Those Who Forget the Past (5 page)

So unwillingness to contemplate an unbearable possibility was understandable, even if it led some to project that fear upon those who spoke of it. Whatever the cause, many found unusual versions of denial when reacting to it. While I have no wish to watch the dismemberment of Daniel Pearl's body, I don't try to deny that it
happened
to Daniel Pearl—or that it's possible something like it could happen again.

It is perhaps an interesting problem in scholastic or Talmudic logic: whether a second Holocaust would in any way be “worse” than Hitler's because of (for want of a better word) its secondness. It wouldn't make a difference to the victims of either one. But it might say something even more unspeakable than we knew, or were willing to admit, about human nature, just as we learned more than we wanted to know from the first one.

Interesting questions, but these weren't the questions raised. Still, I was surprised about the ways in which some chose to avoid the question entirely.

There was what I came to think of as the “displacement syndrome,” for instance. Some sought to avoid considering whether it could happen in the one place it was most likely to happen.

Clearly, in my
Observer
essay, I'd been speaking of the possible consequences of a nuclear exchange, or a nuclear terrorist attack, in the Middle East—on the State of Israel. But when asked to discuss the question on a talk show, I found myself assailed by a leftist critic of the Jewish state, who said I was mistaken to suggest the possibility of a second Holocaust in
Europe
. (After I corrected that rather disingenuous geographical displacement, he later proceeded to astonish me further by claiming that Europeans felt no guilt about complicity in the Holocaust. When I challenged him on
that
assertion, he replied that, well, some European nations, like Portugal, were not complicit. Thank God for the Portuguese!)

So that was the European displacement of the worst-case scenario. Then there was the American displacement. There was, for instance, the implication by a columnist at a New York paper that I was concerned that a second Holocaust might take place in
America
. In July 2002 he wrote a column calling essentially for
more equanimity
among American Jews. He cited some recent survey which showed that the rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the past year
in America
had been relatively small. He cited Leon Wieseltier's May 27, 2002,
New Republic
essay “Against Ethnic Panic: Hitler Is Dead.” So American Jews should stop fretting, the columnist lectured us, and not get all
concerned,
like that fellow in the
Observer
who, he left the impression, believed that we were in danger of a second Holocaust
in America
.

It was a variation on the displacement syndrome: displacing the locus of concern about a second Holocaust from Israel, where it might actually happen, to America, where there was no suggestion (not from me) that it would.

All of which allowed him to preserve
his
equanimity— which, stunningly, seemed to extend to the denial that the nuclear extermination of five million Jews would even
be
a Holocaust. I'm not making this up. After I read his column I called him up, since I'd had lunch with him once, in Jerusalem in fact. It turned out to be a strange conversation, one that revealed an even more desperate desire for equanimity than I could have inferred from his column. It was Holocaust displacement by means of redefinition.

When I questioned him about his characterization of my “second Holocaust” column and went over key passages, he conceded I wasn't suggesting the possibility of a mass murder in America, but in the Middle East, in Israel. But, he added, even if a nuclear weapon was detonated in Tel Aviv, wiping out most of Israel's five million Jews, it would be inaccurate to call this “a Holocaust.”

Huh?

That's right, a
true
Holocaust involved “rounding up people,” he maintained, the way the Germans did, before killing them. That was the key, he explained to me, the “rounding up.” A missile strike or terrorist-nuke scenario would not involve rounding up and therefore could not be called a “Holocaust” no matter how many million Jews it killed. He seemed almost touchingly fixated in an ingenuous way on the notion that the
essence
of a Holocaust was to be found in the “rounding-up” process, not the mass murder to follow. No rounding up, no Holocaust, apparently, no matter how many millions were deliberately murdered.

But isn't the point of a missile strike to kill the maximum number of people without the inconvenience of rounding them up? I asked him, a bit incredulous that he would be advancing this as somehow a consequential distinction.

