Melanie Phillips
Earlier today, at a meeting organised by the law firm Mishcon de Reya, Professor Dina Porat of Tel Aviv university gave a devastating talk about the fact that the contemporary left uses —or rather, grossly misuses — the Holocaust to fuel its anti-Zionism.
AIn brief, her argument was this. In the years after World War Two, the west conspicuously refused to acknowledge that the driver of the Holocaust was antisemitism. In her introduction to the first edition of Anne Frank's Diary in 1952, Eleanor Roosevelt omitted any reference to the fact that Anne Frank was Jewish, to Jews or to the Holocaust. In similar vein the post war conventions on genocide, on establishing the UN and on human rights law also omitted any reference to antisemitism. The reason, said Prof Porat, was that the west had suffered some 200 million deaths or other casualties from the war and wanted to expunge it from its collective mind as fast as possible. Furthermore, with the west plunged almost immediately into the Cold War, old enemies suddenly became allies against the Soviet Union.
The result was that there was no move even to define antisemitism until the 1990s, and a definition did not actually emerge at all until as late as 2005 from the EU Monitoring Centre. This includes as examples of antisemitism, 'Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations', 'Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination eg by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour' and 'Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis'. Since a large number of prominent British and other western left-wingers have propounded all those things, it follows that such people are antisemites by the EU's definition. And yet they are 'progressives' committed to human rights, anti-racism and all that jazz.
So how did this happen? According to Professor Porat, the use of the Holocaust as an anti-Zionist and antisemitic tool which lies at the heart of this phenomenon is confined to the left. By and large the left does not deny the Holocaust, a role largely played by the extreme right. Nevertheless, by abusing the Holocaust in a different way the left ends up in a similar position. Holocaust deniers say that Jews must have sick minds to accuse the Germans of such an unimaginable crime. They go on to blame the Jews for seeking to appropriate to themselves the role of ultimate victim and to manipulate public debate in order to wrap themselves in that mantle. The left creates the same image of the manipulative Jew crying false victimhood, but this time around the issue of Israel.
With antisemitism entirely consigned to the shadows until the 1990s, the left set about finding other reasons for the Holocaust. In an obscene inversion of cause and effect, certain influential leftists blamed Zionism through what they falsely claimed was a collaboration between Zionists and the Nazis to move Jews from Germany to Palestine — a calumny which spawned such grotesque collective libels as Jim Allen's play Perdition and other similarly poisonous effluvia. This has now morphed into the charge that Israeli Jews and Jews who support Israel have themselves turned into Nazis.
This deranged belief derives from a cocktail of ideology and prejudice. The victim culture championed by the left has created a large number of 'victim' groups all claiming primacy over each other. French thinkers such as Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Levy have described this as a 'competition of martyrdom' in which groups such as American blacks, gays lesbians and other gender activists, American Indians and indigenous peoples everywhere, Muslims and so on, all compete to be considered the most victimised group on the planet. But the Holocaust, which although victimising others was specifically a Jewish genocide, made the Jews into the ultimate victims of a unique persecution. That uniqueness was considered a threat by others who resented the claim because it seemed to them to diminish their own claim to have suffered.
This in turn played into the personality of leftists who are strongly anti-American and therefore hate the Jews who they believe control America; who are anti-globalisation and therefore hate the Jews because they think they control the world's finances; who are anti-colonialist and therefore hate the Jews because in their total ignorance of the Middle East and Jewish history they think Israel is a colonialist project; who are anti the notion of racial particularity and therefore hate Israel because it is a Jewish state; who are anti-war and therefore hate Israel because it uses military means to defend itself against annihilation. In short, at the very heart of everything it most hates, the left perceives Israel and the Jews — which thus become interchangeable.
And so if Jews defend Israel the left claim they are seeking to appropriate the role of ultimate victim and manipulate public debate to achieve that image at the expense of the universal brotherhood of victims across the globe. They are said to be waving the shroud of the Holocaust to sanitise the crimes of Israel (even though the belief that Israel was only created because of the Holocaust is a canard put about by Jew-haters such as Ahmadinejad; the proposal to recreate the Jewish national home in Israel was originally made because the world recognised the Jews' unique historic claim to the land where they alone had been a nation state until they were driven out). And if Jews call attention to antisemitism they merely create it all over again, because this reinforces the belief that the Jews use this claim as a manipulative weapon for their own advantage. So Jews are never to be allowed to tell the truth about their own persecution; the more they tell this truth, the more they are to be cast out as pariahs for manipulating public debate.
This of course has profound implications for the assumption underpinning Holocaust education — that such teaching is necessary to prevent such horrors from ever happening again. Personally, I have always been extremely sceptical of this belief; it always seemed to me that it might even exacerbate the problem unless the antisemitism at its core was fully acknowledged and understood, which is not possible without also teaching the history of the Jewish people. So apparently has it proved; according to Professor Porat, a study has now shown that Holocaust education does nothing to stop antisemitism and may even make it worse. If identifying Jewish victimhood with the Holocaust causes a murderous resentment, then obviously the more that the Holocaust is thrust down people's throats, the more that resentment will increase.
As Professor Porat concluded, while antisemitism once caused the Holocaust, the Holocaust now causes antisemitism. The fact that by their very existence the Jews are the incarnation of the incriminating memory of the crime committed against them prompts a resurgence of the very prejudice that lay at the heart of that crime. In short, as has often been observed, the problem is simply that the Jews have never been forgiven for the Holocaust.
Article printed from Melanie Phillips's Diary: http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary
URL to article: http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1665
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