Was the Yishuv Indifferent to the Holocaust?

BY AMOS

The notion that the Zionist leadership in the Land of Israel and yishuv society as a whole reacted with indifference to news of the extermination of European Jewry during the Second World War has become almost a commonplace among non-specialists in the subject. In the past two decades, critics of contemporary Israel and the enterprise of Zionism in history, have led the charge in alleging that the yishuv took little interest in the victims of the Holocaust because of its ingrained negative view of Diaspora Jews (shlilat ha-golah) and single-minded devotion to the enterprise of state-building. Tom Segev's The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (1991, English translation published in 1993) unfortunately strengthened this sentiment. Although his book is still a classic - composed in beautiful prose like all his works and revealing a wealth of insights about Israeli society, its third chapter, "Rommel, Rommel, where are you?" paints an exaggerated picture of Zionist callousness toward the plight of European Jewry.

A new work by the Israeli historian Yosef Gorny significantly challenges the revisionist accounts that emerged in the 1990s about the yishuv and the Holocaust. The book, entitled קריאה באין אונים:העיתונות היהודית בארץ ישראל, בבריטניה, בארצות הברית ובברית המועצות לנוכח השואה, בשנים 1939-1945 ("Helpless Cry: The Jewish Press in the Land of Israel, Britain, the U.S., and the Soviet Union during the Shoah, 1939-1945," was published in 2009 and has now been reviewed in Ha'aretz by Dina Porat. The reviewers herself is the author of a pioneering related work, The Blue and the Yellow Stars of David: The Zionist Leadership in Palestine and the Holocaust, 1939-1945 (Hebrew version in 1986; English translation published by Harvard University Press in 1990).

Gorny's book lays to rest the myth that the Jewish press in the Land of Israel ignored the victims of the Holocaust or that the yishuv's inhabitants and its leading personalities were indifferent to the fate of European Jewry. According to Porat,

Reading and comparing the various newspapers show that the Jewish press, both within and outside the Land of Israel, covered the Holocaust extensively, with the newspapers here writing about it more. A comparison between Hebrew newspapers Davar, Haaretz and Hamashkif shows that Davar, the Labor movement daily, which has been criticized from all sides (especially by the first to research the issue, S.B. Beit Zvi, in his book "Post Ugandan Zionism on Trial" ), actually published a lot more about the Holocaust than either of the other two papers. At the time, Hamashkif, the Revisionist paper, was incessantly attacking Davar, for explicitly political reasons, to the point that it became an uncontested axiom that Davar was ignoring the Holocaust.

The comparison between the newspapers also shows that they published pretty much whatever information they received about what was happening to the Jews in Europe, including some hair raising stories that were inconceivable at the time in terms of the number of victims and especially the cruelty of the killing methods. Indeed, readers and journalists alike argued during the first half of the war that the many articles describing atrocities were an exaggeration, akin to "spilling blood into the lines of the newspapers," and called on editors to exhibit greater responsibility in the kinds of pieces they published and stop demoralizing the public and creating panic.

The book's title, Kri'ah be-ein onim is a triple entendre, as the word "kri'ah" means both "call" or "shout" as well as "reading" (i.e., the act of reading). It can therefore be translated as either. The phrase "be-ein onim" literally means "without potency," i.e., "powerless" or "helpless." One could therefore translate the title either as "Helpless Cry" (more elegantly, "Cry in the Wilderness") or "Impotent Reading." To add to these possibilities, the plural noun "'onim" (אונים) has a homophone (at least for those Hebrew speakers who do not pronounce 'alef and 'ayin differently), עונים, which means "respondents," - in other words, "Reading/Cry without Response."

I see the charge that "Zionists didn't care about the Holocaust during the war" as related to those works of scholarship and political polemic which talk about Holocaust memory having been manufactured after World War II by Zionists or Jewish elites. Alongside the myth that the yishuv was indifferent to the Holocaust, a myth arose several decades ago that American Jews did not really talk about the Holocaust until 1967, and that it only became a major focus of their attention due to Zionist manipulation. That is the heart of the accusations contained in works like Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life and the (far worse) piece of propaganda by Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. These accounts have also been significantly undermined by recent, heavily empirical scholarship, most notably in Hasia Diner's We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962.

Simon Schama on Shlomo Sand

Excellent review by Simon Schama of Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People, which has now been translated into English.

Hasmoneans in the News

The (descendants of the) guys who gave you Hanukah apparently ruled over a larger area of the Land of Israel than historians have long assumed. New finds in southern Israel seem to confirm the claim of Josephus that the Hasmonean king Alexander Yannai conquered large areas in the south. According to archaeologists with the Israel Antiquities Authority, a fortress inside a former Nabatean caravanserai (a kind of inn for traders) in the Negev was actually built and controlled by Hasmonean forces. Archaeologists had previously thought that the fortress was built by the Romans. The Hasmoneans held the structure and effective control over the Nabateans' primary trade route, from 99 until 66 BCE.

Natan Sharansky, from Refusenik to Likudnik to Publicist

 

BY NOAH S.        

Natan Sharansky, the famous Soviet dissident and Israeli political leader, spoke yesterday evening at the University of California, Berkeley. Freshly appointed by Prime Minister Netanyahu to head the Jewish Agency for Israel, Sharansky is touring college campuses in an attempt to foster a more positive image of Israel among American youth. The audience in the large lecture hall, however—considering the stature of the guest and the amount of publicity for the event—was surprisingly sparse and composed largely (in this author’s estimation, at least) of non-students who were old enough to remember Sharansky when he was a hero for Americans and Jews during the Cold War. But then, this is Berkeley—a “haven” for “anti-Israel forces,” as the student organizers put it—the speaker was Sharansky—famous now more as George W. Bush's favorite author than anything else—and the event was part of the dubiously titled “Caravan for Democracy” series, which is funded by such local favorites as Media Watch International (a group aligned with Likud) and the Jewish National Fund (among other things, since 1901 a major land-owner in Palestine/Israel which still refuses to lease its land to Arabs). It is a shame, though, that more students were not in attendance, because they would have been challenged by a trenchant thinker with a compelling personal story to think through some of the basic justifications for the existence of a Jewish state.

The talk was brilliantly composed and delivered, though problematic upon close scrutiny. Sharansky structured his argument around “two ideas” which he claims share a “deep connection”: “the desire to be free” and “the desire to belong,” or between “democracy” and “identity.” (The connection between the two forms the basis of a course Sharansky is leading at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem.) Those familiar with his books The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (2004) and Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy (2008) will recognize the argument. It is directed mainly against those “intellectuals,” as he called them, who believe in “post-identity,” “post-nationalism,” “post-modernism,” and “multiculturalism” - in other words, the relativists who believe that “nothing is different, that everything is equal.” (Berkeley professors?)  In order to illustrate this caricatured line of thought, Sharansky quoted (God help us) none other than the hippie-icon John Lennon, who asked us in 1971 to “imagine” a world in which there are “no countries,” “no religion,” and “nothing to kill or die for.” (Actually, Sharansky only quoted “nothing to die for.”). The logic of Sharansky’s unnamed intellectuals, represented here by the post-Beatle, holds that “strong identities” like nationalism and religion are “the enemies of peace.” Strong identities in Europe supposedly led to two world wars; war is evil; therefore, identity is evil. For them, being a human rights activist and a nationalist is an internal contradiction. And by this logic, the nation-state of Israel, which claims to be a leader of the free world yet retains its identity as the homeland of only one people, is an anachronism in a post-identity Western world. Sharanksy has set out to prove these critics wrong.

