Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September-October 2002, pages 85-87

Israel and Judaism

“Second Holocaust” Rhetoric Trivializes Nazism’s Victims in Effort to Silence Debate

By Allan C. Brownfeld

Where others see a sharp exchange of views about geopolitical questions in the continuing debate over developments in the Middle East, many Jewish spokesmen see a storm of anti-Semitism and even genocide on the horizon.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, says that Jews face a greater threat now than they did in the 1930s. New York Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum wrote of his fears of a “second Holocaust,” and Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff said that, “If a loudspeaker goes off and a voice says, ‘All Jews gather in Times Square,’ it could never surprise me.”

The American Jewish Congress urged Hollywood figures to reconsider their plans to attend the Cannes Film Festival in May, citing a series of anti-Semitic attacks in France. In full-page ads in trade newspapers, the West Coast chapter of the AJC compared the situation in contemporary France to the climate 60 years ago, when the anti-Semitic Vichy government was in power and Hitler stalked the rest of Europe. “France, 1942: Synagogues and Jewish schools set on fire, Jews beaten on the street, Jewish cemeteries vandalized,” the ad reads, next to a similar list under the heading “France 2002.”

In Israel, a resolution warning Jews around the world of an imminent world jihad was unanimously passed at the World Likud Convention in June. The resolution called upon community leaders to organize the immigration of their respective communities to Israel. Another organization, Students for Mass Aliya, said in a statement: “We call upon the Jewish leadership worldwide to recognize the current dangers facing Diaspora Jewry and act on them immediately by organizing the mass aliya [emigration] of their communities.”

Among some Israelis, there is bewilderment about the repeated warnings of a “Second Holocaust” to be heard from American Jews. A heading in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot in May read, “In the collective conscience of American Jews, Hitler is alive again—and this time, he’s a Muslim.” The article described with surprise a meeting between a group of “sane, educated, multi-lingual, opinionated, mostly left-leaning, freedom-loving American Jews,” who publicly railed against the ambassadors of France, Germany, Holland and Sweden to the United States. The Jewish leaders’ message was summarized in Yediot as “All of Europe is against us. All Europeans are anti-Semitic and they want only the extermination of Israel.”

Some in Israel think that many American Jews have fallen into a deliberate trap created for them by the Israeli right-wing. “The response of American Jews reflects, first, the fact that right-wing Israeli leaders have for years tried to mobilize American Jewish ethnic solidarity with the settlements, and to tie fund raising to appeals that highlight the dangers Israel faces,” states Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi. “If you analyze [former Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu’s recent speeches in America and in the U.K., the logic holding these speeches together is a connection between the events of Sept. 11, the Holocaust and an imminent danger to Israel’s existence.”

The sin of the Amalekites was that their aggression against the Israelites was groundless.

Avi Primor, vice president of Tel Aviv University and former Israeli ambassador to Germany, said that Americans are “overreacting” to the threat of European anti-Semitism because of lingering psychological scars. “They have a complex that American Jewry did nothing to save European Jewry. During World War II, they didn’t act like a strong Jewish lobby…So they are trying to do today what they didn’t do then, and save European Jewry that no longer needs saving.”

In a cover article in the May 27, 2002 New Republic that magazine’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, rejects what he calls “Jewish panic.”

The “conflation of the Palestinians with the Nazis,” Wieseltier says, is not an historical argument, but a political one. “If you think that the Passover massacre [in Netanya] was like Kristallnacht,” he writes, “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…After all, a ‘peace process’ with the Third Reich was impossible…[Such thinking] is designed to paralyze thought and to paralyze diplomacy.”

In Wieseltier’s view, “Fear is wild. Reason is derailed. Anxiety is the supreme source of authenticity. Imprecise and inflammatory analogies abound. Holocaust imagery is everywhere…The murder of 28 Jews in Netanya was a crime…but it was not in any deep way like Kristallnacht. Solidarity must not come at the cost of clarity. Only a fool could believe that the Passover massacre was a prelude to the extermination of the Jews of Israel…All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death…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.”

Wieseltier rejects what he calls the “Amalekization” of the Palestinians, portraying them as simply another in a long line of enemies determined to eliminate the Jewish people. He quotes Isaac Abarbanel, the thinker and statesman in 15th century Spain, who noted that the sin of the Amalekites was that their aggression against the Israelites was groundless: “Amalek attacked them without reason…For the Israelites possessed no land that the Amalekites coveted.” Someone like Abarbanel would find no place in Israel’s Likud Party, writes Wieseltier, “For his implication is decidedly a moderate one. If the Israelites had possessed land that the Amalekites coveted, then this would not have been a war to the end of time. It would have been an ordinary war, a war that can be terminated in peace.”

