“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken,” said Stephen Dedalus, Irish author James Joyce’s autobiographical character in his novel “Ulysses.”
Former Israeli politician-turned-businessman Avraham Burg apparently can relate to that sentiment. Only he thinks that the state of Israel and the whole Jewish people should “awaken from history,” particularly the nightmare that was the German Nazi Holocaust, the Shoah.
And so he wrote a book published in Israel last year, titled in Hebrew “Defeating Hitler” (“Le-natse’akh et Hitler”), but now released in English translation as, “The Holocaust Is Over We Must Rise From Its Ashes” (Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95 hardcover, 253 pages).
Burg has made at least one visit to Milwaukee many years ago, at which I met him and heard him speak. I don’t recall whether at that time he was head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, or was just an up-and-coming young Israeli politician.
But I do remember he impressed me favorably with his ready command of English, his keen intelligence and his sense of humor.
That memory made the reading of this book a sad experience for me. Burg clearly has become disappointed in the whole Zionist project.
And he contends the problem is that too many Israelis and Jews have not been able to leave the Holocaust behind, or not been able sufficiently to universalize its lessons.
“For many years, we [Israelis] have lived comfortably, thanks to a national hypocrisy that tries to contain two conflicting worlds: well-being and complaint, power and victimhood, success and trauma,” he writes.
“Our private worlds are defined by physical security, personal comfort and even wealth, both as individuals and as a nation. Our state is well established and powerful, almost without precedence since the destruction of the Second Temple.
“Yet for some acquired psychological deficiency, we try to hide this splendor by constantly whining — because we had a holocaust. We always want a stronger army because of the Shoah, and more resources from other countries’ taxpayers, and an automatic forgiveness for any of our excesses. We want to be above criticism and attention, all these because of Hitler’s 12 years.…
“It cannot go on like this forever. This inherent contradiction will smash its vessel, the state, and the society that contains it.”
And so he proclaims: “The era of fearful Judaism and paranoid Zionism is over. The time for integration in a free, positive world has come. The faith of the Jewish people in the world and in humanity must be rehabilitated.”
It truly is sad to see so intelligent a person appear to have become so delusional.
Not that he is completely off base. Astronomers tell us that those interstellar sources of infinite gravity, black holes, are so powerful that they warp light and the space around them.
I often think that the Holocaust has affected Jewish life and many people’s view of Jewish history much the same way, and that we Jews today are all living in a warped space by warped light as a result of that black hole in our people’s experience.
But that space and light are warped not because the Holocaust was an illusion or “an acquired psychological deficiency,” as Burg seems to think. It really happened. Worse, the majority of the world really permitted it to happen.
And a chunk of the world’s population really wants to do it or something similar to us again; and if they were able to start it again, most of the rest of the world’s population either wouldn’t care or be willing or able to do much to stop them.
Compress the planet’s human population into 1,000 people, and only two of them would be Jews. Compress the planet’s humans into 1,500 people, and three would be Jews, of which only one would be an Israeli Jew.
It certainly is not true that “The whole world is against us,” as states an Israeli proverb that Burg cites with disapproval. But given Jews’ small numbers, we are still vulnerable. It doesn’t take many of the rest to be actively “against us” to put us in real danger.
Add to that the tendency of humans to be tribal/nationalistic and to decline to do much that is really effective — i.e., go to war — to protect or save endangered foreign peoples — not just Jews, but Tutsis, Darfurians, Armenians, Tibetans, Muslim Albanians, Cambodians, Argentineans, not to mention the Russians and Chinese murdered by communist governments — and it doesn’t matter how “well established and powerful” the tiny state of Israel may be. It is not nearly well established or powerful enough.
In addition to ignoring these facts, Burg, like too many people on the political left, underestimates the reality and virulence of the Arab/Muslim world’s disdain for Jews and Judaism.
In fact, while he denies the anti-Israel crazies’ comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany, he does draw “painful comparisons between Israel today and the Germany that preceded Hitler.”
In both he sees over-glorification of the military, “infiltration of a right-wing narrative into the mainstream,” a majority of the public indifferent and passive, “national mythology and blood-earth relationships,” all of which “allow [anti-Arab] racism to contaminate our world.”
I can’t believe I have to say this, but there is a difference between real threats and imaginary and delusional threats.
Germany was not truly threatened by anybody, least of all by its minority of Jews. Its leaders started World Wars I and II in response to threats that existed in their own minds or that were propaganda behind which lurked desire for national aggrandizement at other nations’ expense; and they could have achieved much more for their people by peaceful means.
Yes, Israel is not a perfect society inhabited by perfect people. It has its share of bigots.
A minority of extremist Jewish settlers in particular displays practically a mirror image of the Islamic fascists in their self-righteousness, prejudice, willingness to inflict gratuitous and unnecessary humiliation and violence upon Arabs in the West Bank, and their sense that they are above the law. (See related story in this issue, page 18.)
But deduct all that, and a sad truth remains: Israel and the Jewish people today face real threats from an Arab-Muslim world that outnumbers them by a factor of 100.
And this world for the most part believes — not in the genes of its people’s race(s), but in the depths of its culture — that Jews and Judaism, if allowed to exist at all, must exist in subordination to Muslims and Islam.
And we know this because many of their political and religious leaders say so from Pakistan to Libya; and because the history of Jewish life in the Arab-Muslim world displays it. Don’t believe it? Read the book, “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.”
And yet, much as I have to disagree with Burg’s assessment of the situation, I have to say I found much with which to sympathize in his book.
First, much of it contains not argument but reminiscences of his life and especially of his parents. These portions are interesting and often moving as he tries to understand his Germany-born father and his mother, a survivor of the Hebron riots of the 1930s.
But second, I think anybody who has any real sympathy with the Jewish people as a whole can understand why some of us, especially in Israel, cannot admit that the fate and situation of the Jews is beyond our control by our own actions.
After more than 60 years alternating periods of war and terrorism, a lot of Israelis and Diaspora Jews want it to stop and don’t want to believe that there is nothing concrete they can do to make it stop.
There must be something we can do, this thinking goes — retreat to the Green Line, displace the settlers, repeal the Law of Return, universalize the Holocaust, create a two-state solution unilaterally, whatever — to take charge of our own fate and not wait for others to do things.
I can hear this in Burg’s last chapter, presenting his vision of the future. “When we wake up, history will resume. Life will return to life and it will become clear that it is impossible to dig in, forever, in the trenches that stretch between the cemeteries….
“Because it is possible, we must do it. We must leave the Valley of Weeping, the shadows of death and climb up to the hills of hope and optimism.”
If he and other Jews like him turn out to be right, I will joyously say so. But while we Jews are such a tiny minority among a human community divided between a minority that hates us and a majority that is indifferent and inertial, I and many other Jews cannot share a vision that looks less like life-affirming optimism and more like wishful, if not magical, thinking.
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