Born Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky in Donetsk, Ukraine (then the Soviet Union) in 1948, Sharansky never saw any contradiction between the desire to be free and the desire to belong because under the Soviet regime both were stifled if you were a Jew. He was neither allowed to voice a dissenting political opinion, nor to learn anything about his religious and cultural heritage. When he attempted to immigrate to Israel in 1973 and was refused passage—thus acquiring the title of refusenik—he became an outspoken dissident and spent years in Soviet prisons. He realized that he had found something—his Jewishness—which he was “willing to die for,” and it gave him the strength to withstand the KGB. In this brief biographical narrative, Sharansky did not take time to discuss why the struggle to express one’s political views and the struggle to express one’s cultural identity publicly—which in his case did coincide—should resonate with people growing up in a free world. A tighter case would have to be made; perhaps those who have read his latest book could chime in here. In any case, the argument offers some insight into the psychology of this Soviet dissident turned militant democrat.

In fact, most of the talk was about Sharansky’s own story, and the move from the personal to the contemporary political came only at the very end, in a rhetorical flourish when he accused European intellectuals of “having nothing to die for.” As a result, he claimed, when faced with a very small minority of possible fundamentalist terrorists whose identity is strong and who are willing to die for their cause, they feel bewildered and defenseless. In the wake of World War II, just as Europeans vowed never to fight again, Zionists vowed never to not fight again. Israel has paid the price in its international image for the post-war move toward pacifism and post-identity among "intellectuals," Sharansky claimed, because it became a nation-state precisely at the moment when the idea of the nation-state became unpopular. The Western nations said accusingly, “We have given up our nationalism, our colonialism - why not you?” Sharansky’s answer is that Israelis need to have a strong identity to fight and die (and kill) for if they are to defend against “all these totalitarian regimes” in its region. One senses that Sharansky’s experience in the Soviet prisons has left its indelible mark upon this man’s political philosophy. 

Benny Morris in Berkeley

This is a team post by Noah K. and Noah S.

On Wednesday, January 28, the University of California-Berkeley's Doe Library hosted Israeli historian Benny Morris. BM was a leading figure among the "New Historians" of the 1980s, a group of scholars who with access to newly opened IDF archives, challenged the then prevailing myths and dogma of Zionist historiography. In 1988, BM published his landmark study The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, which he updated and reissued in 2004. Surrounded by an eager crowd comfortably ensconced on the sofas of the Morrison Room of Doe Library, Morris spoke about his new book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Morris is often described as a "leftist," and his early work, by presenting the conclusion that thousands of Palestinian Arabs left their homes unwillingly during the 1948 war, must have been warmly received by many critics of the official narrative. Now, he is said to have shifted to the center, perhaps only reflecting the reconfiguration of Israeli politics in the last several decades. Is this new book he's hawking a "centrist" book? At no point in the lecture did BM expressly contradict any of the arguments made in his first book on the refugee problem. The book aims to set his old story of the birth of the refugee problem into a complete narrative of the war, really two wars, a civil war, and a war between the Jews and the Arab states after the initial civil conflict was decided. So the creation of the refugee problem loses something of its status as original sin when set against the backdrop of massacres on both sides -- the kind that BM argues "naturally" occur in civil war -- and against his careful description of the evolution of the war aims of the various parties involved. BM was at a pains to present himself as a dispassionate historian, who writes history "from the documents," and with his conclusions undermines the accounts of Arab propagandists and vulgar Israeli nationalists. He wowed the crowd with dates and figures, citing chapter and verse, but he also made recourse to comparative examples in world history.

He began with his most controversial historical claims. It is a matter of dispute among historians of the Arab-Israeli war about whether the war was, for the Arab armies, jihad, i.e., holy war against infidels. BM seemed convinced that there was sufficient evidence for an answer in the affirmative. He cited Arab generals who compared their war against the Jews to the Muslim struggle against Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries, and Sunni religious authorities who issued fatwas against Palestinian Jews just months before the Egyptian invasion. The second, related, claim is that the Arab armies were motivated to a certain extent by antisemitism. He presented very little evidence for the latter argument. He did mention that these arguments were probably responsible for the fact that the publisher that originally commissioned the manuscript—Metropolitan Press—ended up not publishing the book. (Yale University Press did.) More on this below.

BM moved on to a chronological account of the two stages of the '48 war: 1) the civil war between Arab and Jewish militias in Palestine (April/May), and 2) the conventional war between the Jewish armies and Arab state armies.

Appropriately, the first question he addressed had to do with war aims. On the Jewish side, BM argued that the original war aim of the Jewish militias in April, 1948, was mere survival and the eventual establishment of a Jewish state. However, as the war progressed, two further aims developed: territorial expansion (past the borders originally allotted in the U.N. partition plan of 1947); and the aim of ridding the area that would eventually become the Jewish state of Arabs, who presented a fifth column. Regarding the third aim, BM differentiated between expulsion—when Jewish soldiers came to Arab villages and commanded residents to leave their homes within x hours—and flight—when Arabs fled their homes in the course of a Jewish attack on their village (Arab militias were based in Arab villages). However, after Arab refugees are not allowed back to their homes after 1948, one could plausibly claim that the whole event was a de facto expulsion. There was no central command on the expulsion issue from Jewish authorities, BM said; some Jewish generals decided not to expel, which account for the fact that at the end of the war, there were 650,000 Jews and still 150,000 Arabs within Israeli borders (who became citizens of the new state).

"Arab" war aims are more difficult to assess, BM continued, because a) there was no central control among Palestinian Arab militias, and b) Arab archives are closed. What he could say was the following: Common war aims among all Arab armies was 1) the prevention of creation of a Jewish state, and 2) the conquest of as much land as possible in Palestine. BM dismissed the argument that a further aim was to "drive the Jews into the sea" for lack of documentary evidence. He further dismissed the official Arab claim that their goal was to save the Palestinian Arab population.

Moving on to the specific aims of the individual Arab states, BM noted that early on King Abdullah of Jordan accepted the inevitability of Israel's creation and aimed instead "only" to take West Bank for itself. Jordan's aim therefore was not to fight Jews, though it ends up happening anyway. Lebanon, too, despite official propaganda never invaded Jewish territory. These examples throw a wrench in the arguments of Zionist historians who claim that all Arab states wanted to destroy Israel in 1948. Syrian, Egyptian, and Iraqi armies did invade Jewish territory.

BM then addressed the "David and Goliath" myth of traditional Zionist historiography (that the small Jewish army was David compared to the Goliath of the Arab states). It is true, BM said, that in territory and population, Arab states were larger. However, the strength of societies also based on economic power—the yishuv was semi-industrial—as well as on "motivation"—whereas Arab soldiers often traveled long distances to fight their enemy, Jews were fighting for their lives on their own territory. The Holocaust had lent a further sense of urgency. Also, Arabs knew they could flee and live, while Jews felt "at death's door," according to BM. Further, the Jews had better ammunition. Once the U.N. imposed embargo on arms sales to warring parties in the Middle East, the Arab states lost supplies, while the Jewish militias had been stockpiling arms on the black market through Czechoslovakia all along and continued re-supplying throughout the war.

