Those Who Forget the Past (24 page)
In Israel and in the United States, moreover, the Jews found not only safety, but also strength. The blandishments of pluralism in America have included the fierce and unembarrassed pursuit of Jewish interests, and so brilliantly that the American Jewish community has become the model for what an ethnic group can accomplish in such conditions of freedom. The blandishments of sovereignty in Israel have conspicuously included military power. Suicide bombs are sickening; but it is the Israelis who command an army and an air force, and also a nuclear arsenal. These instruments of warfare are themselves conclusions properly drawn from a severe history in which Jews lacked the means of self-reliance and self-defense. There is nothing vexing about the strength of the Jewish state, though there may be something vexing in the manner in which the Jewish state sometimes (but not often) exercises its strength. And military power has political purposes as well as military purposes. So Israel has adversaries, but Israel is stronger than its adversaries. That is why the real threat to Israel comes not from Jenin and Gaza, but from Baghdad and Tehran; not from booby-trapped casbahs, but from advanced missile technologies. But not even that threat, and it is grave, can be accurately compared to the plight of the Jews in Hitler's Europe. The comparison breaks down over more than the fact that this time the Jews have a spectacular deterrent. The Jews in the 1930s and 1940s were fighting, when they fought, for nothing more than a splendid death. They knew that the fight was futile, which makes their courage almost unbearable to contemplate. The Jews in Israel have no reason to believe that the fight is futile. And they are fighting for their home.
The fright of American Jewry is finally not very surprising, and not only because we are an “ever-dying people.” To a degree that is unprecedented in the history of the Jewish people, our experience is unlike the experience of our ancestors: not only our ancient ancestors, but also our recent ones. It is also unlike the experience of our brethren in the Middle East. Their experience of adversity in particular is increasingly unrecognizable to us. We do not any longer possess a natural knowledge of such pains and such pressures. In order to acquire such a knowledge, we rely more and more upon commemorationsâ so much so that we are transforming the Jewish culture of the United States into a largely commemorative culture. But the identifications that seem to be required of us by our commemorations are harder and harder for us to make. In our hearts, the continuities feel somewhat spurious. For we are the luckiest Jews who ever lived. We are even the spoiled brats of Jewish history. And so the disparity between the picture of Jewish life that has been bequeathed to us and the picture of Jewish life that is before our eyes casts us into an uneasy sensation of dissonance. One method for relieving the dissonance is to imagine a loudspeaker summoning the Jews to Times Square. In the absence of apocalypse, we turn to hysteria.
In America, moreover, ethnic panic has a certain plausibility and a certain prestige. It denotes a return to “realism” and to roots. A minority that has agreed to believe that its life has been transformed for the better, that has accepted the truth of progress, that has revised its expectation of the world, that has taken yes for an answer, is always anxious that it may have been tricked. For progress is a repudiation of the past. Yes feels a little like corruption, a little like treason, when you have been taught no. For this reason, every disappointment is a temptation to eschatological disappointment, to a loss of faith in the promise of what has actually been achieved. That is why wounded African Americans sometimes cry racism and wounded Jewish Americans sometimes cry anti-Semitism. Who were we kidding? Racism is still with us. Anti-Semitism is still with us. The disillusionment comes almost as a comfort. It is easier to believe that the world does not change than to believe that the world changes slowly. But this is a false lucidity. Racism is real and anti-Semitism is real, but racism is not the only cause of what happens to blacks and anti-Semitism is not the only cause of what happens to Jews. A normal existence is an existence with many causes. The bad is not always the worst. To prepare oneself for the bad without preparing oneself for the worst: This is the spiritual challenge of a liberal order.
