The Myths of Liberal Zionism

Yitzhak Laor

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781784786281
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784786298
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

Yitzhak Laor is one of Israel's most prominent dissidents and poets, a latter-day Spinoza who helps keep alive the critical tradition within Jewish culture. In this work he fearlessly dissects the complex attitudes of Western European liberal Left intellectuals toward Israel, Zionism and the "Israeli peace camp."

He argues that through a prism of famous writers like Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, the peace camp has now adopted the European vision of "new Zionism," promoting the fierce Israeli desire to be accepted as part of the West and taking advantage of growing Islamophobia across Europe.

The backdrop to this uneasy relationship is the ever-present shadow of the Holocaust. Laor is merciless as he strips bare the hypocrisies and unarticulated fantasies that lie beneath the love affair between "liberal Zionists" and their European supporters.

1

The Shoah Belongs to Us (Us, the Non-Muslims)

On February 13, 2006, Ilan Halimi, a young Parisian Jew, was found naked and bound, his body covered with torture marks. He died shortly afterward. The police, the media and public opinion unanimously described the murder as anti-Semitic—even though his attackers had not known at the time that Halimi was Jewish. Paris offered the unprecedented spectacle of the entire political spectrum, including the racist extreme right and formerly anti-Semitic conservatives, uniting to organize a joint protest against the outrage. How to explain this unprecedented unanimity? As the Haaretz correspondent Daniel Ben-Simon explained to Israeli readers:

Halimi’s murder began as a criminal act but has been recognized as motivated by anti-Semitism. The entire country has come together in solidarity. Memories of the 1940s, when France collaborated with the Nazis and sent tens of thousands of french Jews to death camps, have come flooding back.¹

Ben-Simon explained that, for French Jews, “the murder retrospectively justified” “the fear and anxieties that began with the outbreak of the intifada,” a period during which they had “asked for protection that rarely came.” And, “That is why Chirac attended a memorial service for Halimi at a Paris synagogue … There is nothing like a presidential visit to reassure Jews and calm fears.” In sum, Ben-Simon could announce to his readers: “Many French Jews have come to feel like stepchildren of the French state. Now they feel as if they are recognized as legitimate offspring.”

The journalist went on to recall the desecration of graves in the Jewish cemetery in the French town of Carpentras in 1990:

The Carpentras incident was motivated by Christian anti-Semitism. Halimi’s murder is a case of Muslim anti-Semitism. Many Jews see it as the result of a deeply-rooted hatred of Jews that has taken hold of France in recent years. No one can convince them otherwise, even though his captors may not have known he was Jewish until after they abducted him.

Writing never proceeds without its slips of the pen. Sometimes it is the author who is revealed in them, but just as often it is something beyond him which speaks through the lapsus to the reader. What is clear from this is, first, that the “new anti-Semitism” is defined not by reference to an analysis of the objective situation, but as how “many Jews see it.” Second, unlike traditional anti-Semitism, its perpetrators are ethnically defined. Third, the shadow of the Nazi past, or European experience under Nazi occupation, becomes the present context of that new anti-Semitism; that very past—even if the “new anti-Semites” have nothing to do with that past—is connected to the evocation of “Jewish sensitivity,” or, better, to those who can articulate it, whether the leadership of the Jewish organizations or the Israeli embassy. In the week that the media were exclaiming over the huge Parisian march against anti-Semitism, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, was suspended from office for four weeks by a disciplinary tribunal for saying that a (Jewish) journalist was behaving like a concentration camp guard. At around the same time, an Austrian court sentenced the English revisionist historian David Irving to three years in prison for having denied that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz. As the Haaretz commentator Gideon Levy wrote, attacking the sentence:

It is no small irony that it should be Austria—one of the greatest deniers there is—that has sent Irving to jail. For years Austria denied its responsibility in the extermination … It sheepishly came back on its positions only after weighing up the enormous political cost this attitude would have. Today, if the country sends Irving to prison so spectacularly, it is of course through application of Austrian law, but it is also to satisfy the international community and Israel, which was pressing for its boycott.²

What, then, Levy went on to ask, should we make of the world’s silence at the extermination of a million Tutsis in Rwanda, or the 4 million killed in the Congo? “The world does not want to hear this sort of comparison, and if the facts are not explicitly denied, nobody would imagine punishing anyone for this disgusting indifference.” My point is that even if Israel benefits from and sometimes nourishes this new “Culture of the Holocaust,” it is above all an internal European matter, and the Jews or Israel are bit players in that particular drama.