At the tail end of his talk, BM revisited the issue of "war crimes": massacres and the refugee problem. On massacres: BM cited numbers of 800-900 dead Arabs resulting from around two dozen discrete massacres (murders of civilians by Jewish soldiers outside of fighting). There were also massacres of Jews by Arab soldiers, BM said. However, the great disparity between the two numbers was a direct result of the fact that the Jewish militias took 400 Arab towns and settlements, whereas the Arab states conquered only 12 Jewish settlements/kibbutzim. This argument makes numerical sense only if one accepts the argument that massacres are a natural by-product of all wars. BM attempted to put the massacres of the 1948 war into "comparative perspective" by noting that there were days in the Yugoslavian war in which Serbs massacred over 9,000 civilians in just two days. (The number of Bosnians killed there is normally estimated at 8,000.) If there was one point, where, we think, he may have slipped up enough to allow the audience a glimpse of his ideological orientation, it was here. Sure the Hagganah, et al., killed 800 or 900 Arab non-combatants in 1947-8, but the Serbs in Srebrenica in 1995, killed 9,000 in a day! Curiously, he began to call the victims of that massacre "Croats," but caught himself, and said, "I think, no, they were Bosnians." The brutal facts of war, in all their precise and gory details, which BM had so far actually seemed to relish bringing out into the sterile light of our library seemed suddenly less important than the dignity of the Jewish state's first generation

On the refugee problem after the war: There were actually two refugee problems – Palestinian Arabs stranded in Arab countries after fleeing homes in Palestine, and Arab Jews stranded in Arab countries that no longer want them there after 1948. The main difference between these two groups is that the latter were absorbed into Israel, whereas the former group is only partially absorbed into various host countries. BM argued that this situation for the Palestinian Arab refugee was historically anomalous, as normally refugees are assimilated into host countries by second or third generation. Instead, now there are 4.5-5 million Palestinian Arab "refugees" who live off U.N. and other aid.

Explaining why there were expulsions and voluntary flight of Palestinian Arabs:

1) Zionists' explanation for the refugee problem was that the Arab states had a advised Palestinian Arabs to flee their homes in order to clear the battlefield for pan-Arab armies, or in order to justify their invasion of the territory.

2) Arab states' explanation for the refugee problem was that the Zionists had designed from the beginning to dispossess and expel the Arabs.

Truth, BM claimed, lies in between. Most Arabs fled from fighting, not because they were advised to by Arab states or forcibly expelled by Jewish soldiers.

By and large, this lecture was about the historian's craft. Amos once told me that he saw BM on Israeli TV arguing with Ilan Pappe -- another of the so-called New Historians. Pappe told BM, "You're not an historian!" And BM, becoming very agitated, retorted in his Anglophone Hebrew, "I'm not an historian?" Indeed, when Pappe came up in the Q&A, BM discussed Pappe's use of Ben-Gurion's diary in order to demonstrate that his rival isn't in fact an historian. An historian, BM, emphasized, writes history from documents. And in the case of the 1948 war, the documents of the yishuv and the fledgling Israeli state, are all we have to work with. The Arab documents haven't seen the light of day, and they aren't likely to soon. We only perceive the Arab position(s) through western eyes: contemporary diplomatic and intelligence assessments. This is the sad reality of the totalitarian political culture in the Arab states. These are the facts. Inevitably, for the history we write, this is for the worse. Then, BM literally threw his hands up. This sense of helplessness in the face of the perceived inadequacy of one, albeit, a massive, crucial segment of the sources, struck me as worth quarreling with. Is Morris giving up too easy? Take the 1967 war and the Soviet role in that conflict as an example. Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez have recently written a book Foxbats Over Dimona: the Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, which reinterprets official Soviet documents, known for years, in order to rewrite the story of the outbreak of that war, arguing that the USSR was by May 1967 directly intervening with its military in an effort to prevent Israel from producing operational nuclear weapons. However, it was an oral source, I recall, which originally sent Ginor and Remez reviewing old official documents, looking for new ones, and challenging the historiography of '67. A recent veterans' newsletter of some kind published a Ukrainian marine's memory of his unit's orders to invade Israel by way of Haifa if and when the Israelis crossed certain red lines. Would BM's methodology allow him to be sensitive to similar material?

Columbia University to Host Ahmadinejad

It looks like Columbia University will indeed play host to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the occasion of his visit to the UN General Assembly. From what I have heard, competition for tickets to the event is fierce. Everyone seems to want to hear this man speak. I think those responsible for this event are making a mistake.

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger believes that he will be able to use the occasion to put "pointed and challenging questions" to Ahmadinejad. In particular, Bollinger seemed to have in mind the Iranian president's record of Holocaust denial. While I applaud the intentions of Bollinger and others, who want to use Ahmadinejad's lecture as a forum to critique the Iranian president's past remarks and the regime's policies, I fear that they are miscalculating.

All of us in the academy are interested in the free exchange of ideas and the pursuit of truth in which it is supposed to result. But we also accept restrictions on the search for knowledge. For example, ethical scholars will not use data acquired from medical experiments that were conducted on human subjects without their permission. The ethical test with respect to having Ahadinejad speak at Columbia University should not be based on his stance toward U.S. policy in the Middle East. Russian President Vladimir Putin or China's Hu Jintao oppose many key aspects of American foreign policy. They also head regimes with less than stellar democratic credentials. But this is not the issue.

What matters most, in the context of an invitation extended by a university, is Ahmadinejad's public denial of the Holocaust in the past. This is not because the Holocaust is inherently "sacred." The same would apply if Ahmadinejad denied that the French Revolution never happened. Rather, his pseudo-academic initiatives to question a supposed "taboo" on free inquiry into the genocide of European Jewry (read: his effort to engage in willful distortion and negation of a subject whose historicity has been confirmed by thousands of scholarly publications) challenge the core of the university's guiding principles. The public sphere that the university presents is not a free-for-all open to every crackpot and conspiracy theorist with a fondness for spinning yarns. Such a model of the university would drive the pursuit of truth into intellectual bankruptcy. Professors and students would be occupied permanently with fending off unlimited attacks from those unbound by the chains of logic, procedure, respect, and the standards of academic disciplines. Unfortunately, the very admission of such individuals into the world of scholarship bestows credibility on them.

While I would not equate Wolf Blitzer of "The Situation Room" with the academy, I think it is worth watching his interview (see YouTube box above) with Holocaust denier David Duke to see how damaging it can be to give people like these even a modicum of respectability. They do not deserve to enter our classrooms and lecture halls.

Unfortunately, Proverbs gives conflicting advice. In 26:4 we read, "Don't answer a fool according to his foolishness, lest you too will be like him," while 26:5 tell us "Answer a fool according to his foolishness, lest he will appear clever in his own eyes."

