Those Who Forget the Past (4 page)

A columnist for an Islamist newspaper in a nation with which Israel is ostensibly at peace. A culture in which such a murderous excrescence is celebrated rather than despised. In which such a “dream” was—it was fairly clear—thinly disguised incitement to
real
Egyptian bodyguards to “realize the meaning of virility” and carry out the assassination Bakri “dreamed.”

What made it more disturbing was its metaphoric import: the Jewish state was in effect being asked by the international community to put its trust in the good faith, put its very fate in the hands of “bodyguards” such as this. By “trading land for peace,” as they were incessantly being urged to do, they'd be trading defensible borders and, in effect, giving themselves over to “bodyguards” who had not given up dreams like that. Making themselves, making their children's lives, hostage to the “bodyguard” of purported Islamist goodwill.
⁷

Again, Egypt was a land officially “at peace” with Israel. That's why the bodyguard murder-fantasy, that one paragraph in a six-thousand-word
New Yorker
report, touched such a nerve in those of us who had wanted to believe there was a simple, attainable, trustable,
reasonable
solution to the Middle East crisis. That's why it gave one—gave me—such a sense of hopelessness, a profound historical pessimism about the possibility of peace.

But as I said, something curious happened to Bakri's dream, to that single paragraph in its transmission to the world.

In preparing this volume I'd asked a researcher to fax me a copy of Goldberg's
New Yorker
article she had downloaded from the LexisNexis database, the source that most commentators, journalists, and essayists consult, the one that— in practical effect—defines, describes the contours of the public debate on any given issue, internationally.

As I read over the LexisNexis version of the Goldberg piece for the first time since it came out in
The New Yorker
of October 8, 2001, and came to the portion where Bakri's ugly dream is recounted, I was stunned. It wasn't there anymore. The text came to the place where Goldberg quoted from the dream— “in the column . . . he [Bakri] wrote:”—and after the colon, there was a space break and the text picked up: “Bakri offered me an orange soda. . . .” The existence of the murderous dream from beginning (“The pig landed”) to end (“I stepped on the pig's head . . .”) was erased.

I called both Goldberg and LexisNexis: neither was aware of the omission. The man at LexisNexis investigated and reported back that it appeared to be a technological glitch, not a deliberate political or ideological erasure. The dream passage was preserved on one
New Yorker
website version of the piece (not the “printer-friendly” one) but not on LexisNexis. The LexisNexis man said he believed that because the dream was printed in smaller type in
The New Yorker,
it may have dropped out in the scan that transferred it to the LexisNexis database. So it appears to be an inadvertent omission. Inadvertent, but emblematic of the way that dream of slaughter—and the widespread sentiment it spoke for—had dropped off the scan of discourse on the question.

When I wrote the first draft of this introduction, it had not been restored. Which allowed anyone reading the piece to avoid facing an unsavory truth. Now it's back again on LexisNexis; the murderous dream has been restored, although of course in reality it was never gone.

But the two versions of the Goldberg story, the one with and the one without the dream, represented two versions of the world—two ways of looking at the world, and looking away.

4) SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE

Those two ways of looking at the world: I suppose that's what I evoked—even if it wasn't what I set out to do—when I touched off a controversy by putting into print a phrase that some found transgressive, disturbing, and virtually taboo: “a second Holocaust.”

I had set out to write something about the revival of European anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. The kind of anti-Semitism that could feature a child wearing a mock “suicide-bomber” explosive bandolier in a “peace” march. And the emerging phenomenon of “Holocaust inversion,” as Melanie Phillips called it, the pernicious rhetorical device in which Nazi imagery is used to depict Jews. There was Tom Paulin's famous formulation “the Zionist SS”—merely the most egregious. Holocaust inversion took Holocaust denial one step further: the Jews were not victims, not even “fake” victims, as the deniers contended; the Jews were now portrayed as the perpetrators of the kinds of crimes that had been committed against them.