Commemorations

How should we understand this philosemitic offensive, this strident new pro-Israel tendency in Western Europe? These incessant complaints of anti-Semitism, while we can see on television the realities of what Israel is perpetrating in the occupied territories, are one aspect of a culture that has recently appeared in Europe. It involves a very particular reworking of the past. Our history is rearranged by those who tell its story in the present; to understand what is going on here we would need to interrogate not just the vulgarized media expressions of this mode of thinking, but also the work of filmmakers, philosophers and writers. The question is: Why now? Why the contemporary concern with the Jewish genocide, nearly half a century after it took place, compared to its treatment in the period immediately after the Second World War?

Israeli Jews like myself grew up in the 1950s in an atmosphere saturated with chaotic, almost anarchic images of the genocide. They were progressively arranged into fixed form by the dominant ideology: a structured narrative similar in many respects to that which has been created in Europe over the past twenty years. The new vocation of European Shoah culture provokes a certain unease in me, as in other Israelis—whether the suspension of Livingstone, for reasons that have nothing to do with the genocide, or the big march in Paris, or the role the extermination of European Jewry plays in political and cultural Europe. On the upmarket French and German TV channels, Arte or 3Sat; in the big European co-productions—usually between France, Germany and Belgium—for the cinema; in the literature on the Second World War, Auschwitz is everywhere; only Claude Lanzmann could believe that he and his film Shoah are the cause of this. It would be facile to see this memorializing culture as a belated crisis of international conscience, or a sense of historical justice that took time to materialize but has now been fully acknowledged; it would be facile also to speak of a new generation’s feeling of guilt, without explaining where that guilt is coming from.

The majority of United Nations General Assembly members have emerged from a colonial past: they are the descendants of those who suffered genocides in Africa, Asia or Latin America. There should be no reason for the commemoration of the genocide of the Jews to block out the memory of these millions of Africans or Native Americans killed by the civilized Western invaders of their continents. But there is no international day to mark the extermination of Native Americans or the Slave Trade, no date on which all countries are supposed to recall what the white man did to them, or to listen to the speeches in their honor.

Yet in 2005, sixty years on from its foundation by the victors of the Second World War, the UN General Assembly decided that from 2006 onward, January 27, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, would be International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Britain and Italy had already established this as their national day of the Shoah, following the lead of Germany, which had chosen January 27 in 1996. The Jewish genocide has since had a universal place in Western culture, as if this narrative had been there from the start. Hollywood had said nothing about the killing of the Jews for many years. The Second World War was treated in bravura form, with successive waves of films on combat, romance, heroism, stories about prisoners and great escapes, episodes from the war in the Pacific (without a word on Hiroshima or Nagasaki, the two leading events in the logic of denial), and, from the 1970s on, comedy series. The break came in 1979 with the Hollywood-produced series Holocaust, which largely adopted the aesthetic of the war films. At around the same time, the decision was made to build a Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.

What had kept the genocide out of sight or on the margins in the decades after the war, when its memory was the prerogative of escaped Jews, anti-Nazis and other victims? As Raul Hilberg has explained, the salvation of the Jews was not a priority for the Soviet Union, Britain or the United States. From 1941 to 1945, their attention was on the war itself, and on the respective spheres of influence they would enjoy once Germany surrendered. The territories behind enemy lines were analyzed first and foremost as sites of production, mobilization and supply: “The all too real decimation of populations under the rule of Germany and its partners was at best a secondary preoccupation.” In early 1944 a detailed report from Auschwitz was forwarded by the underground Polish resistance to the Office of Strategic Services, the War Department and the UN War Crimes Commission. In all three cases, the report was buried. According to Hilberg, “The Western Allies did not want their populations to think that they were fighting the war to save Judaism.” It was hard enough to explain to an American why we were fighting in Europe. Britain and the US were waging “a carefully controlled war, minimizing their losses and simplifying their public declarations. As a result of this attitude, the liberation of the Jews would be a by-product of victory.”³