משלי כו:ד-ה
אַל-תַּעַן כְּסִיל, כְּאִוַּלְתּוֹ: פֶּן-תִּשְׁוֶה-לּוֹ גַם-אָתָּה.
עֲנֵה כְסִיל, כְּאִוַּלְתּוֹ: פֶּן-יִהְיֶה חָכָם בְּעֵינָיו

Definition of Nationalism

Is this definition complete? Please let me know. Thanks.

Nationalism is the conviction that by virtue of any combination of the following:

1. common language

2. shared “culture” (broadly defined, may include religion)

3. blood-ties

4. geographic proximity

you and a large group of other people belong on the same team.

Further, that you should be ruled by teammates, preferably in the framework of a polity composed largely of team-members.

If any of the previously cited criteria do not apply, you must strive to build institutions, start movements, and create ideologies or narratives to make sure that all those whom you want on your team (for whatever reason) really do speak the same language, share a common culture, blood-ties, and/or geographic proximity, while others, whom you do not want to play with, are excluded.

Norman Finkelstein

Anyone who believes that it is unfair that Norman Finkelstein did not receive tenure should read the man's review of Jan Gross's Neighbors. This piece of tendentious and antisemitic garbage, which he proudly published in a right-of-center Polish newspaper, should have been enough to sway any university committee against giving Finkelstein tenure.

Anti-Defamation League in Hot Water over Armenian Genocide

A Jewcy Banner in a petition that calls on the ADL to recognize the Armenian Genocide

UPDATE: There have been some very interesting new developments, on which I have posted over on Genats-Lehayim. First, the ADL published an "open letter" maintaining their previous position. Today, Foxman finally retracted.

The municipal council of Watertown, Massachusetts, which together with Glendale, California is one of the major Armenian centers in the U.S., last Tuesday voted unanimously to pull out of the "No Place for Hate" tolerance-education program. The reason? The program is funded by the Anti-Defamation League, whose national board, the council alleges, has not been forthright in recognizing the Armenian Genocide.

Among other developments, the controversy has led to the firing of the New England Regional Director of the ADL, Andrew Tarsy, after he defied the national leadership of the organization and called on it to refer to the killing of 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians in 1915 as genocide. Now, some people are hoping that the scandal will lead to the "implosion" of the Anti-Defamation League and the sacking of its controversial leader, Abe Foxman.

One of the people who has been leading the campaign against the ADL is Joey Kurtzman over at Jewcy, who in a July post, Fire Foxman, "broke the news" of a February 2007 meeting between Turkish foreign minister Abdullah Gul and American-Jewish organizations, at which the latter allegedly agreed to oppose a House bill that would recognize the Armenian Genocide. For some thoughts on this meeting, see my post, "Recognizing the Armenian Genocide: Another Round."

I have very little sympathy for some of Kurtzman's other aims, which apparently include "the end of the Jewish people." Unlike Kurtzman, I hardly think the ADL is redundant. And while I can imagine how gratifying it is for a spunky, young Heeb to bash someone like Abe Foxman, I wish Kurtzman could have spared us the self-righteous universalist moralizing. Furthermore, Kurtzman's polemics against the ADL's anti-Mel Gibson campaign are a scandal, as is his pooh-pooing of antisemitism.

Nevertheless, I say mabrouk to the man for his spirited coverage of the Watertown-ADL controversy. To me, the whole episode illustrates something that I have repeated like a broken record on this blog: the American Jewish grassroots overwhelmingly support U.S. recognition of the Armenian Genocide. It's too bad that an excellent program, the ADL's "No Place for Hate," ended up being cut to send a message.

It is clear that there is a split between the grassroots and local leaders on one hand and the diplomatic activity of the larger organizations on the other. The directors are thinking geopolitics. When the Turkish foreign minister invites them to make a pitch for action against an Armenian Genocide resolution by Congress, they are not going to tell him "no" to his face, especially when he joins his plea to the status of the Jewish community in Turkey and to Turkish-Israeli as well as Turkish-American relations. The foreign policy departments of the premier American Jewish diplomatic organizations, such as the American Jewish Committee, are focused on the Middle East today; they are doing everything they can to keep Turkey on America's side, and at least somewhat close to Israel.

The question is whether historical truth, moral integrity, and diaspora Armenians should all suffer for the pursuit of these interests. I say pursuit because I am not convinced that being "neutral" on the Genocide issue - i.e., basically supporting Turkey's denialist status quo - is really furthering concrete interests on the ground. I have talked off-the-record to someone in one of the major foreign-policy oriented Jewish organizations in the U.S. , who supports the traditional line toward Turkey (on Genocide recognition and other issues), and I was surprised by the lack of flexibility and what seems to me unawareness of the dynamic situation we are facing in the region. It reminded me a little bit of Israel's reluctance to seize opportunities in Iraqi Kurdistan, on which Zvi Bar'el had the following to say in Ha'aretz recently:

Israel now fears that renewing the ties with the Kurds will harm its strategic relations with Turkey, which, as a matter of fact, is doing very good business with Kurdistan: Hundreds of Turkish commercial firms have investments there.

Nor does Israel want to clash with American interests. Washington views the Kurds' ambitions for a federation as an effort to undermine Iraqi unity - Washington's great goal. This is the same Washington that doesn't yet know who is a friend and who an enemy in Iraq, but is conveniently ignoring the Kurds and even their request for an American military base to be built in Kurdistan.

Note: this is an expanded version of my post on Genats-Lehayim.

Jesus in the Talmud

Something new to quarrel about. (Image: Princeton Univ. Press)

Princeton University Prof. Peter Schaefer has written a new book called "Jesus in the Talmud," which seeks to move beyond mere positivistic compilation of the meager rabbinic sources for the "historical Jesus," and to instead make sense of these cameos as a kind of "counter-narrative" to the Gospels. Who knew that the authors of the Babylonian Talmud knew the Gospels so well? I'm surprised to learn as well that, as the J-Post review points out, Jesus' Sanhedrin trial (not dealt with explicitly in the Talmud) lacked so much in the way of adherence to Jewish law. As it turns out, it's in the Babylonian Talmud that Jesus tends to show up, in what some zealots are calling, "pornographic" detail, whereas, in the Palestinian Talmud, Jesus appears less often, mostly as a target of an attack on magic. Schaefer's historical explanation here is compelling: in post-Constantinian Palestine, more and more the site of inspired imperial patronage, bashing Jesus was risky. But in Sassanian Babylonia, where an attack on Christianity could be construed as an attack on Rome, it was cool. The J-Post review is a little suspect, but Antiquitopia has read the book and provides interesting analysis. Oh, and in the interest of full disclosure, Schaefer's seen Amos in diapers, so we have to tread carefully here.

War with Syria?

Battle of the Golan Heights, 1967 (Map Source: Wikipedia)

Uri Bar-Yosef is concerned about the lack of interest in negotiations with the Syrians. He argues that Israel is once again underestimating the enemy's willingness to go to war. From 1962 to 1967, Israel's political and military leaders believed that Egypt did not have a military option against Israel because of Nasser's embroilment in the war in Yemen. Hence, Israel persisted in escalating the conflict with Syria. According to Bar-Yosef, it was the domestic pressure inside Egypt, which eventually forced Nasser's hand and compelled him to move his army into Sinai. The lesson for today: pushing Assad into a corner could lead to a Syrian attack on Israel, which would be painful, even if unsuccessful.

