Jonathan Tobin
Contentions
18 August 09
In the United States there’s an unwritten but valid rule that applies to debates about topical issues: the first person to cry “Nazi” is usually the one who loses. In discussions about Israel, the same thing ought to apply but doesn’t always, as leftist critics routinely throw the epithet around to describe any action of Israel’s they don’t like, such as routine measures of self-defense against active terror organizations. The point is, anyone who can’t speak about the Jewish state without invoking a comparison between it and the Nazis is an anti-Semite whose real goal is to delegitimize the Jews by smearing them with the tag of their greatest foe.
A variant of this ploy is sometimes heard not from anti-Semites but from Jews who are similarly put off by Israeli actions, if not the political culture of the country itself. For them, it’s not that the Jews are Nazis but that they are so obsessed with what the Nazis did to them that they do bad things to others as well as to themselves. Seen from this point of view, Holocaust remembrance and the invocation of the spectacle of Jewish powerlessness in the face of malevolent evil has become an evil in and of itself, in that it feeds Jewish paranoia.
This is the view of certain leftist authors, such as Tom Segev, who made it famous in his lamentable book The Seventh Million. Though his work has been widely discredited as both history and sociology, writers seeking to discredit Israeli policy trot out Segev’s ill-conceived pop-psychology theory every once in a while. It’s a technique that attempts to combine condescension with a touch of sympathy for the poor grief-deluded Jews.
The latest example comes from one Bill Glucroft, a self-styled digital journalist who wrote in the Christian Science Monitor today that the Holocaust is casting a shadow over Israel’s choices and “undermining its security” because paranoia about threats prevents Jews from simply ending the conflict with the Palestinians by “giving them a home.” This happens, he says, because “invoking the Holocaust is the way Israeli policymakers evade the difficult decision making needed to shift the status quo; nothing else matters, and anything is justified, when everything is about surviving annihilation—a rationale that serves especially well in delaying the creation of a Palestinian state.”
The main problem with this analysis is that Israel has been trying to hand the Palestinians a state on a silver platter for nearly 16 years, ever since the failed Oslo process began. Ehud Barak offered one to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in July 2000. Ehud Olmert tried to give it to Mahmoud Abbas last year. Though most Israelis have justified concerns about their security, given that only a few years ago the Palestinians launched a terror offensive designed to break them with random suicide bombings in restaurants, malls, and streets, the vast majority, including the prime minister of Israel, have long since agreed to the notion of a Palestinian state.
It’s the Palestinians who view any deal that recognizes the legitimacy of a Jewish state as anathema and keep turning down peace whenever the opportunity arises. Far from Israel “holding a key to a home for the Palestinians,” it’s the Palestinians themselves who need to rethink the notion that their national identity is linked to the destruction of Israel rather than to the building of a homeland.
Contrary to amateur psychologists like Glucroft, the vast majority of Israelis understand that they are not living in the Warsaw Ghetto. But they also understand that they are locked in a conflict with an adversary that views Israeli concessions as invitations for more terrorism (such as the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005). Most rightfully understand that the only condition under which Jews can live with such dangerous neighbors is a position of strength, but that doesn’t make them Holocaust head cases. It just means that, unlike Glucroft and others whose ideology blinds them to Palestinian realities, Israelis understand that they are living in 2009 and not in a mythical future where hostility to Zionism has ended.
Telling the Jews to shut up already about the Holocaust in order to falsify the present situation is a unique form of dishonesty. Such writers would do better to try convincing their Palestinian clients that their own paranoia and Jew-hatred ought to be junked if peace is to have a chance.
.
Posts
