it is here of all places that I am free to express all my identities—American, Jewish, Zionist. And if Jews kicked out of Spain clung, at peril of death, to a religion with such an ultimately inclusive faith in the redeemable nature of humanity, who am I to reject that view? Perhaps the optimistic American half of my inheritance isn’t at odds with the darker Jewish component after all. In this regard, the double consciousness that has burdened my response to our new war need not feel like a division. On the contrary, it redoubles my patriotism and steels me for the struggle ahead.

  PAUL BERMAN

  Something’s Changed Bigotry in Print. Crowds Chant Murder

  I.

  FEARS THAT ONLY YESTERDAY seemed absurd or silly begin to seem reasonable and more than reasonable. Thoughts that might have seemed inconceivable even two months ago become not just conceivable but spoken out loud. Crowds chant utter wildness on the street. In this way, the clouds grow blacker before our eyes. Very small clouds, you may say. Still, the transformation takes place at stupendous speed. Not everyone notices. The failure to notice constitutes a small black cloud in itself.

  In Washington last month, a crowd of demonstrators gathered to celebrate the modern protest rituals of the antiglobalization movement. Only, this time, the radical opposition to globalization turned into radical opposition to Israel. A portion of the crowd chanted “Martyrs, not murderers.” I suppose that many of the individuals in that part of the crowd would have explained that, in mouthing their m’s, they intended only to promote the cause of Palestinian rights, which is surely a worthy cause. But their chant was not about Palestinian rights. It was about mass murder.

  I doubt that the streets of Washington have ever seen such an obscene public spectacle, at least not since the days of public slave auctions, before the Civil War. Three months ago, I imagine, the demonstrators themselves would never have dreamed of shouting such a slogan. I don’t want to suggest that everyone at the anti-globalization demonstration shared those sentiments. But everyone at the anti-globalization demonstration willy-nilly ended up shoulder to shoulder with people who did feel that way. Anti-globalization protests have never been like that before.

  That same month, in New York, the annual Socialist Scholars Conference assembled at the East Village’s venerable Cooper Union, where Abraham Lincoln gave one of his most famous speeches. The Socialist Scholars Conference is an annual meeting of a few thousand people, most of them intellectuals of some sort. The conference has always resembled an ideological bazaar, with every ridiculous left-wing sect selling its sacred texts, side by side with sober European social democrats and American liberals.

  But this year a novelist from Egypt sat on one of the panels and stated her approval of the suicide bombers. To be sure, most people at the Socialist Scholars Conference would condemn random mass murders. But there is nothing new in condemning mass murder. This year, the new event was that someone supported it, and the rest of the participants, the rank and file Socialist Scholars, sat in comradely assemblage as the argument was advanced, and someone even spoke out in the panelist’s defense. The newness in this event has to be remarked.

  II.

  I could cite a dozen other instances where, in the last few weeks, someone in a city like New York or Washington, London or Paris, has argued or chanted in favor of mass murder— someone who has never done such a thing in the past, in settings that have never heard such arguments before, or at least not in many years. What can explain the sudden development? It is a consequence, of course, of the Israeli incursion into the West Bank—or, rather, a consequence of how the Israeli incursion has been interpreted by an immense number of people all over the world.

  One of the most prominent of those interpretations has looked on the incursion as Nazism in action, which is to say, as an event of extreme and absolute evil, requiring the most extreme and absolute counter-measures. In the last few months, Israel itself has been routinely compared to Nazi Germany, and Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler. Exactly why large numbers of people would arrive at such a comparison is not immediately obvious. In its half-century of existence, Israel has committed its share of serious crimes and even a few massacres (though not lately, as it turns out). But the instances of Israeli military frenzy or criminal indiscipline are not especially numerous, given how often Israel has had to fight.

  There has never been a hint of an extermination camp, nor anything that could be compared in grisliness with any number of actions by the governments of Syria, Iraq, Serbia, and so forth around the world. Israel’s wars have created refugees, to be sure; but Nazism’s specialty was precisely not to create refugees. If Israel nonetheless resembles Nazi Germany, the resemblance must owe, instead, to some other factor, to some essence of the Israeli nation, regardless of the statistics of death and displacement.

 
The notorious old United Nations resolution (voted up in 1975 and repealed in 1991) about Zionism and racism hinted at such an essence by saying, in effect, that Israel’s national doctrine, Zionism, was a doctrine of racial hatred. But why would anyone suppose that, like Nazi Germany, Israel has been built on a platform of hatred? The founding theorists of Zionism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not escape the prevailing doctrines of their own time, but their theories were chiefly theories of Jewish national revival and self-defense. They were not theories about the inferiority or hatefulness of anyone else, not even Judaism’s worst enemies of the past, the Christian churches of Europe. Why, then, the accusation about hateful essences and Zionist doctrine? This is something that is very rarely explained.

  In these last weeks, though, one of the world’s most celebrated writers did stand up to discuss the hateful essence and its nature. The writer was José Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1998. Saramago was part of an international group of writers who traveled to Ramallah to observe the Israeli siege of Yasser Arafat’s compound. And, having observed the situation, Saramago came up with the same comparison as Breyten Breytenbach and any number of other people, lately. (It is fairly amazing how many otherwise serious writers have ended up choosing the same tiny set of images to apply to the Jewish state.) The situation at Ramallah, in Saramago’s estimation, was “a crime comparable to Auschwitz.” To the Israeli journalist who asked where the gas chambers were, Saramago gave his much-quoted reply, “Not yet here.” But he also explained himself more seriously and at length in the April 21 issue of El País, a Madrid newspaper read and respected all over the Spanish-speaking world.