The Jewish genius for worry has served the Jews well, but Hitler is dead. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is harsh and long, but it is theology (or politics) to insist that it is a conflict like no other, or that it is the end. The first requirement of security is to see clearly. The facts, the facts, the facts; and then the feelings. Arafat is small and mendacious, the political culture of the Palestinians is fevered and uncompromising, the regimes in Riyadh and Cairo and Baghdad pander to their populations with anti-Semitic and anti-American poisons, the American government is leaderless and inconstant; but Israel remembers direr days. Pessimism is an injustice that we do to ourselves. Nobody ever rescued themselves with despair. “An ever-dying people is an ever-living people,” Rawidowicz sagely remarked. “A nation always on the verge of ceasing to be is a nation that never ceases to be.” It is one of the lessons that we can learn from the last Jews who came before us.
RUTH R. WISSE
On Ignoring Anti-Semitism
"HITLER IS DEAD.” In April 1945, a headline containing those three words might have heralded the collapse of Nazi Germany and the beginning of the end of World War II. This past May, appearing on the cover of
The New Republic,
the same words ridiculed the “ethnic panic of the Jews.” In the lead essay, Leon Wieseltier, the magazine's literary editor, charged that American Jews, spooked by the history of Jewish persecution, were stoking unwarranted and apocalyptic fears by comparing the Arab war against Israel with Hitler's earlier war against the Jews. The first requirement of security, he advised his readers, was not to imagine the worst on the basis of historical precedent but to “see clearly” the situation of the present.
The article provoked a number of rebuttals, and also a number of strong defenses. In the words of the historian Tony Judt, one of its defenders, Wieseltier had “elegantly dissected those
frissons
of existential angst in which some in the American Jewish community are wont to indulge themselves.” Wieseltier's call for clarity is thus as good a starting point as any to ask whether we have made much progress since Hitler in understanding the political phenomenon that he represented.
Not that Hitler was by any means the first politician in Europe to fulminate against the Jews; but it is certainly true that no one before him had ever organized so radical a political platform. Still, during the years that he was consolidating his power, the majority of European Jews, unwilling or unable to fathom what his policy signified, or how it would be implemented, did not seem to fear him
sufficiently
. Rather than manifesting the kind of “ethnic panic” that Wieseltier ascribes to their American coreligionists today, they stand retrospectively accused by many historians of having minimized or ignored Hitler's menace until it was too late. Indeed, the same accusation has been extended to that generation's American Jews as well, who have been reproached for failing either to recognize the danger in time or to do what they could to help their beleaguered coreligionists.
We have, then, a variety of possibilities. It could be that the “panic” of today's Jews is an overcompensation for past negligence. It could be, contrarily, that the myopic Jews of the 1930s have finally been blessed with perfect vision, and that yesterday's Mister Magoo has become today's Ted Williams. Or it could simply be, as Wieseltier would have it, that Nazi antiSemitism is so different in kind from the Arab variety that what would have been a proper response in the former case is improper in the latter. Since Wieseltier's article calls into question “the new recognition of the
reality
of anti-Semitism” (emphasis added), it would help to establish whether there is, today, a major threat to the Jewish people.
The Arab war against Israel has been going on since before the Jewish state was established in 1948, but lately there have been significant changes in its scope, its nature, and the degree of international support it enjoys. Until fairly recently, Arab rulers who exerted despotic or autocratic control over their populations kept the lid on armed aggression issuing from their territory. Now, however, radical ideologies and terrorist tactics against Israeli Jews seem to be dominating Arab politics as never before, while in liberal and academic circles everywhere in the West, as well as in the chancelleries of Europe, blame for this state of affairs has fallen largely on the state of Israel itself.
The avant-garde of anti-Israel radicalism has long been the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the bastard offspring of the Arab world's insistence that the Palestinian people be kept demonstrably homeless as permanent evidence of Jewish culpability. The terrorist groups comprising the PLO, and their multiplying rivals, were given unique license by their fellow Arabs to intimidate, to extort, and to kill. Over time, they served their handlers superbly well, doing far greater harm to Israel than all the Arab military assaults combined.