Bar-Yosef seems to be arguing for the primacy of domestic politics in understanding the likelihood of a Syrian decision to go to war. This frame of reference, in his view, increases the possibility of Assad turning to a military option. On the other hand, if we were to see foreign policy and such measures as national interest and security as the primary factors, it would seem rather obvious that it is not in Syria's interest to attack Israel.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, West German historians such as Fritz Fischer, in his second work, War of Illusions (1969), and Hans-Ulrich Wehler in his German Empire (1972), suggested that the empire's ruling elite saw the war as a domestic stabilizing factor that would function to safeguard its power from the challenges of democratization. This thesis has since been heavily revised, but few historians today would argue for the absolute supremacy of foreign policy considerations in the decision to go to war.

Does Assad need a war (or peace agreement, for that matter) to stay in power? What would the cost-benefit ratio of such a decision be?

Historical Note on Turkish-American Relations

The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire

(Perry Castaneda, click to magnify)

Hazbani's questions about U.S. policy toward the Ottoman empire and the Turkish republic after WWI sparked my interest in the history of Turco-American relations.

As Hazbani noted, the U.S. did not declare war on the Ottoman empire in 1917 - a decision in line with the non-interventionist policy it had pursued since the late 19th century. The U.S.'s main concerns then were protecting the investments that American missionaries had made in educational institutions, as part of efforts to convert Ottoman Christian minorities. But the American also had an eye to future economic opportunities. The latter motivations became preeminent after 1918, when most of the Ottoman Christian populations had either left or been killed or deported.

It is interesting that Hazbani mentioned a US Navy paper, on "USN relations with Turkey from 1914-1940," as the person whom many associate with redefinition of American relations with Turkey after the war was Admiral Mark Bristol, the U.S. High Commissioner to Turkey from 1919-1927. Bristol saw economic and investment opportunities for the U.S. in Turkey, and he was not blind to the navy's need for oil (Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, pp. 185-187).

Another point that Hazbani made was about the relatively benign stance of the U.S. toward the defeated Ottoman empire, especially when compared to the rapacious aims of the British, French, Italians, and Greeks.

Under the Treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 10, 1920, the Ottoman empire was not only stripped of all its non-Turkish territories (in the Balkans and in North Africa), but also of some of its Anatolian possessions. The oil-rich town of Mosul, one of those former Ottoman empire possessions that Melih Can was talking about, was seized by the British as part of the Iraq mandate. The French took Cilisia as part of their Syrian mandate. In Eastern Anatolia, the Allies recognized the Armenian and Kurdish claims to independence. Finally, in May 1919, the Allies approved of the Greek occupation of Smyrna (or Izmir in Turkish) in the west, also on the grounds of national self-determination (Greek statisticians claimed a Greek majority in the city). However, the Italians were allowed to occupy Antalya in SW Anatolia (Norman Rich, Great Power Diplomacy since 1914, p. 61).

The U.S. did not participate in this, partly because it had not been party to the irresponsible promises of territorial spoils made by the Allies to each other. However, American businessmen were happy to go along with the British in looking for oil in tapping the Mosul oil fields. There actually was a certain convergence of US and British interests here, but the U.S. came to differ with Britain and the other European powers on the future of Turkey. The British, under Lloyd George, hoped to persuade America to guarantee Armenian independence and thereby put in place a check against both Bolshevik and possible Turkish pan-Islamist (or pan-Turkic?) ambitions. The Americans refused, and eventually came to see a strong, nationalist Turkey as a preferred alternative (Bloxham, Ibid., pp. 192-193).

Atatürk (Wikipedia)

In the meantime, Mustafa Kemal had risen to the top of the Turkish nationalist movement. In October 1920, the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Armenian Republic and turned it into a Soviet Republic. But with the Red Army embroiled in a war with Poland, Kemal attacked the Armenian Soviet Republic and regained all the lost Turkish territory, including Batum, Kars, and Ardahan; Batum was later returned, and became part of the Georgian Soviet. Kemal also signed a treaty with France, which returned Cilicia in southern Anatolia as well as arms, in exchange for Tureky's recognition of the French mandate over Syria. Lastly, the Italians surrender their Anatolian claims in return for certain economic stipulations and Turkish acceptance of their possession of Tripoli, the Dodecanese islands, and Rhodes. In August 1922, the Turks took back Smyrna from the Greeks. Finally, the nationalist forces headed north to Constantinople, where the British were still defending the sultan and the Treaty of Sèvres. Soon thereafter, Kemal led the domestic revolution that deposed Sultan Mehmed VI on November 17. The net result: Anatolia had been secured under the leadership of a modern, Western-oriented Turkish Republic.

These Turkish gains were consolidated under the November 20, 1922 Treaty of Lausanne. Armenian and Kurdish independence in eastern Anatolia had been quashed, as had Greek claims in the west (eastern Thrace); only Mosul was lost to the Mesopotamian mandate, and Alexandretta (İskenderun) to France (the latter became part of Turkey again in 1939) (Rich, Ibid., pp. 85-87).

(Map source: Wikipedia)

From 1922 to 1989, American policy viewed a strong, undivided Turkey as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and as a force for stability in the region. Although Turkey's pursuit of an autarkic economic policy and its trade relations with the Weimar Republic and then the Hitler regime during the interwar period and into the 1930s meant that many of America's economic hopes were not realized then, the military and economic aid that poured into Turkey in the 1940s cemented the American role in the country.

Turkey, it seems clear, now wants some of the oil spoils of which it had been deprived by the British after WWI. In addition to protecting its population from terrorist attacks, the country also wants to safeguard its territorial integrity, which it sees threatened by the rise of a Kurdish state on its southern border, and Kurdish control over oil revenues from Kirkuk and elsewhere. The trick for the U.S. will be to determine how to keep the Turks in line with its own interests, at the lowest price possible.

Forty Years Ago

למען אחי ורעי - אדברה נא שלום בך
"For the sake of my brothers' and companions, I will now say 'peace be within you,'" (Ps. 122)

The war that began on June 5, 1967, as a myriad of commentators have pointed out, is still with us. While Israel handily defeated the Arab states that had joined against it - crushing the Egyptian air force and army, pushing the Jordanians across the river, and taking the Golan from Syria over a period of 6 days - the country's leaders opened up a front in an unwinnable war, when they decided to occupy Gaza and the West Bank.

The triumph of 1967, the salvation from destruction, the opening up of the Holy City to the Jewish people, forty years later looks like a Pyhrric victory. Who can stand up today and say that the decision to occupy the captured territories to the east and to the south, and, later, even to tolerate the construction of settlements on them, was "worth it"?

The settlers believed that the Palestinians would consent to being "subjects," living in the Land of Israel like the ancient Canaanites. Maybe they were looking at the other Arab states in the region - few of which gave their populations the right to vote or to exercise sovereignty. But how did an entire generation of ostensibly sane people in the government and military come to believe that such an absurd scenario was possible? What role, did they imagine, would the newly-acquired land and its inhabitants play in the state?