These facts are well known and have been abundantly commented on in Jewish Israeli debates. This is one area where Jewish Israeli approaches and prevailing Western views do not coincide. For the West has avoided—and continues to avoid—the thorny question of how the Allied powers themselves, and above all the United States, treated Jewish refugees before, during and immediately after the Second World War. The glossing over of this aspect of the tragedy has been glossed over in the narrative constructed in recent decades and has resulted in the loss of a concrete dimension of these terrible events, which have been fused into a version that is totally alien to us Israeli Jews. In mainstream Western culture the Jewish genocide takes the form of a story that has always been told in this way. It seems to have come out of nowhere, but the narrative produces a sort of retrospective continuity, as if it had been in place since the event itself. The ruptures and changes in its telling are, generally speaking, ignored. It is the nature of every ideology to emphasize continuity, but what grates here is that the reality of Jewish history has been so distorted in this telling. It has become the narrative of national continuity which begins with the rise of Nazism, continues with the war and terminates in the construction of the memory of the (Jewish) victims.

In Europe, the Shoah has duly become the image of everything that the Europe of today is not: dictatorship, intolerance and hatred of Israel. Thanks to it, modern Europeans know what is their opposite. But why now? Why is it that, in the aftermath of the Nazi defeat, the genocide was only a reference point on which the victors could agree, whereas today it has become the symbol of the Second World War in its entirety—in the cinema, on television, in political clichés, school syllabuses and state celebrations. One answer is that during the unification of Europe, the genocide and the Jews served in the construction of a European identity. The European subject who, at an earlier epoch, had succeeded so well in differentiating himself from the Jew (“he is not like us”), is now eager to demonstrate how much he loves him: first because now “he is like us,” and second because he no longer lives here. This is a hypothesis which would have to be verified for every European state.

Displacing Horror

Ironically, Germany has donated the darkest chapter in its history to be the symbol of the new European identity: Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is worth returning to the choice of date, not only because Germany’s decision on this has been taken up by the other states, but also because it shows most clearly the process of amnesia through which remembrance constructs itself. Germany did not set a day to remember all Nazi crimes. It did not choose the day of Hitler’s accession to power as the date for its official day of commemoration, or the day the anti-Jewish racial laws were passed, or November 9, the day the Nazis chose to unleash what they themselves called Kristallnacht and which for years was a non-official commemoration day for many parts of West German civil society—until it was replaced by the new official day. Nor did it choose the day Poland was invaded, signaling the start of the Second World War. Germany does not commemorate May 8 or 9, the date of the fall of the Reich. Why exactly has it chosen January 27, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz?

The German Federal Republic was not, of course, born anew in “Year Zero.” As many have pointed out, its judiciary included many magistrates who had served under Hitler. The post-war ban on Nazi Party members working as civil servants was quickly rendered meaningless under American influence. The appointment of Hans Globke—a jurist who had assisted with the Nuremberg Laws and anti-Semitic legislation in the Nazi-occupied territories—as Adenauer’s Under Secretary of State and chief of personnel for the West German Chancellery from 1953 to 1963, on the grounds that he was not formally an NSDAP member, was only the most blatant symbol of continuity during those years.⁴ The German economic elite that had provided the material infrastructure for the genocide also remained in place. In the postwar period, soldiers who had deserted the Nazi Wehrmacht received no pension; those who had served in the SS did. In lieu of any official self-examination, the German state has preferred to elide all the questions arising from the Nazi period into that of Auschwitz. No political price would then need to be paid by the Globkes, the Krupps, IG Farben and the SS pensioners; nor would any compensation be paid to those who did resist. Remembered only as the Holocaust, the past now consists solely of victims—the Jewish people—and executioners, the Germans of the past.

This process reached its apotheosis in the aftermath of German reunification. As a stable republic, solidly established within an institutionalized Europe, Germany moved to complete the reconstruction of the past: transforming the memory of Nazism into that of the genocide, and the genocide into remembrance of the Holocaust. Over 8 million Soviet soldiers were killed in the fight against Nazi Germany; some 16 million Soviet citizens are estimated to have died overall during the Second World War, many of them civilians from Ukraine or what is now Belarus. Official remembrance of those deaths seems set to follow the USSR into oblivion; there is scant place for them on Holocaust Day. The same question might be asked of the vast monument to the Jews constructed in the center of Berlin: Would it not count for more if the tens of millions of non-Jews who perished were also honored, in due proportion? Are their deaths of less significance than the others?