In any case, the fact that I uttered the phrase “second Holocaust” was, in truth, inadvertent, a Web-surfing happenstance. Safe in America, yet suffering with each new report of a “suicide bombing” in Israel, one morning I followed a link from the popular “InstaPundit” website to a site I'd never visited before, one operated by a Canadian political commentator, David Artemiw.

On that day, he happened to quote a deliberately shocking passage from a Philip Roth novel, the 1993 work called
OperationShylock
. It's a novel that is set mainly in Israel, in 1988, during the first Intifada, and begins with a comic doppelgänger premise that turns—lurches at times—into moments of terrifying seriousness. (And ends in, of all places, the back room of Barney Greengrass.) I don't want to anticipate the excerpt published herein. But in sum, the “real” Philip Roth hears that an impostor calling himself “Philip Roth” is ensconced in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem giving talks about an ideology he calls Diasporism.

This is the belief that exile, Diaspora, the historic dispersion of the Jews, had by that year become a better solution to the problem of Jewish survival than their dangerous “concentration,” so to speak, in the State of Israel. “The Diasporist” argues that the in-gathering to Israel, while it served a purpose in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, now threatens to lead to an unthinkable catastrophe. Unthinkable but not unspeakable. He speaks it. He calls the dread possibility “a second Holocaust.”

The phrase comes in the context of an argument he gets into with the “real” Philip Roth about the danger posed to the Jewish state, not merely from stone-throwing Palestinians but from powerful Islamic states that will someday—a day not too distant—have nuclear weapons. Indeed, Pakistan would soon have the first “Islamic bomb”; Iran was developing missiles with the range to deliver such bombs or hand them off to terrorists.

In fact, when I reread the “second-Holocaust” passage, which Roth wrote in 1992, it was hard not to think of the Iranian leader who (some ten years after Roth wrote the passage) was thinking about the same arithmetic as the Diasporist. In December 2001, Hashemi-Rafsanjani, former president of Iran, gave us an insight into the calculations of mass murder that were going on in certain quarters of the world. He gave a speech in which he estimated that in a nuclear exchange with the State of Israel, Iran might lose fifteen million people, but that would be a sacrifice of fifteen million out of a billion Muslims worldwide. And in return, the five million Jews of Israel would be no more. He seemed pleased with the possibility of such a trade-off (regardless of the cost to Palestinian and Israeli Arabs). Perhaps it was just bluster, but less than a year after that speech, Iran announced that it had missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv.
⁸

Perhaps that was just bluster as well; nonetheless, Rafsanjani was speaking casually of the elimination of the Jewish state and up to five million Jews. The language of extermination— of a second Holocaust—was not entirely new. Indeed, after I'd read and quoted the “second-Holocaust” passage, I recalled a conversation I'd had ten years ago in Jerusalem about the run-up to the Six-Day War with Emil Fackenheim, the late much-admired “theologian of the Holocaust.” Fackenheim was describing the apprehension of an existential threat he'd felt at the time of Purim, in April 1967, two months before the outbreak of the war. Purim is a holiday celebrating Jewish deliverance from slaughter, but (as I'd described it in
Explaining
Hitler
) with “Nasser about to blockade Israel's ports, a growing threat of a three-front attack to come, with the world indifferent if not hostile, it looked to Fackenheim as if a second Holocaust was in the works.”

“That was the crisis,” Fackenheim told me, “where I first put forward the 614th commandment,” as it has come to be known (an addition to the 613 rules of Jewish orthodoxy): “Jews are forbidden to grant posthumous victories to Hitler.” (In a sense, every postwar act of anti-Semitic violence or incitement—or indifference to them—can be considered a posthumous victory for Hitler.)