No, he insisted, a missile strike that wiped out the Jews of Israel wouldn't be a Holocaust; it would be “an act of war.” How could he know? A handoff of a nuke to a terrorist group and its detonation wouldn't necessarily be an act of war. It would be an act of terrorism, of deliberate extermination. “Act of war” implies a
response,
at the very least mutual combat. But he was insisting that a nuclear strike on Israel could result only from “an act of war”—implying the mutual tragedy of combat. It was the moral relativism of those who use the phrase “cycle of violence.” He was in effect displacing the blame—or at least half of it—to the victims. In any case, it appeared he was more
comfortable
thinking of the death of five million Jews as coming from an “act of war” than from one of those old-fashioned “rounding-up” Holocausts. Equanimity at all costs—even at the cost of intelligibility.

Until that moment I hadn't realized just how frightening the very phrase “second Holocaust” could be. I'm tempted to say superstitious fear of these words was the real “ethnic panic.” I dwell on this because it occurred to me that this desperation to avoid conceding that another Holocaust, by any definition, was
ever
possible, even in Israel, was akin to pre–World War II equanimity and denial. The voice of those Jews who urged other Jews to be quiet about reports of death camps in Europe for fear of arousing anti-Semitism here. The mind-set that buried the reports from the death camps on page 12, as Deborah Lipstadt
¹⁰
has demonstrated. Don't be too “ethnic,” too ethnically conspicuous. Was the fear of ethnic panic really panic over ethnicity?

Perhaps accusing Jews of ethnic panic may have made the columnist feel more tough-minded, more steady-nerved than all those allegedly panicky Jews whose concerns he dismissed. But I was hearing echoes of the past: the voice of those Jews who were somewhat embarrassed about other Jews' speaking up on behalf of fellow Jews. The journalist Ben Hecht (co-author of
The Front Page
), who worked with Peter Bergson in the early forties to bring Hitler's Holocaust to the attention of the world, wrote bitterly about such behavior.
The New York
Times,
to its credit, apologized for not following up on the ominous reports.

Most cruelly—and wrongly—however, this “rounding-up” columnist made those who raised a voice of concern sound as if they were afraid for
themselves
here in America rather than concerned for families in Israel who had to worry when they saw their children go out for a pizza that they might not come back. (Was that ethnic panic?)
¹¹
His column implied that since American Jews had nothing to fear for
themselves
at this point, why should they get all upset on behalf of the fate of fellow Jews half a world away? (I'm alright, Jack.)

This was one of the earliest manifestations of a phenomenon I've come to think of as “Holocaust shame.” It begins with Holocaust inconsequentialism—one shouldn't mention the far, far distant past, in which Hitler murdered six million, in discussing the fate of the five million Jews of Israel. But the columnist— and others who take this line—goes on to try to shame those who
do
refer to the Holocaust for having done so.

Often, the word “shame” in one of its forms is used: as Tony Judt did in an October 23, 2003,
New York Review of Books
piece calling for the dissolution of the Jewish state. American Zionists, Mr. Judt wrote, have “shamefully” exploited the Holocaust in arguing that Israel should be a refuge for Jews.

Leon Wieseltier didn't use the word “shame” in his “Ethnic Panic” essay, but using the word “panic” (and the phrase “the fright of American Jewry” as well) was a similar attempt to shame those who believed the past should have admonitory consequences for the present.

I will let readers consider for themselves the differences between me and Wieseltier and between Wieseltier and Ruth R. Wisse on these questions. (I have refrained, out of fairness, from reprinting herein my own June 10, 2002, response to the Wieseltier essay, but those interested can find it on the
Observer
website, at http://observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=5949.)

Nonetheless, I've come to feel that “the second-Holocaust debate,” as it's been called, raised an important question: how much weight
should
be given to the Holocaust in influencing the policy of the Jewish state—and the world's opinion of that policy?

