The Jerusalem Report
August 6, 2007
THE FUHRER’S UNWITTING COLLABORATORS?
by Ina Friedman
In a stinging indictment of its approach to the Holocaust, a former
pillar of the Zionist and Israeli-political establishments assails
his country’s insecurities as self-induced, charges that the Jewish
state is prone to a form of racism no less vicious than that of the
Nazis, and urges his countrymen to shed their narrow Israeli ethos
and transform themselves into universal Jews
Defeating Hitler By Avraham Burg – Yediot Aharonot Books and Chemed
Books 382 pp.; 88 shekels (Hebrew)
"Defeating Hitler" is a startling document, though less for what it
says – much of which has been articulated before, both in Israel and
abroad – than for who is saying it.
After all, Avraham Burg’s credentials as an Israeli blue-blood are
impeccable. His father, Yosef Burg, who fled from Nazi Germany in
1939, served as a minister in successive Israeli governments
representing the then-politically-moderate, modern-Orthodox National
Religious Party. His mother’s forbears had lived in Hebron for seven
generations before she was driven out by the 1929 anti-Jewish riots,
in which she lost half her family.
Burg junior, likewise a modern-Orthodox Jew, threw in his lot first
with Peace Now and then with the Labor party, entered the Knesset in
1988 at age 33 and went on to become chairman of the Jewish Agency
and then speaker of the Knesset in the 1990s, before retiring from
public life three years ago to enter the business world.
Yet reading his polemic, one has the sense that he must have chafed
in those official roles, for he has come out with a guns-blazing
critique of some of the most sensitive elements of the Israeli ethos.
Burg begins by arguing that Israel’s understanding and approach to
the Shoah (the Holocaust) has warped its psyche and values almost to
the point of mirroring those of Hitler and his cohorts. He then
launches a frontal attack on what he regards as the Jewish racism
(derived from the notion of being God’s "Chosen People") that is
fostered, he argues, by Israel’s rigidly fundamentalist religious
establishment and has been echoed from the podium of the Knesset (in
calls for ethnic cleansing couched in the euphemism of "transferring"
the Arabs out of the Jewish patrimony). Though he stops short of
endorsing the repealed U.N. resolution that Zionism is an expression
of racism, he advocates dismantling the classic constructs of the
Jewish nation-state (such as the Law of Return), imploring his
countrymen to embrace, and truly eternalize, the humanist values
embedded in Judaism and thus join – and place their trust in the
fidelity of – the family of enlightened nations. By offering these
judgments and prescriptions, Burg has elevated himself to something
of a b?te noir, forced to parry charges ranging from heresy and
superciliousness to a cockeyed optimism that, were it to be adopted
by his compatriots, would quickly lead Israel to perdition. But this
is not to say that his is a lone voice in Israel, or that all his
observations should be dismissed as bizarre.
The gist of Burg’s opening argument is that, rather than view the
Shoah as part of a broader campaign of genocide propelled by the Nazi
doctrine of the master race – a crime against humanity perpetrated
against Communists, homosexuals, the mentally challenged, the
mentally ill, Gypsies, and Slavs, as well as Jews – Israel has chosen
to portray it as a unique and exclusively Jewish tragedy, the climax
of a millennium of European anti-Semitism. (Germany, he points out,
had already committed genocide in the early 20th century by killing
65,000 of the indigenous people of what is now Namibia in the course
of colonizing it.) This insistence on the uniqueness of Jewish
victimization, he charges, has led Israel down strange and
unacceptable paths. For example, Israel has refused to officially
acknowledge other instances of genocide, such as the Armenian
holocaust (in order to maintain good relations with the Turkish
government) and displayed a noncommittal stance toward Serbia despite
its practice of ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Worse yet, Burg charges, by portraying the Shoah as proof of abiding
Jewish vulnerability, Israel has exploited it as an excuse to justify
its own acts of brutality (against both the Palestinians and the
inhabitants of Lebanon). "The Shoah is our life," he writes. "We have
removed it from its historical context and turned it into a claim and
reason for every deed. Everything is compared to the Holocaust."
(During Israel’s 1982 incursion into Lebanon, Burg recalls as an
example, the late prime minister Menachem Begin compared PLO leader
Yasser Arafat to Hitler.) "And everything is dwarfed by it… so
everything [we do] is permissible."
Ironically, Burg writes, while Israel was "quick" to reconcile with
Germany – signing a reparations treaty in 1952 and establishing
diplomatic relations in 1965 – it actively nurtured its Shoah-induced
fears and credited them to the evil designs of its Arab neighbors.