A Friendly Competition

Rather than seeing Jewish “peril” at the present time, Wieseltier argues that, “Jewish history now consists essentially in a competition for the Jewish future between Israel and the U.S., between the blandishments of sovereignty and the blandishments of pluralism; it is a friendly competition, and by the standards of the Jewish experience it is an embarrassment of riches…”

Forward columnist Leonard Fein notes that American Jews are offended by the comparisons of Ariel Sharon to Adolf Hitler which are heard in some circles in Europe, but tend to embrace similar sentiments when it is Yasser Arafat who is compared to Hitler in the U.S.: “Sundry columnists and politicians in this country casually compare Yasser Arafat to Hitler, write and speak of an imminent final chapter of the Final Solution, a new Holocaust just over the horizon—and we applaud. Our applause when we are told of the apocalypse that nears is as bankrupt, intellectually and morally, as the wretched conclusions of the Europeans (and of those Americans who have joined their chant). Let a right-wing politician who has nothing more in mind than pandering to the Jews assert that Israel should annex the West Bank, that the Palestinians should make their state in one of the Arab countries, and we applaud. Our applause of such babbling is as mindless as the chants that equate Sharon with Hitler.”

When it comes to the question of whether anti-Semitism is rising dramatically in Western Europe, and whether criticism of Israel among Europeans is veiled anti-Semitism, the evidence seems not to confirm the overheated comparisons, for example, of contemporary France with the Vichy regime of World War II.

The head of France’s central Jewish representative body criticized the American Jewish Congress for endorsing a boycott against France and comparing the situation there to the dark days of World War II. “It’s absurd, it won’t help and it is even counterproductive,” said the French Jewish leader, Haim Musicant, director general of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France, or CRIF. “We oppose all kinds of boycotts.”

Declared Musicant: “It’s not for Israel or American Jews to tell French Jews what they need to do.” He blamed the recent incidents on Muslim immigrants from North Africa and rejected claims that France is an anti-Semitic country. He was particularly critical of comparisons with the Vichy regime: “It’s totally crazy to compare 1942 to 2002. There is no state anti-Semitism, no occupation, no yellow star in 2002.”

In Paris in June, a group of 21 French left-wing intellectuals, many of them Jewish, launched a petition accusing supporters of Israel of automatically branding as anti-Semites anyone critical of Israeli policy. “Until now, France was a country where criticism of the now-ruling Israeli government was not considered an anti-Semitic act,” they wrote in a petition published in the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. “But as the Palestinian tragedy develops, campaigns are being launched which use threats and libel…and loosely and unjustly bandy about accusations of anti-Semitism.” They acted after three pro-Israel groups filed a lawsuit for incitement to racial hatred against a French radio journalist, Daniel Mermet, who aired a report particularly critical of Israel. The petitioners include World War II resistance heroes Lucie and Raymond Aubrac and Stephanie Hessel, as well as a former Spanish culture minister, Jorge Semprun, a concentration camp survivor.

In England, Rabbi David Goldberg of London’s Liberal Jewish Synagogue wrote in The Guardian that Jews make the “ahistorical” mistake of conflating the political positions of Israel’s opponents with the theological hatred of Jews embodied in classic anti-Semitism.

Goldberg writes that, “We Jews do ourselves a disservice if we cry ‘anti-Semite!’ with the same stridency at a liberal commentator who criticizes the Israeli army’s disproportionate response to terrorist outrages, and a National Front lout who asserts that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a genuine document; if we try equally vehemently to silence a Holocaust denier and proven liar like David Irving, and ideologically left-wing Tom Paulin, who last year wrote an angry and not very good poem…that compared Israeli soldiers to Nazis.”

In discussions with non-Jewish acquaintances, Goldberg notes that he hears “appreciation of Israel’s achievements and recognition of her democracy, unhappiness at the obduracy of West Bank settlers, dislike of Sharon, exasperation at Arafat’s dithering, wariness of Arabs and Islam (especially after Sept. 11), an abhorrence of suicide bombers and all fundamentalists, but a natural sympathy for the Palestinians when faced by Israeli tanks and fighter jets. More or less my own sentiments…If this is the extent of English anti-Zionism, then Israel is certainly strong enough to live with it.”