It is true that the Palestinians have, time and again, provided Israel with plenty of reasons not to withdraw from these territories. What have concessions brought Israel, demands the right? Suicide bombings during the Oslo years? Qassam rockets from un-occupied Gaza? When one reads the prophecies of someone like Angry Arab, who cites a generous American professor "giv[ing] Israel 80 years" and who openly admits that he sees no future for the Jews in the Middle East -

"Personally, I am for a secular state in Palestine where Jews, Christians, and Muslims live together in peace, but Israel has made that ideal remote (in terms of Jewish-Arab coexistence in Palestine without a religious labeled-state). Israeli crimes over the decades have endangered Jewish existence in the Middle East, and I fear that Israel will endanger that existence further--even in Palestine"

- one wonders what the point of Israeli concessions might be.

However, the angry professor, try as he might to make his prophecy self-fulfilling, might be proven wrong after all. Even if the Palestinians cannot be trusted to deliver on any agreement, somehow Israelis might still be persuaded to evacuate the West Bank in exchange for a comprehensive peace with the Arab states still hostile to Israel. Following such an agreement, Israel would still have to endure attacks from the West Bank and Gaza. But perhaps Israeli civilian casualties (from whatever new tactic that the Palestinians will devise) will be reduced to a "tolerable" level, as they have been in the past year. And maybe, as unlikely as it seems given the Gazan example, some strong Palestinian leaders will slowly start giving their people an option other than armed struggle. The result of such a scenario would not be "peace." It would be the kind of conflict management that Tom Segev describes in the conclusion of an op-ed in today's New York Times.

Ha'aretz Op-eds:

Tom Segev, מה נשכח באותו בוקר [What was forgotten that morning], English
Saeb Erekat, הערבים בחרו בשלום [The Arabs chose peace], English
Shlomo Avineri, אחרי 40 שנה, להחליט לבד [Deciding alone after 40 years],
Dani Rabinowitz, איזה יום היום? [What day is today?], English
Bradley Burston, בגן הילדים השמאלני [In the leftist kindergarten]
Amira Hass, בשבחי הכיבוש [In praise of the occupation], English
Moshe Arens, נרתעת מלהרתיע [Flinching from deterring], English

Op-eds and articles in the U.S. and European press marking the fortieth anniversary of the war:

Fouad Ajami, "Israel's Triumph," US News & World Report
Ian Black, "Six days of war, 40 years of failure," The Guardian
Michel Bôle-Richard, "1967-2007 : la Palestine démembrée," Le Monde
Wolfgang Günter Lerch, "Ein Pyrrhus-Sieg vor vierzig Jahren," Frankfurter Allgemeine
Michael Oren, "Remaking the world in six days," LA Times
Ralph Peters, "Six-Day War, 40 Years on: Israeli Victories brought de-facto Peace," New York Post
Tom Segev, "What if Israel Had Turned Back," New York Times
Letters to the Editor in response to Segev, New York Times
"Les cicatrices de la guerre des Six-jours," Le Monde [Interview with Tom Segev]
"Les plaies d'Israël", L'Express [another interview with Segev]
Thorsten Schmitz, "Der hohe Preis des schnellen Sieges," Sueddeutsche Zeitung
Bettina Vestring, "Israel vor vierzig Jahren," Berliner Zeitung

Tom Segev on the Jewish Lobby, Jimmy Carter, and Berkeley

"Ugly Fountain," Berkeley (May 2007)

In the question and answer session at a lecture that Jimmy Carter gave here in Berkeley on May 2, the moderator [thanks, Yaman] of the Q&A session mentioned a conversation that he had had with Tom Segev earlier that day. He quoted the Israeli journalist and historian as having told him that "it's a very healthy thing for friends of Israel not to feel as if they can't criticize the occupation."

Segev repeated these remarks during the question and answer session of his own lecture on May 8. In response to the question, "In this century, how much do you think the Israeli lobby in the U.S. has succeeded in influencing [indistinct], particularly the Republican right," which to me seemed like a total non sequitur given the subject of the lecture, Segev first asked for clarification of the term, and - unless I misinterpreted the exchange that followed - accepted the redefinition of "Israeli lobby" as "Jewish lobby," without flinching. He then said that

One relatively new development in American society is that for first time I hear an argument about that. This is a new subject [applause from the audience]. This is what I found interesting about Carter’s speech and his book. You have to rethink the meaning of friendship. You will no longer believe that friendship with Israel means supporting the Israeli government, but rather make a distinction between the government and the country. This tendency to reformulate what it means to be friends with Israel is very interesting and encouraging.

As you can see, Segev did not really engage the question. Maybe he didn't understand it or perhaps he simply chose to ignore its ugly tone. In either case, I am stunned by the indifference to American Jewish concerns and debates that his non-response betrayed. I am not in principle about what Segev said here; I am simply amazed that he failed to connect this question to some of the ugly tendencies that we saw in the wake of the Mearsheimer and Walt article as well as the Jimmy Carter book. This kind of myopia and lack of interest in the concerns of American Jewry are, however, quite typical of people on the Israeli left.


The next question was equally astounding: "What do you propose Israel do with Jerusalem, in light of Carter’s speech?"

Segev's response: "I don't think there is anything that we need to do in light of Carter's speech." He then went on to share his own impressions of Carter's book and the man himself:

Carter doesn’t really say much. What he says in his book, is that if Israelis and Palestinians are nice to each other there will be no war. The story is very complicated. Jerusalem has been a problem without a solution for 3,000 years. It may remain a problem like this. The challenge is managing this problem. Barak was once caught reading a book on “300 solutions to the problem of Jerusalem.” If a problem has that many "solutions," this might mean that there is no real solution. I was struck by how a former president of the United States could come up with a plan ... that the best thing you can say about it is that it is so naïve. It is only one of many other plans. I actually had a chance to tell him that – this is one of the great Berkeley moments that I was thinking of earlier. I was introduced to him, and I told him this.

For Segev, one of the other highlights of spending the semester at Berkeley was the "absolutely thrilling experience" of teaching his seminar on "1967." He said that it was clear to him that he was meeting some of America's brightest students, who were extremely passionate about what they believed should happen to Israel, "even though most of them know almost nothing about the country." He also spoke fondly of his meetings with Salim Tamari from Birzeit University, a visiting professor in Berkeley's Department of History, whose lecture was the subject of an earlier post.

Another view of the I-House

Assorted Other Remarks

Segev on differences between his generation and young Israelis today:

The main difference between us and the younger generation is that the latter no longer believes in peace. The geopolitical situation has changed. The conflict has become deeper, more violent, more difficult to solve. My generation, including the Israeli peace movement, deserves very little praise. The new generation is a more realistic generation, less idealistic. They don’t believe in grand solutions but in conflict management. Peace may not be attained in the foreseeable future. But perhaps this generation will manage conflict in a more rational manner – this is the most optimistic thought I can share with you.

Segev on the conflict between memory and historiography:

Everything that happened in the region since the 6-day war has occurred in its shadow. This puts 1967 somewhere between history and memory. There is always someone in the audience who tells me, “why do you even bother going to the archives, I can tell you all about the war.” Of course, a soldier in a tank never knows anything about the general picture of the war. I would not be able to convince him that anything was different from how he remembers it. Documents will always be trumped by memory. 1967, furthermore, is not quite easy to document.