After the Egyptian army’s opening gains in the Yom Kippur War of
1973, for example, even then-defense minister Moshe Dayan – the
epitome of a seasoned Sabra fighter and the emblem of Israel’s
victory in the Six-Day War – panicked and predicted the imminent fall
of the Jewish state. And in subsequent military confrontations
against irregular forces (referring to the two wars fought on
Lebanese soil and the response to the first and second Palestinian
intifadas), Israel’s being "stuck" in the Holocaust, Burg posits,
resulted in "the sanctification of its security concept, which often
turns into an obsession of revenge and power."
Yet interestingly, this mindset did not develop directly after the
Holocaust, when the wounds were still fresh. On the contrary, during
the first 12 years of Israel’s sovereign existence, Burg observes, it
was too occupied with state-building activities even to allow the
Holocaust survivors who had flooded through its gates to express
their trauma. Back then, he writes (drawing directly on Tom Segev’s
book "The Seventh Million"), it was taboo to talk about the Holocaust
– while now it is discussed incessantly, all but dominating Israeli
discourse. Just look around you, he invites us, and "you’ll find
endless references to the Holocaust everywhere: in the media, in
literature, in music and art, in politics and education. Shoah,
Shoah, and a little more Shoah."
The turnabout came with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, which
wrought a sea change in the Israeli psyche. After almost five months
of survivors’ testimonies broadcast live on the radio, Burg writes,
the self-confidence of the Zionist pioneers and founders of the state
was supplanted by an indelible mood of angst, rendering Israel a
society that is "haunted and self-righteous, panicky and brutal,
remembering and vengeful." Since Eichmann’s capture and trial – which
Burg describes as a cynical bid by then-premier David Ben-Gurion to
reverse the flagging fortunes of his Mapai party – "everything seems
threatening to us, and our normal development as a people, a society
and a state is brought to almost a complete halt."
A second result of this grim transformation, Burg holds, is the
obdurate mantra that "the whole world’s against us," which he
characterizes as "boundless paranoia that is no longer able to
distinguish between friend and predator, a primitive suspicion of
everyone, all the time, about every issue." No amount of rapport with
or support from the world’s democracies is able to assuage this deep
suspicion; no degree of military strength suffices to allay these
fears, he suggests. Even the old saw that the paranoid may have real
enemies does not seem to faze him, for he’s convinced that Israel’s
status has never been better. Not only "gone are the days of our
being ‘a little country surrounded by enemies,’" he writes, "the
[belief that] ‘the whole world’s against us’ is untrue.
"Even Iran’s present position as the vanguard of opposition to Israel
and Judaism doesn’t frighten me so much. [Iran is] not just our
problem; it’s menacing, but it’s a challenge to the entire Western
world, and most of the Arab and Muslim world, and is at any rate
being dealt with accordingly. We needn’t feel pushed [into a
corner]… it’s enough to be realistic: No other country in the world
enjoys the wholehearted commitment of the leaders of the foremost
powers to its peace and security. Much has changed in the diplomatic
arena since the sad days of Auschwitz. We can calm down …"
But Israelis resist the call to avoid overreaction, Burg charges,
because "we need to feel [ourselves] the eternal victim… in order
to avoid taking responsibility for Israel’s situation and its fate."
The supreme irony, he observes in summing up this psychology, is that
as the initial stage of his program to destroy the Jews within his
sphere of control, Hitler sealed them behind the walls of ghettos.
Since the 1960s, in his portrayal, Israel has withdrawn into a ghetto
of its own making, a prison of self-absorption, fear and mistrust of
friend and foe alike. Given this reading, it’s little wonder that the
original working title of this book was "Hitler Won."
Equally disturbing, Burg proposes, is that Israelis, who view the
Holocaust as utterly unfathomable, fail to see that they themselves
are not free of sentiments similar to the ones that generated it. In
fact, he compares an undercurrent in contemporary Israeli society to
the racist doctrine that seduced the German public to acquiesce in
Hitler’s evil. In nigh-apocalyptic language, he argues that the
warped, fundamentalist reading of the liturgical verse, "You have
chosen us from among all the nations" – a belief, Burg says, that may
have been comforting to the slaves in antiquity but is unspeakably
inappropriate in the 21st century – has given rise to a "Jewish
racist doctrine" positing the innate superiority of the Jewish
people.
Preached openly by Rabbi Meir Kahane in his day and still promoted by
one of his leading disciples, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg, this creed,
Burg tells us, is also prevalent in the ultra-Orthodox religious
establishment, is disseminated by mystics and kabbalists and is even
ascribed to by many "traditionalist" Jews, who are not strictly
observant but regard the teachings of these mentors as the
"authentic" Judaism. Ginzburg, the dean of a nationalist-messianic
yeshiva originally established at the Tomb of Joseph in Nablus that
caters to zealots from the West Bank settler community, is ostensibly
a marginal figure on the Israeli scene. But around the hard core of
his followers and their ilk, Burg writes, "extend ripples of faith
and support, ignorance and folly, insensitivity and apathy, and
ultimately their translation into hooliganism, violence, and actual
bloodshed." Combined, he assesses, this outlook poses "a genuine
threat to the modern Jewish identity and the State of Israel," for
"Israeli public opinion is, at least subconsciously, primed to accept
[it]."
