[Peace-discuss] Uri Avnery on the Holocaust

[David Green]

With the caveat that the Holocaust did not become the
center of Jewish consciousness in this country until
after 1967.

DG


Remember What? Remember How?

Hebrew
http://www.geocities.com/keller_adam/uri_article.doc
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Archive of Weekly articles by  Uri Avnery
http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives.html#articles
 
Uri Avnery 
19.3.05
     It was an impressive ceremony: the UN
Secretary-General, presidents, ministers, prime
ministers and notables from 40 countries gathered in
Jerusalem to inaugurate the new Holocaust museum of
Yad Vashem - only a few months after the mighty of the
earth had gathered to commemorate the liberation of
Auschwitz. 
     >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 Sharon's
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."