On sources:

Israel has a relatively liberal policy on opening archives. But there are some things that we just don’t know. We don’t know if Israel in 1967 already had an atomic bomb. This makes a big difference – did any cabinet minister know? Did it play a role? Much of Israel’s foreign policy was conducted by the Mossad, which doesn’t open its archives. Much of what was done in the territories was conducted by the Shin Bet, which also doesn’t open its archives.
[...]
Fortunately, Israeli officials have the commendable habit of taking home documents and not bringing them back. Much of the more significant information comes from records that are “private papers.” An important factor in the success of Israeli historians is their ability to talk to widows of important politicians. I spent many days in the kitchen of Miri Eshkol ...

In response to the question, "Is there any truth to the rumor about plans to trade villages inhabited by Israeli Arabs in Israel proper for settlements in the W. Bank?"

This is an idea that even voicing it should be made illegal. These people are Israeli citizens, they enjoy every right, and they have no wish to be anything else. If you want an indication of how far Israel has come from its original values that it once cherished - it’s possible to say things today that a few years ago no one would have dared to say. Everything is in the open today. I think this is a very dangerous idea. Fortunately very few Israeli Jews and Arabs would go for it.

Tom Segev on 1967

Berkeley's International House, May 2007

The distinguished journalist and historian Tom Segev has been at Berkeley for the past semester as a Diller Family Israeli Visiting Professor, where he has been teaching a seminar on "The Six-Day War, 40 Years Later," and a course about "Reporting on the Middle East."

Yesterday, Segev gave a public lecture on "1967: Israel's Longest Year" at Berkeley's International House. The talk offered a preview of his latest book, 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East,* which will appear in English translation at the end of this month. (Another advertised title for the lecture was "Israel's Longest War").

The effects of the Six-Day War can hardly be underestimated. As Segev remarked, "those of you who follow the news will not be surprised to hear that 1967 is not over yet."

Segev's previous books include one of my favorite works of history, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust,** and several other stellar contributions to the historiography on the yishuv, Zionism, and the state of Israel, such as One Palestine Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate,*** and 1949: The First Israelis.****

The question is - what does Segev add to the history of the Six-Day War? After all, as Segev acknowledged, the "events that led to the 6-day-war have been widely researched and analyzed."

According to Segev, one particular dimension of the war has been ignored hitherto. The 1967 war was "an international Cold War story, an Arab-Israeli story, and a Palestinian story." But, more than anything else, the Six-Day War was an Israeli story. That is, to understand why the war broke out we really need "deep knowledge of the Israelis themselves – not just the diplomatic record."

Segev's greatest strength is his ability as a narrator. His successful books combine probing archival research and sharp, often unsettling analysis, with a great journalist's eye for revealing anecdotes and the masterful storytelling practiced by the best prose stylists. In his lecture, Segev revealed a taste of some of these skills, as he sketched out the atmosphere of Israel in the 1960s, when the country "was emerging as one of the more impressive success stories of the 20th century." According to Segev,

Most Israelis had good reason to be proud of their country and confident of its future. Two million Jewish refugees had been taken in. The economy was booming. There was also a culture boom. The efforts to build a nation around a common national identity had advanced greatly. Israeli high school students reached first place in an international mathematics competition. Shmuel Yosef Agnon received a Nobel Prize for Literature.

In short, in the early 1960s, "Israelis had good reason to believe that their children would live better lives." Then, suddenly, in the one-and-a-half years before the 1967 Six-Day War, all this optimism stopped abruptly. Depression spread across the country. Drawing on press reports and more than 500 letters, many sent by Israelis to their friends and relatives abroad, Segev evokes a world in which citizens' hopes for the future seemed to have vanished overnight.

In 1966, for the first time since 1953, more Jews emigrated from the country than immigrated to it. The years of 12% annual growth gave way to economic depression. And dark jokes circulated about signs at airport asking the "last person leaving the country [to] please turn off the lights."

The Zionist dream appeared to be crumbling for many of the country's citizens. An ordinary politician, Levi Eshkol, had replaced the heroic David Ben Gurion as prime minister. Outside of the political sphere, Israeli society was losing its Ashkenazi character, "which worried no small number," as Jews from Middle Eastern countries began asserting themselves in the public sphere, eventually overtaking the Ashkenazi population in numbers.

Into all this stepped Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, who moved his troops to Israel's border, and menaced the country's citizens with incendiary speeches. "It is no wonder," Segev argued,

that many Israelis truly believed that Egypt was about to destroy their country, literally to exterminate Israel. That frequently-used term clearly evoked the Holocaust.

The apocalyptic mood of the country is perhaps best represented by the documented reports of municipal rabbis sanctifying football fields to be used as mass burial grounds for hundreds of thousands people, who were expected to die within hours of the war breaking out. This "genuine Holocaust panic," Segev believes, made war with Egypt inevitable in 1967. In June of that year, Israeli society "was very weak - too weak not to strike at Egypt."

The situation changed completely after Israel's devastating attack on the grounded Egyptian air force, and its subsequent victory over the Egyptian army in Sinai. What happened next - the wars against Jordan and Syria, Segev claims, "expressed a surge of power and messianic passion." More importantly - and this is surely the heart of his message - these conquests contradicted Israel's national interest, not just as it it was perceived in subsequent decades but also as it was imagined immediately before the war.

Segev's evidence for this claim consists of the notes from a January 1967 meeting between the heads of the Mossad, foreign office, and army intelligence branch. "What happened at that meeting," he quipped, "was a rare occurrence. They came together and they thought." The question that they were thinking about was whether Israel should invade East Jerusalem and the West Bank, given a number of scenarios such as the Jordanian King Hussein's death, a Palestinian uprising, or an Iraqi invasion of Jordan. The conclusion on which all of them agreed, and which they presented in a common paper, was that it was not in Israel's interest to take the West Bank because of the Palestinian population there.

In the euphoria of the victory against Egypt - perceived as a moment of messianic redemption - strategic considerations, Segev argues, suddenly went out the window. We have been living with the consequences ever since.

Next post - some of the questions Segev received and his answers, including his dressing-down of Jimmy Carter, as well his take on Berkeley and its students (positive and also funny).

* 2005. 1967: ‏ ‏והארץ שינתה את פניה

**1991. המיליון השביעי :הישראלים והשואה
ימי הכלניות : ארץ ישראל בתקופת המנדט 1999 ***
1949: הישראלים הראשונים 1984. ****

Yom ha-Shoah

Emmanuel Ringelblum ז"ל

Today, Jews in Israel and in the diaspora commemorate the millions who were murdered by the Nazis and their allies in the Second World War. In the United States, many synagogues and Jewish community centers will hold remembrance ceremonies and lectures tonight. In Israel, an official commemoration ceremony is held at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial. At 10 am on Monday, a siren sounded for two minutes, and people stood silently to mark the day.