To clarify his perspective, Burg wisely qualifies that "we are not
the Germany of… the height of the Final Solution." But he sees
Israeli society as "somewhere quite close to the initial stages of
the collapse of the humane and cultured Germany" when Hitler rose to
power. So alarmed is he by his assessments that he even predicts "the
day is not far off when the Knesset may well enact the equivalent of
the Nuremberg Laws," forbidding marriage between Jews and Arabs,
annulling existing mixed marriages, outlawing sexual relations
between Jews and Arabs, and preventing Arabs from employing Jewish
cleaning women or laborers in order to avoid the least suggestion of
Arab superiority over the Jewish people that rules in the Jewish
state. "All this will happen and is already happening," he warns
darkly.
Yet despite this grim portrayal, Burg chooses to end his book on an
optimistic and pragmatic note by offering prescriptions for restoring
Israel’s battered immune system and discarding its misguided beliefs.
Among his recommendations is to halt the trips made by Jewish-Israeli
high school students to Auschwitz and instead to send mixed groups of
Jewish and Arab pupils on a grand tour of Europe that begins in Spain
(to explore the medieval period of "amazingly fruitful relations
between Islam and Judaism"); moves on to Eastern Europe and Germany
(to examine the relations between the Jews and the Gentiles that
prevailed over the past millennium and "only recently became so
terrible and threatening"); and ends with a visit to communities of
Muslim immigrants in Europe that are currently attempting to create
"the new European Islam."
Jewish students, he adds, should also be directly exposed to Jewish
communities in the West, in order to learn "what a threat-free
existence is, what communal solidarity is, and how it’s possible to
live a national, meaningful and proud existence… [marked by]
relations of complete trust between a Jewish minority and its
non-Jewish environment."
Less original is Burg’s proposal to retire the "antiquated" concept
of the nation-state, built along ethnic lines, and redefine Israel as
"a state of all its Jews and all its citizens, with the majority," he
adds a bit cryptically, "determining its character." This revision
would entail repealing the Law of Return, whose definition of a Jew
according to bloodlines is at any rate, he suggests, an unfortunate
echo of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws. Actually, he calls for altogether
rejecting the tradition of "genetic Judaism" in favor of a "Judaism
of values" that will readily accept into the fold anyone committed to
practicing its humanistic creed. In a globalized world increasingly
marked by multicultural societies and a commitment to human rights,
he admonishes, Israel cannot ignore the Zeitgeist, cling to a narrow
and discriminatory nationalist vision, and still hope to flourish.
Indeed, the ultimate vision cherished by Burg, who portrays himself
first and foremost as a human being and citizen of the world, is to
transform Israel into a country of "universal Jews."
Many readers may be outraged by "Defeating Hitler," even charge Burg
with providing ammunition to its enemies and anti-Semites the world
over. Some will deem his appraisal of the sway of
fundamentalist-religious thinking on Israeli society as exaggerated
and fault him for dwelling solely on the negative, as though trauma
and fear were the sum and substance of life in what strikes so many
observers as an unusually vibrant and resilient society. Others will
likely judge Burg incorrigibly naive, challenge his idealized
portrait of the democracies of the West, and decry his cavalier
treatment of the dangers facing a country located in an increasingly
radicalized and unstable region.
I came away from this treatise with a deep sense of ambivalence. Burg
offers many points deserving of contemplation, some of which have
been raised before by writers of his political ilk and generation.
Yet he does himself a disservice by maintaining a tone of outrage
through much of the book, which has the effect of putting even
empathetic readers on the defensive and is hardly the way to gain a
wide hearing among his countrymen. Ostensibly placing Israel on the
couch with therapeutic intent, he proceeds to deliver a harangue of
blame to his "patient" for creating its own problems, while barely
alluding to the extenuating circumstance that Israel is engaged in an
intractable political dispute with neighbors who have suffered their
own traumas and bring to the table neuroses and cultural baggage of
their own. His style is also marred by resort to hyperbole and
sweeping statements backed by a single example, or none at all. And
while he quotes (and sometimes contends with) the views of historians
and philosophers, from Hannah Arendt to Alain Finkelkraut, I would
have appreciated references to research by sociologists and social
psychologists to anchor his claims.
Despite these shortcomings, however, "Defeating Hitler" is a
thought-provoking read that will, I believe, be particularly
intriguing to younger Israelis willing to approach it with an open
mind and will also resonate with all those who have wearied of living
in a perpetual Israel Agonistes and are searching for paths to
reconciliation.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