It was that crisis that prompted Fackenheim, an escapee from Hitler's Sachsenhausen concentration camp, to take an action quite the opposite from Roth's “Diasporist”: he left Canada, where he'd been living and teaching since the end of World War II, and went to live in imperiled Jerusalem. Nonetheless, what Fackenheim and the Diasporist (who advocated a reverse migration—the return of European Jews in Israel to their homelands) had in common was a willingness to face the possibility, to think about the unbearable and speak the unspeakable. Here's what Roth's Diasporist said—these are the lines from the novel which I found on David Artemiw's website and quoted in my
New York Observer
column:

The meanings of the Holocaust are for us to determine, but one thing is sure—its meaning will be no less tragic than it is now if there is a second Holocaust and the offspring of the European Jews who evacuated Europe for a seemingly safer haven [Israel] should meet collective annihilation in the Middle East. . . . But a second Holocaust could happen here all too easily, and, if the conflict between Arab and Jew escalates much longer, it will—
it must
. The destruction of Israel in a nuclear exchange is a possibility much less farfetched today than was the Holocaust itself fifty years ago.

“Much less farfetched.” Say what you will about the Diasporist's outrageous “solution” to this prospect. Is it in fact utterly “farfetched”
now
to say that a second Holocaust is possible? Not if you listen to the rhetoric in the mosques and media of the Middle East these days.

Reports of Hitler's Final Solution were, of course, considered “farfetched” at the time. Anyone who reads David S. Wyman and Rafael Medoff's heartbreaking book
A Race
Against Death,
about the efforts of a small group of Jews to alert the American government to the mass murder being planned and executed in Europe—and the incredulity, obstinacy, and yes, equanimity they found in response—will come to understand that the prospect of a genocide, even as it was happening and as escapees from the death camps were testifying to it, was dismissed as “farfetched,” as “atrocity stories,” as self-interested propaganda, ethnic special pleading.

As Bill Keller pointed out in a piece in
The New York Times
Magazine
(May 26, 2002) about the possibility of terrorist use of nuclear weapons, “The best reason for thinking it won't happen is that it hasn't happened yet, and that is terrible logic.” But when something has already happened once, in secrecy, and is now advocated openly, gleefully, it is less improbable that it will happen again. To let the words “second Holocaust” frighten away consideration of a worst-case scenario seems foolish, “terrible logic.” The best way to avoid the “worst case” is not to deny it but to study how to prevent it.

Yet the words seemed to be at the heart of the controversy. There were three kinds of reactions to my essay quoting Roth's “Diasporist.” Some found merit in my argument that one hidden source of resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe is the burden of guilt Europeans feel about their culture's widespread complicity with the Final Solution.

Another reaction, especially important to me, came from certain Holocaust survivors. Some wrote or called to express relief that someone had raised the issue. Somehow, having faced the abyss once, they tended to be the ones who were unafraid—or perhaps unsurprised—to face the possibility again. They would not look away.

But a more curious reaction was the purported shock and horror at uttering the words “second Holocaust” at all. Obviously I was not the first; nor, it turns out, was Roth. In Michael Oren's important book
Six Days of War,
he speaks, in a postscript interview, of his parents believing back in 1967 that “a second Holocaust was about to occur.” Every all-out war poses this threat to the people of Israel.
⁹
An existential threat, a “genocidal” threat (Yehuda Bauer's term), a “worst-case scenario”—again, the words are less important than the possibility they describe.

In some respects, I could understand the resistance to the phrase: it was akin to my reaction to the video of Daniel Pearl's murder. I didn't want to watch it. I suspect at some level I was angry not just at those who made it but at those here who made it available: it represented an ugly truth I preferred not to have to gaze at directly. In addition, peremptory rejection of a worst-case scenario gave those who did so the excuse of not having to consider the many less-than-worst-case scenarios— however horrific—and permitted a return to equanimity. (Another evasion was the false identification of Palestinian “suicide bombers,” rather than, say, Iranian and Pakistani nukes, as the source of the worst-case threat.)

“Second Holocaust.” It was almost as if some numinous taboo had been broken; it was as if it evoked a superstitious dread—that to speak of it was to bring it closer. (Of course silence hadn't done much good for the victims of Hitler's Holocaust.) It violated a comforting precept: that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. It suggests instead: first time tragedy, second time even
worse
tragedy. Or perhaps it was an aspect of the mystification of the Holocaust that removes it from history.