Sultan Knish
There are two basic human responses to an assault. I will protect myself
or I will make the world a better place. The first deals with the risk
of an attack. The second with your insecure feelings about the world.
The first leaves you better able to cope with an attack. The second
makes you feel better about the world that you live in.
The
Jewish response to the Holocaust fell into these two categories; Never
Again and Teach Tolerance. Never Again became the credo of Israel and
Teach Tolerance became the credo of the Western Diaspora.
There
were Israelis who believed in teaching tolerance and Western Jews who
believed in self-defense, but the responses were structural because the
divide between Nationalists and Universalists predated the Holocaust.
The
Holocaust was a transformative event, but the responses to it came from
old debates. The pogroms had led to the same fork in the road between a
collective struggle for a better world and national self-defense,
between the Universalists and the Nationalists, between the left and the
right. The current debates about Israel by Jews and non-Jews revisit
those old arguments.
To the Nationalists, the Holocaust was not
an unexpected event and Nationalist leaders like Jabotinsky had warned
that it was coming. To the Universalists, it was an inexplicable event
that challenged the entire progressive understanding of history as a
march toward enlightenment.
Violent bigotry was supposed to be
the opposite of modernity. History moved forward, not backward. Unlike
Czarist Russia, Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany were too modern for
mass murder. And then they weren't.
The Holocaust was a mugging
in broad daylight on the biggest street of the biggest city in the
world. Its message was that human beings had not magically become better
people because Berlin had a subway and phone calls could be made across
the Atlantic. The Nationalists attributed it to human nature, while the
Socialists blamed reactionary nationalism. The Universalists insisted
that true progress would come with world unity while the Nationalists
went off to build their own castle.
The Holocaust deepened the
divide between the Universalists and the Nationalists. The Universalists
thought the Holocaust made it more urgent for us to work toward a
better world while the Nationalists saw history as a cycle of
civilizations that had to be survived, rather than a utopian harbor
where strife would end and the fighting would stop.
What the
Universalists had always hated about Israel was what a Jewish State
symbolized; a turning away from the great dream of the Brotherhood of
Man for another reactionary state. Zionism had been rejected by much of
the left for its abandonment of universalism. Luminaries of the left
from Lenin to H.G. Wells denounced Zionism as a reactionary roadblock to
world unity. The answer to the Jewish problem was assimilation, not
conglomeration. And to many liberals, Israel's existence is still so
pernicious because it lures Jews away from the dream of a better world.
The
schism on the left over Zionism is slowly being won by the
Anti-Zionists whose visceral hatred is for the Jewish State as a
reactionary entity, a retreat from the borderless world. They do not
criticize Israel for human rights violations. They find or invent human
rights violations because they have labeled Israel as a reactionary
entity and in their worldview all reactionary entities oppress and only
reactionary entities oppress. The Soviet Union was progressive and
therefore not oppressive. Israel is reactionary and therefore
oppressive.
The Universalists interpreted the Holocaust as a
Nationalist phenomenon and through that warped logic, Israel as a
Nationalist response to the Holocaust is just like Nazi Germany. By
wanting their own country, their own flag and their own army, the Jews
became just like the Nazis. Instead of adopting the Universalist
response of national suicide to mass murder, the Jewish people decided
to live. And that is a crime that the left can never forgive them for.
Jewish
Universalists have always been vaguely ashamed of Israel. They used to
understand the need for it in their guts, even as their ideological
minds struggled against it, but over time that feeling faded because
the things that you feel but do not say are hard to pass down to future
generations.
Holocaust museums were built, books were written and
tours conducted into Anne Frank's attic, but the understanding of what
these things meant was not passed down. The only lesson was to make the
world a better place by teaching everyone to be tolerant so that history
would not repeat itself. As if any amount of courses and slides on
tolerance could stop history from repeating itself.
There
are nice Jewish boys and girls who have read Anne Frank's diary,
visited Auschwitz and come away anti-semities. They don't call
themselves that because their Universalist ignorance is so profound that
they don't even know what they are. Instead they call themselves human
rights activists, they boycott Israeli products, smash Jewish store
windows, hug terrorists and rationalize suicide bombers.
And
what else were they supposed to do when the lessons that they drew from
the Holocaust are that the underdog is always right, that people in
uniforms are bad and that you always have to stand up for minorities.
That
is the Holocaust in its universalized form. Never Again made the
Holocaust a teachable moment for Jews. Teach Tolerance made it a
teachable moment for all mankind. The Nationalist and the Universalist
drew two opposite lessons from the Holocaust. The Nationalists focused
on resistance while the Universalists focused on persecution. The
Nationalist aspires to be a ghetto fighter while the Universalist
aspires to be a good German.
The Universalist lesson of the
Holocaust is that we must all aspire to be good Germans because our
governments, at least the non-progressive ones, are embryonic Third
Reichs that are only one flag-waving leader away from opening
concentration camps. The Universalists believe that the only way to stop
another Holocaust is to destroy nationalism, patriotism and the modern
state.
This is what they believed before the Holocaust. And it
isn't the Holocaust that motivates them. The Holocaust has been hijacked
and distorted as another teaching tool for the left. Its history is one
where the Jews happen to stand in for Native Americans,
African-Americans or any other victim group, but have no identity,
motives or interests of their own. The dead Jews are empty symbols with
no tangible claims on the past or on the future. They died to teach us
to be better people.
And so the boys and girls, Jewish and
non-Jewish, smash Jewish store windows and throw stones at Jewish
soldiers out of a desire to be good Germans. Their method of avoiding a
repetition of the Holocaust is to perpetuate it by persecuting Jews by
being good Germans. If they manage to destroy Israel and all its Jews,
then they'll be the best Germans of them all.
This Universalist
doctrine does not mention the English boys, who were being good Germans
before the time when those words meant anything, by gathering at
anti-war rallies. It does not mention the leftist intellectuals who
insisted that the Allies were no better than the Nazis or the Communist
Universalists of the Soviet Union who allied with Nazi Germany.
The
debate over Israel is only one of many such fights between
Universalists and Nationalists of every creed and from every nation. It
is a struggle between those who believe that nations, religions and
cultures have innate worth, and those who believe that they are
obstacles to the great jello bowl of togetherness.
The
Nazi Holocaust failed, but the Universalist Holocaust is still ongoing.
Every time a leftist gets up to denounce Israel and to look forward to
the day when it disappears, the Universalist Holocaust grinds on. And
they have no shortage of Jewish assistants who are eager to complete the
task, believing that a humanitarian utopia waits on the other side of
the gas chamber door.
The Jewish Universalists lost faith in G-d,
but they did not lose faith in humanity. They still believe with all
their hearts that if they strum the guitar loud enough and sing,
"Imagine", that a better world will appear behind that door.
Disbelieving in history, they have forgotten that the last time that
door was opened in Russia, there was barbed wire and bitter cold on the
other side.
Jewish Nationalists understood what was coming last
time. They understand what is coming this time. Yet no matter how many
times they are proven right, the beautiful dreamers refuse to listen to
the history which proves them wrong. They're still waiting for the dead
hand of history to let go and the better world to be born out of the
ashes of the old.
History is the road map that charts where the
past lives that made ours possible have gone and shows us where the
lives that we make possible may go. The Universalist Holocaust would
burn those maps and kill our future for their better world.
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