Unlike the Germans who unleashed their war against the Jews under cover of a wider European conflict, the Arab nations, through the PLO, placed the destruction of Israel explicitly at the heart of their mission. The PLO's charter, a public document, defines the Jews as “not a people with an independent identity,” branding them as colonial occupiers of land that belongs eternally to the Palestinian people, and their state as an illegitimate “entity” that needs to be eliminated. On these grounds, the PLO not only claimed the moral right to kill Jews but turned their murder into a sacred cause. And this, as the historian Michael Oren has pointed out, does mark one difference between German and Arab anti-Semitism, albeit a difference suggesting that the Arab variety is worse:
For all the kudos discreetly given SS killers by the regime, Nazi Germany never publicly lionized them, never plastered their pictures on the streets, or openly encouraged children to emulate them. That kind of adoration for mass murderers can only be found, in abundance, among the Palestinians.
In the light of this adoration, indeed, it has become more and more difficult to maintain the distinction between antiSemitism and anti-Zionism, with the latter defined as “merely” a political-territorial objection to the state of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. Rather, contemporary anti-Zionism has absorbed all the stereotypes and foundational texts of fascist and Soviet anti-Semitism and applied them to the Middle East. Every stratum of Arab society, from top to bottom, has been nourished on the myth of Israel's illegitimacy, and has been encouraged to express its loyalties through aggressive hostility to the Jewish people and its land.
The dissemination of anti-Jewish propaganda by and within Arab and Muslim societies has lately been swifter than the spread of the Internet. As anyone can discover by punching in the relevant keywords in any major library system, Arabic translations of all the major works of European anti-Semitism have been supplemented by an immense new body of original literature defaming Israel and the Jews. As long ago as 1986, Bernard Lewis could write in
Commentary
that certain Arab countries were the only places in the world “where hard-core, Nazi-style anti-Semitism is publicly and officially endorsed and propagated.” Since then, Arab propagandists have been working hard to expand and revitalize the tradition. The sincerity and the steadfastness of this genocidal hostility, proliferating through the press, the visual media, literature, and the schools, are much greater in Arab lands than they ever were in pre-Hitler Europeâwhich had, after all, a contrary liberal tradition and at least the rudiments of a modern democratic culture. And now, thanks in part to Muslim immigrants, this same hostility has found its way back to the heartland of the very Europe where it originated.
Without citing all the other evidence that anti-Jewish politics is visibly on the rise in Europe, and even in scattered precincts in the United States,
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I would therefore suggest that, on the question of the threat itself, Wieseltier has things backward. So obvious is this threat that we should ask why the reality had to wait so
long
for its “new recognition.” But there is an answer to that question as well, and it leads directly to the real gravamen of Wieseltier's article.
Palestinian bombings inside Israel and political/diplomatic assaults against the state's right to exist escalated dramatically after September 2000, when Yasir Arafat, unleashing the very kind of violence that under the Oslo accords he had solemnly undertaken to quell, launched the second Palestinian
intifada
. The first
intifada,
between 1987 and 1993, had claimed 160 Israeli lives. The second killed more than three times as many in twenty months, with thousands of wounded as a result of the explosives that had replaced the knives and stones that were the earlier weapons of choice.
But it was not until a year after the terrorist outbreaks in Israel that the American media and a significant proportion of American Jewry began to air anxieties about anti-Semitism. The reason clearly had to do with an intervening event: namely, September 11. President Bush set a new tone for the nation when he spoke before Congress of “a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom.” Although the President drew no analogy between the unprovoked assault on America and escalating Arab attacks against Israeli Jews, it was then that many observers began to think harder about the correspondence between the two types of terror.
At a Washington rally for Israel in April of this year, said to be the largest pro-Israel gathering ever held in the United States, most speakers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, linked solidarity with Israel to America's war on terror. Representing the government of Israel, Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky saluted the President's determination to wage a global battle against a common enemy. William J. Bennett, who in the wake of 9/11 had founded an organization called Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, pointed to the Holocaust Museum just a few blocks away and said: “What we are seeing today, what Israel is feeling today, was not supposed to happen again.” Just as the attack on America had triggered memories of Pearl Harbor, the atrocities in Israel had begun to evoke the mass murders of European Jewry.