Uses of Holocaust Imagery

Perhaps most disturbing in the current use of excessive rhetoric about growing anti-Semitism is the use and abuse of the imagery of the Holocaust as a means of silencing Israel’s critics and as a fund-raising tool within the American Jewish community. At the present time, fund-raising letters warning of a “Second Holocaust” have become a staple for some organizations.

This abuse of the Holocaust is hardly new. In his book The Holocaust In American Life, University of Chicago Professor Peter Novick reports that after the Six-Day War, and particularly after 1973, “much of the world came to see the Middle East conflict as grounded in the Palestinian struggle to, belatedly, accomplish the U.N.’s original intention. There were strong reasons for Jewish organizations to ignore all this, however, and instead conceive of Israel’s difficulties as stemming from the world’s having forgotten the Holocaust. The Holocaust framework allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate grounds for criticizing Israel, to avoid even considering the possibility that the rights and wrongs were complex…Only a few months after the top officials of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had proclaimed that it was fading memories of Nazism’s crimes against the Jews that accounted for Israel’s isolation, the ADL decided to embark on an ambitious venture on Holocaust programming. Its public relations consultant submitted a memorandum on the shape the program should take. The memo concluded by insisting that everything done should be ‘against the background of a powerful J’Accuse that is now submitting its bill ‘for Sufferings Rendered.’”

Beyond a diffuse relationship between the Holocaust and Israel’s cause, specific themes were developed. One was connecting Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular with Nazism. I.L. Kenen, a prominent Zionist spokesman, declared: “The Arabs cannot pretend they played no role in the Holocaust.” Notes Peter Novick, “The claims of Palestinian complicity in the murder of the European Jews were to some extent a defensive strategy, a preemptive response to the Palestinian complaint that if Israel was recompense of the Holocaust, it was unjust that Palestinian Muslims should pick up the bill for the crimes of European Christians.”

The way the Holocaust is being used in Israel, writes Israeli political scientist Charles Liebman, “reinforces and legitimates closed-mindedness, unrealistic foreign policies and barbaric behavior toward Arabs.” After the Hebron massacre, in which a Jewish extremist slaughtered Arab Muslims at prayer, Ze’ev Chafets, who had been head of the government’s press office under Menachem Begin, wrote that “dwelling on genocide may be a good fund-raising strategy, but it also encourages an us-against-the-world mentality that deranged zealots…translate into a religious obligation to murder.”

Novick is particularly critical of the hyping of anti-Semitism at a time when it is rapidly diminishing. In the late 1960s and during the ‘70s, he reports, Jewish leaders began to insist that a “new anti-Semitism” had arisen and that American Jews were threatened: “Previously, the history of Jews in America was seen as a success story. Now, increasingly, American Jews came to see themselves as an endangered species, and searched for themes and programs that could promote Jewish solidarity…The posture adopted by an increasing number of Jewish leaders…was one in which the Holocaust became the central symbol of Jewish identity.”

Observing many Jewish spokesmen, Brandeis University historian Jonathan Sarna noted with dismay that, “influenced by the current obsession with the Holocaust, they asked only one question: could it happen here? And to this question they have only one answer: yes.”

Lamenting the trivialization of both the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, Novick writes that, “The Holocaust came to symbolize the natural and inevitable terminus of anti-Semitism; first stop, an anti-Semitic joke; last stop Treblinka. Every loud-mouthed Farrakhan acolyte was the opening act of the Julius Streicher show.”

As a Jew, Novick also is concerned about the growth of a narrow Jewish ethnocentrism and points out that the Talmudic adage—cited in “Schindler’s List”—that “whoever saves one life saves the world entire” refers, in the original, to saving “one life of Israel,” adding that this is the version “taught in all Orthodox yeshivas.”

The late Lucy Dawidowicz, the distinguished historian of the Holocaust, declared that there should be a moratorium on the very use of the word “Holocaust”—that it has become a crutch and an excuse and a cheapener of memory. And repeated warnings of a “Second Holocaust” because the policies of Israel’s current government are being sharply criticized, is an attempt to use the memory of those innocents killed in the past as a means of silencing debate in the present.

It would be useful to learn the real lessons the Holocaust has to teach. It was precisely chauvinistic nationalism and notions of racial and ethnic purity which motivated the perpetrators of the Holocaust. We should learn from that period the dangers of narrowness and of ethnocentric religion, of separating men and women from one another because of ethnic background, religious faith or racial identity.

That lesson, however, must be learned anew in each generation, and we are in dire need of that lesson at the present time.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.