Yom ha-Shoah is usually observed on the 27th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan. Because that day fell on a Sunday this year, which means that the day of mourning would have begun Saturday night just before the conclusion of the Sabbath (in Jewish tradition, a day begins on the evening before), the observance was pushed to Nisan 28, 5767 (April 16, 2007).

If you want to take this opportunity to learn something about the Shoah, Yad Vashem has a new online exhibit on Emmanuel Ringelblum's "Oneg Shabbat" or, in Ashkenazi pronunciation, "Oyneg Shabbos" [lit., "pleasure of the Sabbath"] archive in the Warsaw Ghetto. Ringelblum (1900-1944) was a young Polish-Jewish historian, who devoted his time in the ghetto to systematically recording the trials, tribulations, and occasional triumphs of everyday life under the most cruel circumstances. He directed a large team of contributors, who secretly gathered material for the archive, and successfully hid most of its contents in milk canisters and metal crates, which were recovered after the war, in 1946.

A page from Ringelblum's diary. The first 1942 entry, from January 8-26, begins:

January 1942. The conditions for the refugees are simply unbearable. Because of the shortage of coals, they are freezing to death.

The title of the exhibit is "Let the world read and know," an excerpt from a longer statement by an Oneg Shabbat activist that appears in the archives:

It must all be committed with not a single word omitted. And when the time comes - as it surely will - let the world read and know what the murderers have done

The photographs are from Emmanuel Ringelblum, Ktavim fun Geto, Volume 1: Togbukh fun Varshever Geto, 1942-1939 (Warsaw, 1961). Thank you, Judy, for this gift.

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I recently received a link to a very moving recording obtained by NPR from the Smithsonian. Taped by a British reporter in April 1945 at Bergen-Belsen, shortly after its liberation, it preserves for posterity the voices of Jewish camp survivors singing "Hatikvah," which later became the anthem of the State of Israel. Note that they are singing an earlier version, which has slightly different lyrics in the second stanza. Thank you, Ms Dessen.

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In the English Wikipedia entry on Yom ha-Shoah, you can read the following gem:

Most of the Jewish community consider the day a Jewish religious holiday. Non-Zionist Orthodox Jews do not, instead remembering the victims on days that were already days of mourning before the Holocaust, such as Tisha b'Av in the summer, and the Tenth of Tevet, in the winter. It deliberately ignores other victims of the Holocaust such as Gay people, Gypsies, the Mentally Ill, the Disabled or Easter Europeans sent to the Gas Chambers.

It's amazing to me how even the commemoration of the Shoah can be turned into an attack on the Jewish people, along the old canard that the Jews are misanthropes who care only about their own suffering. I'm not going to get into how misleading and tendentious the second sentence is.

---

Yad Vashem Council Chair Tommy Lapid, a former Israeli parliamentarian and minister, said that

even after the Holocaust we witnessed genocide in Biafra, Cambodia, Rwanda, and we must cry out against the genocide currently being committed in Darfur in Sudan.

MK Ahmed Tibi (Ra'am-Ta'al) called the Holocaust "the greatest crime in the history of humanity," and condemned those who deny the Shoah (Ha'aretz).

Cross-posted from Genats-Lehayim.

German Police Cadets are Sick of the Holocaust

Berlin Police Commissioner Dieter Glietsch
(Photo: Berlin.de)

German politicians, activists, and Jewish community representatives have expressed outrage over comments allegedly made by "an entire class of police cadets" to a Holocaust survivor who was delivering a lecture on the Nazi period, antisemitism, and xenophobia at the Berlin Police Academy.

The incident took place nearly a month ago, on February 27, when the 83-year-old Isaak Behar visited the class, as part of a session about the Nazi regime mandated by the curriculum. Police cadets apparently told Behar that they resented "constantly being reminded about the Holocaust." Others made remarks to the effect that "Jews are rich" (Tagesspiegel).

The story, first reported by the Berliner Zeitung, has received widespread coverage in German newspapers since it broke on March 19. A report of what transpired during the discussion only reached Berlin's Police Commissioner, Dieter Glietsch, last week, "almost by accident" and through sources outside of the department. It is possible that Behar himself brought it to Glietsch's attention. The commissioner expressed his consternation about the report and about the fact that it had only reached him now (Berliner Zeitung). An inquiry has already begun, and condemnation has been virtually unanimous.

Reports about a resurgence of antisemitism in Germany invariably make big headlines - in Germany and abroad. There are certainly reasons to be concerned, but I hope that the blame does not fall on the German police or state, for the problem clearly lies elsewhere. This has not always been the case. Just twenty years ago, German politicians and civil servants were far slower in responding to reports of antisemitism. But the current German elite is sui generis in its awareness of the dark sides of the German past and its dedication to combating antisemitism and Holocaust denial - with a few exceptions. I would even go so far as to say that no country's political elite in the world today can claim to be as sincere as Germany's in confronting its past.

While the current German elite, which came to political maturity in the 1960s, shares a fundamental consensus about the importance of Holocaust education, a younger generation of Germans is slowly undermining the values and institutions for which some of its parents (the ones born in West Germany) struggled for several decades. This younger generation, composed of men and women who while born in pre-1989 West or East Germany have spent most of their lives in the unified Federal Republic, today declares that it is "sick of the Holocaust." In the words of one German headline "Deutsche Polizisten: Kein Bock auf Holocaust Vortrag" (if anyone knows how to translate this into equally compelling idiomatic English, please let me know).

Of course, German fatigue about the Holocaust, which once prompted Henryk Broder to quip that "the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz," is not an entirely new phenomenon. Perhaps there has always been a profound disconnect between the discourse of the elite described earlier and that of German society at large. Things have only become more complicated since Germany's unification, especially as neo-Nazi or "national" groups in East Germany emerged as protest movements against the communist regime before 1989, and against immigrants and leftists today. I think the reaction of the police cadets reflects the views of large segments of the German people from similar class backgrounds. They have increasingly come to the conclusion that the Holocaust is being rammed down their throats.

Contrary to the claims of right-wing demagogues, I don't believe that there is a surfeit of Holocaust education in the country. But an effective strategy to counter these dangerous tendencies cannot consist in hysteria about the return of Nazism to Germany. Perhaps, it might be a better idea to dwell on the positive. Organizations such as the American Jewish Committee have long realized this. The point is that Germans have a great deal to be proud of when it comes to dealing with their history - just consider, for the sake of comparison, the situation in Japan or Turkey. The German elite should be confident of this record and its role in in these achievements; it should speak of German accomplishments in this sphere as much as it speaks of duties and responsibilities today. At the same time, of course Germans must continue to monitor and engage critically, in clear terms and without glossing over the issues involved, the kind of self-serving (and often antisemitic) ressentiment that came to the surface in the affair of the Berlin police cadets.

ON A DIFFERENT NOTE:
I encountered some bizarre transcriptions of German words in a Ha'aretz article about the incident described above. The article referred to chants of "Zig [sic] Heil" (i.e. Sieg Heil), and to the police academy's tours of the "Ziekenhuizen [sic] concentration camp" (probably the Sachsenhausen KZ just outside Berlin). I'm not sure how to explain these transcriptions - both of these spellings look vaguely Dutch to me, so maybe they hired some translators from the Netherlands or Belgium.