Drawing this analogy most insistently was the journalist and critic Ron Rosenbaum, who warned in
The New York Observer
of a possible “second Holocaust” at the hands of the Arabs should they ever get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. As for the origin of that ominous phrase, “second Holocaust,” Rosenbaum traced it back to Philip Roth's 1993 novel
Operation Shylock,
where a character opines that “Arafat's final solution is the same as Hitler's: extermination,” and then urges Israelis to seek safety in a Europe where (in the judgment of this same fictional character) memory of the Holocaust still acts as a bulwark against anti-Semitism.
Roth in 1993 was only toying with this incongruous idea. But Rosenbaum, ten years later, finds Roth's dark fantasy much too optimistic. Europe's own recent outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence persuade him that there is likely to be another attempt to destroy the Jewish people; the question for him is “not âwhether,' but
when
.”
This was the trigger that set off Wieseltier's tirade. He describes the emotional condition of American Jews in the following language:
The community is sunk in excitability, in the imagination of disaster. There is a loss of intellectual control. Death is at every Jewish door. Fear is wild. Reason is derailed. Anxiety is the supreme proof of authenticity. Imprecise and inflammatory analogies abound. Holocaust imagery is everywhere.
As it happens, however, none of the evidence Wieseltier adduces in support of this claim can compete with the claim itself for sheer “excitability.” Apart from the Washington rally, and a number of other initiatives to advocate Israel's cause and help the victims of terror there, American Jews have been going about their business as usual, manifesting no more visible panic than has been apparent among American citizens in general in the long months after 9/11. When Boston's Jewish Community Relations Council scheduled a rally last May to coincide with the day of Holocaust remembrance, it drew only about a thousand persons in a city of a quarter of a million Jews. The Jewish press has reported no protest suicides, no burning barricades, not even a canceled vacation.
What, then, explains Wieseltier's own overreaction? Primarily, his objection to any analogizing of European and Arab anti-Semitism would seem to rest less on issues of accuracy than on issues of political utility. In his analysis, invoking the Holocaust is a means of exaggerating the degree of hostility to Israel, and this in turn promotes and justifies a hard line against concessions to the Palestinians. The Nazi analogy, in short, denies the possibility of the “peace process.” As Wieseltier writes:
If you think that the Passover massacre [of twenty-eight Jews in Netanya] was like Kristallnacht [November 9, 1938, the night of multiple Nazi pogroms against the Jews of Germany], then you must also think that there cannot be a political solution to the conflict, and that the Palestinians have no legitimate rights or legitimate claims upon any part of the land, and that there must never be a Palestinian state, and that force is all that will ever avail Israel.
Is Wieseltier right about this? Have the Jews fallen victim to a self-fulfilling prophecy, missing the chance for reconciliation with today's Arabs by insisting on portraying them as yesterday's Nazis? After all, if it were possible to temper Arab hostility by, for example, withdrawing from the disputed territories and encouraging the creation of an Arab Palestinian state, might this not go a long way toward reaching the “peace” that Israel says it has been seeking for many long years? Would not a more forthcoming Jewish policy induce a more receptive Arab policy in turn?
The argument is, alas, all too familiar. It is exactly what produced the Oslo accords, which were designed to lead to the very settlement between Israelis and Palestinians that Wieseltier now envisions as if for the first time. In 1993, a mere nine years ago, the government of Israel invited Yasir Arafat back from exile and transferred administrative power over parts of the disputed territories to a newly appointed Palestinian Authority, expecting it to become the nucleus of an independent Arab state. At that time, the majority of American Jews, Wieseltier assertively among them, hailed the Oslo accords as the road to peace, and many actively lobbied Washington on behalf of the PLO.
The most revealing section of Wieseltier's narrative is thus the one that is missing. No one reading his words about ethnic panic would ever guess that American Jewish celebrants of the peace process had so recently danced the hora in honor of Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn. If there has indeed been a “loss of intellectual control,” it is not the one that Wieseltier attributes to today's nervous Jews but that earlier orgy of hope, based as it was on political calculations that had no proven models, and on trust in those who had least earned it.