Again, why choose Auschwitz in particular; why not Bergen-Belsen, for example, which is at least in Germany? Even if the worst atrocities were concentrated in the former camp, doesn’t the choice of site nevertheless repeat what the Nazis’ did—relegating the horror to “over there,” outside the homeland, far away to the east among the “inferior Slavs?” (The school trips to Poland organized by Israel’s Ministry of Education also serve to relegate the Jewish genocide to the margins of Europe; it is harder to imagine these visits taking place in Dachau, Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald, in the heart of Germany.) Lanzmann’s Shoah participates in the same distancing process: the horror took place in the east.

Another feature of the new philosemitism is the attempt to forge a German “Judeo-Christian” identity. A few years ago the tabloid Berliner Zeitung frontpaged a story on September 11, 2004 about a mass Evangelical Christian pray-in at the Brandenberg Gate, with the blue-and-white of Israel’s flag prominently displayed across the center of the layout. The German mass media determinedly attach Israeli images in this way as if offering a humanist guarantee of “the other.” What could be more convenient for the representatives of German culture, whether Christian, Liberal, Green or Social Democrat, in the city with one of the highest Muslim populations in Europe—and a country in which racist attacks on them are on the rise—than the symbol of Jewish, that is, Israeli, “Otherness,” precisely on the occasion of a Christian gathering? The Israeli flag, like the Berlin streets named after Yitzhak Rabin and Ben Gurion, become symbols through which German identity is thought. The bogus Judeo-Christian tradition does not correspond to any concrete history; it is an ideological invention invoked against Islam, in which the Jew plays the role of the imaginary other.

In Berlin, the culture of philosemitism takes on a particularly frenetic character. A whole array of (Ashkenazi) Jewish folklore is on offer: exhibitions on Orthodox Judaism, performances of klezmer or Hassidic music and dance. In this respect, the Germans differ from other Europeans, but only in degree; in a large part of Western Europe, the violence directed toward the Other hides itself behind this need for an Other who is like us. This is another effect of the reduction of the Nazi experience to remembrance of the Jewish genocide: this newly constructed past—the Jew as absolute victim—serves as a cover for a new Islamophobia that cannot but recall attitudes that Europe once had toward the Jews: Muslims must modernize, they must become “like everyone else,” in other words, like Europeans.

These developments need to be historicized. In the 1970s, young Germans could wear the keffiyeh as a mark of solidarity with the Palestinians without being accused of anti-Semitism or revisionism; the Left could pledge its support for the Palestinians—unlike its heirs, the Greens, who are always the first to speak up in favor of Israel. What is more, in Western European countries where there is no real reason for any feelings of guilt, the Jewish genocide plays a similar role, and encourages the development of a sense of guilt in relation to Israel, represented as the homeland of genocide survivors, just as it does in Germany.

Mussolini’s Shadow

An example from Italy: defending his decision to send troops to support the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in the context of massive domestic opposition, Berlusconi made a moral distinction between Mussolini and Saddam—the former, he explained, was not a murderer. Unsurprisingly this created a scandal and the prime minister hastily had to apologize for his blunder. To whom did he do so? Italy’s Jewish community—and not without good reason: It was Mussolini who passed the anti-Semitic discrimination laws and under his rule that the Jews were killed for their ethnic origins. But Berlusconi’s apology said much about the memory wars that are being played out in Italian political and cultural circles. In a single political gesture, the fact that tens of thousands had been imprisoned, tortured or killed for having fought against fascism was swept aside. Berlusconi had nothing to say about the horrors of the Salo Republic or the invasion of Ethiopia and the use of poison gas against its population. With the collapse of the postwar order at the beginning of the 1990s, the old way of remembering these events is no longer operational....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface to the English-Language Edition
• Introduction
• 1. The Shoah Belongs to Us (Us, the Non-Muslims)
• 2. The Right of Return (of the Colonial): On the Role of the “Peace Camp” and its French Sponsors
• 3. It Takes a Lot of Darkness and Self-Love to Merge “Us” with “You”: Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness
• 4. “I Don’t Even Want to Know Their Names”—On Hatred for the East: A. B. Yehoshua, and the Shame of Being Sephardi
• 5. In Lieu of a Conclusion: A Banished Thought from the East about a Polish Saltfish
• Notes