Remember What?
Remember How?
By Uri Avnery
22 March, 2005
Gush
Shalom
From
the well-chosen - as usual - words from Joschka Fischer, the German
Foreign Minister, to the tortured - as usual - face of Eli Wiesel, the
Holocaust professional, it was an appropriate commemoration of the historic
crime.
But it was also
a great victory for Israeli diplomacy. The chiefs of our Foreign Office
openly boasted of this political achievement. The foreign guests met
with the Israeli leaders and thus lent their indirect but clear support
to Ariel Sharons policy.
Altogether, it underlined
the ambiguity of the Holocaust commemoration at this time.
When one of the
leading Nazis imprisoned in Nuremberg first learned the full dimensions
of the Holocaust, he exclaimed: This will not be forgotten for
a thousand years! He was right. The Holocaust was indeed a unique
crime in history.
It is difficult
for foreigners to understand that for us in Israel the Shoah is not
just a thing of the past. It is a part of the present. An example: at
the time of the museum opening, I was flying back from Europe. In the
airplane I got into conversation with an Israeli professor I had not
known before, and he told me about the various stages of his life. I
noticed that he passed quickly over several years of his childhood.
When I asked him, be told me that he had been in Theresienstadt. He
did not go into detail, so I did not ask what happened to his family.
From the concentration
camp of Theresienstadt, most prisoners were sent on to the death camps.
My aunt committed suicide there, her husband was sent from there to
Auschwitz and was never heard of again. I remember this uncle laughing
when my father decided to flee from Germany in 1933. What can
happen to us here? he asked, After all, Germany is a civilized
country!
The impact of the
Holocaust is not restricted to the generation of the survivors. A young
writer once told me that both her parents had spent time in the death
camps. I did not know that, she recounted, They never
spoke about it. But when I was a child, I knew there was an awful secret
in our family, a secret so terrible that it was forbidden to ask about
it. That filled my whole childhood world with dread. Even now I still
feel anxious and insecure.
Almost every day
we hear stories that are connected with the Shoah. One cannot escape
it. One should not try to escape it, either. Forgetting the Holocaust
is a kind of betrayal of the victims.
The question is: HOW to remember? WHAT to remember?
After World War
II, the Shoah became the center of Jewish consciousness. Yeshayahu Leibovitz,
the philosopher who was an observant orthodox Jew, told me once: The
Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies
the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust. That is natural,
because every Jew knows that if he had fallen into the hands of the
Nazis, his life would probably have ended in a gas chamber. We, in Palestine
at the time, were quite close to that when the German Afrika Corps under
Erwin Rommel approached the gates of our country.
There was no need
for a conclave of the Elders of Zion in order to turn the Holocaust
into a central instrument in the struggle for the creation of Israel.
It was self-evident. The Zionists had argued right from the beginning
that in the modern world there can be no existence for the Jews without
a state of their own. The Shoah lent this argument an irresistible force.
It caused the Jews
in the State of Israel, which was created in war and had to fight for
its life, to crave total security, and so we became a military power.
It is impossible to understand both the good and the bad in Israel without
taking into account the impact of the Shoah on our national and personal
consciousness. It was none other than the late Palestinian intellectual,
Edward Said, who told this to his compatriots.
The centrality of
the Holocaust in Jewish consciousness caused the Jews to insist on its
absolute exclusiveness. We are shocked and furious when somebody tries
to remind us that the Nazis exterminated other communities too, such
as the Roma, the homosexuals and the mentally ill. We get very angry
when somebody comes and compares our Holocaust with other
genocides: Armenians, Cambodians, Tutsis in Ruanda and others. Really!
How can one compare?
The Holocaust was
indeed unique in many respects. Nothing compares with the organized
extermination of a whole people by industrial means, with the participation
of all the organs of a modern state. It may be that Stalin murdered
no fewer, and perhaps even more human beings than Hitler, but his victims
were drawn from all the peoples and classes of the Soviet Union, and
were not subjected to a process of industrialized extermination.
But the concept
of the exclusiveness of the Holocaust can lead to despicable perversions.
Many among us argue that no moral restraints apply to us, because after
what they did to us nobody can teach us what is or is not permitted.
After the Shoah we have the duty to do everything to save
Jewish lives, even by ignoble means. We are allowed to use the memory
of the Holocaust as an instrument of our foreign policy, since Israel
is the state of the Holocaust survivors. We are allowed
to stifle all criticism of our behavior, since it is self-evident that
all critics are anti-Semites. We are allowed to blow up every insignificant
incident, such as the painting a swastika on a Jewish tombstone, in
order to prove that anti-Semitism is on the rise in the
world and raise the alarm.
I want to argue
that now, 60 years after the end of the Holocaust, it is time to grow
out of all this.The time has come to turn the memory of the Holocaust
from an exclusively Jewish property into a world-wide human possession.
The mourning, the
anger and the shame must be turned into a universal message against
all forms of genocide.
The struggle against
anti-Semitism must become a part of the fight against all kinds of racism,
whether directed against Muslims in Europe or Blacks in America, Kurds
in Turkey or Palestinians in Israel, or foreign workers everywhere.
The Jews long
history as the victims of murderous persecution must not cause us to
wrap ourselves in a cult of self-pity, but, on the contrary, should
encourage us to take the lead in the world-wide struggle against racism,
prejudice and stereotypes that begin with incitement by vile demagogues
and can end in genocide.
Such a people would
truly be a light unto the nations.