To some, no Hitler and Holocaust comparisons are allowed. It happened, but it shouldn't have any policy implications. Arab media could laud Hitler and the Holocaust (when they weren't trying to deny it happened), but Jews in Israel should not take it into account when deciding on measures of self-preservation.

And was it true that “Hitler is dead”? Not in Islamist media. Was the re-legitimization of Hitler by prominent voices in the Middle East something to be dismissed as merely trivial, then? Ruth Wisse makes the point that in certain crucial ways the hatred in the Middle East for Israel, for Jews, for the Jewish state, is far
worse
than the hatred that preceded and made possible Hitler's genocide.

For one thing, Hitler never advertised, never boasted about, and never celebrated his mass murder of Jews. He broadcast his
hatred,
but he did not broadcast the ongoing extermination process. In fact he took pains to distance himself from the death camps. To carry on the killing process in great secrecy and official denial. Hitler was, as I pointed out in my book, the first Holocaust denier.
¹²

But today in the Middle East, Hitler's mass murder of Jews is publicly celebrated by some, and a second mass murder openly sought by others. Today in the Middle East the murder of Jews by a “suicide bomber” is marked by parties for the families who receive blood-money bonuses for their child's hideous act. It is not just an individual act of fanaticism spurred by the false promise of paradise, it is a practice backed by an entire culture.

How much
should
the Holocaust be used as a rationale for a Jewish state's existence, for its attempts at self-defense? It would seem that self-defense by any people is a legitimate goal, whether they've had a Holocaust in the past or not.

But to ignore that particular past is, to say the least, difficult. Of course it is possible to make too much of the Holocaust in the sense of sacralizing and mystifying it. Making it an event beyond all comparison, Jonathan Rosen has suggested, removes it from history almost as effectively as the Holocaust deniers.
¹³
This may be the source of the misconception of those who believe no Hitler comparisons should be allowed; Hitler is dead, there will never come another one in the same category of evil as Hitler, and therefore we can learn no lessons, make no contemporary comparisons to Hitler and his Holocaust— they must inevitably be disproportionate with the graven image of evil some turn Hitler into. A mystifying inversion of worship.

But there
are
lessons to be learned from Hitler and the Holocaust. Some of them are just common sense. In the
Observer
essay that initiated the controversy, I cited the old proverb “Fool me once, your fault. Fool me twice, my fault.” In other words, Jews had been told to remain calm once before—not to “panic,” not to escape Germany, say, because Hitler was nothing new; Jews had lived through anti-Semitic regimes before. Jews in America were told by some of their fellow Jews not to make too much fuss about Jews in Europe in the years before (and during) the Final Solution. Not to make themselves conspicuously “ethnic” by expressing alarm. This turned out to be terribly wrong. (Fool me once, your fault.)

Today Jews are being told not to get alarmed, because “ethnic panic” will “undermine a political solution,” undermine the trust they are asked to place in the benign intent of regimes and societies that promote the spread of Hitlerian rhetoric and celebrate the massacre of Jewish children.

They're being told they must trust, otherwise they'll be called “unreasonable.” They're being asked (after making unprecedented negotiating concessions) to ignore subsequent years of mass murder of their children and look to the good faith of their “negotiating partners” to shift from subsidizing suicide killers of Jews to ensuring the safety of Jews. (Fool me twice, my fault.)

5) INTENT AND EFFECT

To return to the question of the weight of the Holocaust, I'd argue that in fact it has
not
been overemphasized. It may have been over-mystified, perhaps over-museumized, but its significance to our estimation of the dark potential of human nature and the merciless, unredemptive processes of history has only
begun
to be taken into account. As George Steiner put it in an interview for my Hitler book, the Holocaust “removed the reinsurance on human hope.” Tore away the safety net beneath which our estimates of human nature's lowest depths had not previously plunged.

I think this helps explain something else relatively new in what has been called the new anti-Semitism: the recent shift of anti-Semitism from Right to Left. The Left, for one thing, may have put its faith too blindly in an optimistic view of the power of Reason in human nature, one that looks away from those depths.