ISRAEL AND THE HOLOCAUST, 60 YEARS LATER

I confess that I’ve always instinctively recoiled from linkage of the Holocaust and Israel. As a moderately affiliated American Jew growing up in the period between the Six Day War and the “continuity crisis”/religious revival of the 1990s, I was educated with the Holocaust and Israel as the twin pillars of Jewish identity. I saw them as competing poles, joyful and mournful, and threw my lot in the with the hope and forward-looking vitality of Zionism.

As I grew older, I found my skepticism warranted. Many of the most common narratives that link the Holocaust and Israel are deeply flawed. For example, the often stated, but rarely examined proposition that the Holocaust made the birth of Israel possible. In this view, the world, shocked and shamed by the Holocaust, showed mercy on the Jews by voting in the United Nations to create a Jewish state. This narrative is deeply flawed in two ways. First, is the assumption that world pity and a UN vote were sufficient to establish Israel. It is consistent with a view of Jews on the sidelines of history, rather than the active agents of their own fate. In doing so, proponents of the "world gift" thesis ignore the heroic efforts and remarkable achievements of the Zionists in building a community and modern infrastructure in mere decades. The now-cliche litany of the heroic deeds of the halutzim (pioneers): reviving long-fallow land in the Galilee, raising Tel Aviv from sand dunes into an metropolis and causing the Negev to "bloom" were very real achievements long before they appeared on Federation pamphlets. Similarly, the price the yishuv (pre-independence Palestinian Jewish community) was willing to pay in precious lives to make the Jewish State a reality can not be overlooked.

Furthermore, the "post-Holocaust world-pity" creation myth writes Sephardi and Mizrachi Jews, who came to Israel fleeing Arab and Muslim persecution, entirely out of the story. Israel is reduced to being a European story. The world (in other words, Europe) sinned against the Jews in the Holocaust and atoned through the creation of Israel. To the extent that the narrative of Israel and the Holocaust is one of European atonement is it woefully insufficient. The votes of various European governments, and grudging passage to survivors is far from atonement for Europe’s sins. Europe can not simply pretend to have granted a Jewish state as an act of mercy, and move past the destruction of a third of the Jewish people. Yet the ongoing refusal of Europeans to truly confront the reality of the Holocaust makes the idea of Israel as European atonement too attractive to pass on.

It is the same desire in Europe to avoid a full moral reckoning with the Holocaust that leads to an even more pernicious linkage between the Holocaust and Israel, that of labeling Israeli actions against Palestinians as “Nazi.” This claim, viewed rationally, is patently absurd. The actions of Israel that are cited in the standard indictment against it range from those taken in scrupulous self-defense (such as targeted assassinations of militant leaders and the construction of the border fence) to the ugly, but necessary by-products of counter-terrorism (such as armed checkpoints and curfews) to the discriminatory and morally debatable (e.g. land confiscations). None of these actions, however, approach the mildest form of genocide, let alone the standard against which all genocides are measured.

It is simply not possible to lob "Nazi" allegations against Israel while taking what happened at Auschwitz seriously. (Ponder for a moment that in comparison, the tragedy of the Spanish Expulsion is a reprieve, that the reality of Auschwitz for Jews is to look backward, and to wish longingly that 1942 was 1492 once more. That is the full scope of evil and loss). Were Israel to indulge the wildest fantasy of the most fanatical settler and drive every Palestinian over the Jordan River it would be but a puddle of moral depracity to the ocean of Auschwitz, Yet here we are 60 years after the liberation of the camps, and the most frequently cited example of those horrors is the Jewish state's flawed, but fundamentally moral and restrained self-defense.

The reason for this is the mutation of anti-Semitism to a more politically and socially correct form of anti-Zionism. When it comes to Europe, Jews can never win. In the era of European nationalism, the nation-less Jews were made a pariah, blamed for all the sins of cosmopolitan internationalism. Now, in a new era of European post-nationalism, the Jews, it is the Jewish nation that is made a pariah, scapegoat for all the sins of nationalism.

There is of course, more at play than simply the residual stirring of Europe's oldest curse. By far the most virulent source of anti-Semetism in Europe today comes from its Muslim immigrant communities. In a particularly perverse irony, Europe exported the virus of modern anti-Semetism to the Islamic world (a form of Jew-hatred quite distinct from traditional attitudes towards Jews in Islamic society)
in the fascistic strains of pan-Arabism and Islamism, only to re-import it in the form of immigrants holding those views. If anything, immigration to Europe has exacerbated the problem, as European Muslims alienated from European society have increasingly been supceptible to Islamism's scapegoating of "Jews and Zionists" as the source of all problems.

The virulent anti-Semetism cloaked as anti-Zionism of the European far left and Islamists has been increasingly abetted by "reasonable" liberals. The liberals take on faith that there must be something to the passionate accusations lobbed as Israel. Thus, they will admit that perhaps Israel has a right to exist, but will denounce it as the main obstacle to peace and progress in the Middle East. They will deplore suicide bombings but "understand" the "desperation" that is its cause.

Thus the death of Rachel Corrie becomes a critically acclaimed play in the West End, and the British academy bans only Israeli academics from its conferences. (And this is in all places, relatively philo-Semetic Britain). Yet, as actual genoice occurs in Darfur, Europe in silent. As human rights campaigners in Iran and China are silenced there is no response from Europe except for calls for increased trade with the current regimes.

Never forget. And yet Europe is constantly forgetting the Holocaust. Unfortunately for Israel, Europe's moral amnesia is not just a mere inconvenience. Europe is Israel's most important neighbor - its number one trading partner, its cultural neighborhood (where it competes in everything from basketball to pop music). Permitting the current anti-Zionist wave to rise will result in serious consequences.

Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that Europe not be permitted to forget. That it is only appropriate that the demonization of the Jewish state, the efforts to marginalize citizens of the Jewish state, and the appeasement of the enemies of the Jewish state be rightly compared to Europe's past record of demonizing Jews, marginalizing Jews, appeasing the Nazis and ultimately aiding and abetting the Nazi genocide. Sixty years after the destruction of a third of the Jewish people happened on European soil, Europe owes the Jews this much - to take the existential threat to Israel seriously, and to never again stand idly by while Jews perish.