'Must Jews always see themselves as victims?Fierce debate has been raging in 'The Independent' about Israel's conduct in Gaza. Here, one leading Jewish thinker argues that until Jews shake off their persecution complex, there can never be peace in the Middle East
By Antony Lerman
Saturday, 7 March 2009
In the wake of Israel's attack on Gaza, eager voices are telling us that anti-Semitism has returned yet again. Eight years of Hamas rockets and the world unfairly cries foul when Israel retaliates, they say. Biased media are delegitimising the Jewish state. The Left attacks Israel as uniquely evil, making it the persecuted Jew among the nations. Even theatres keep wheeling out those anti-Semitic stereotypes, Shylock, Fagin and the "chosen people", just to torment us. If this bleak picture were an accurate portrayal of what Jews are experiencing today, who could deny that suffering is the determining feature of the Jewish condition?
In most Jewish circles, if you pause to question this narrative and suggest that it might be exaggerated, that it unrealistically implies a level of dreadfulness and victimhood unique to Jews, you'll attract hostility and disbelief in equal measure, and precious little public sympathy. But in the work of Professor Salo Baron, probably the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century, we find powerful justification for just such a questioning.
Professor Baron spoke out angrily against what he called the "lachrymose conception of Jewish history", which placed suffering at the centre of Jewish life. "Suffering is part of the destiny" of the Jews," Professor Baron said in an interview in 1975, "but so is repeated joy as well as ultimate redemption." Another distinguished historian, Professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, said Baron always fought against the view of Jewish history as "all darkness and no light. He laboured mightily to restore balance".
Baron, who was born in Poland and went to America in 1930 to teach at Columbia University in New York, died aged 94 in 1989, perhaps one of the most significant years in post-war Jewish history. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, the suppression of Jewish religious practice and cultural expression came to an end.
More than two million Jews were finally free to choose to be Jewish or not. An astonishing number chose Jewishness and a remarkable revival of Jewish life began. This historic moment aptly illustrates the central truth of Baron's critique.
Twenty years on, that revival continues, but the world's response to Israel's war on Gaza and the dramatic rise in anti-Semitic incidents in a number of countries since the war began have led many to paint a very dark picture of the current Jewish predicament. So, in thinking about the accuracy of this, especially in view of the poisonous weed of anti-Semitism that Howard Jacobson, writing in The Independent last month, claims to find growing in practically every patch of criticism of Israel, I wondered what light Professor Baron would have found in the current darkness. Would he have concluded that the lachrymose conception of Jewish history has returned and that a restoration of some balance is required? Have we Jews succumbed psychologically to a sense of eternal Jewish victimhood, a wholly negative Jewish exceptionalism, or is paranoia justified?
Some pioneering research, published as Israel's bombing of Gaza began, throws some light on this. It reveals just how much the feeling that no matter what we do, we are perpetually at the mercy of others applies to Jewish Israelis. A team led by Professor Daniel Bar Tal of Tel Aviv University, one of the world's leading political psychologists, questioned Israeli Jews about their memory of the conflict with the Arabs, from its inception to the present, and found that their "consciousness is characterised by a sense of victimisation, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanisation of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering". The researchers found a close connection between that collective memory and the memory of "past persecutions of Jews" and the Holocaust, the feeling that "the whole world is against us". If such a study were to be conducted among Jews in Britain, I suspect the results would be very similar.
For Jews to see themselves in this way is understandable, but it's a distortion and deeply damaging. As Professor Bar Tal says, this view relies primarily on prolonged indoctrination that is based on ignorance and even nurtures it. The Jewish public does not want to be confused with the facts. If we are defined by past persecutions, by our victimhood, will we ever think clearly about the problem of Israel-Palestine and the problem of anti-Semitism?
To justify its attack on Gaza, Israel threw the mantle of victimhood over the residents of southern Israel who have lived under the constant threat of rocket attack from the territory since 2001.
Israeli government and military spokespeople seemed to get a remarkably sympathetic hearing in the media when they made this argument. But history did not begin in 2001. As the Israeli journalist Amira Hass notes, the origin of Israel's siege dates back to 1991, before suicide bombings began. The relentless emphasis on Israeli suffering, to the exclusion of all other contextual facts, and the constant mantra that no other country would tolerate such a threat posed to its citizens over such a long period provided the basis for arguing that the military option was the only alternative.
The victim is cornered and there's only one way out.
But the popular Israeli phrase ein breira, "there is no alternative", won't stand one second's scrutiny. There was a wealth of informed senior military and security opinion, especially following the disaster of the 2006 Lebanon war, which argued that there is no military solution to the problem of Islamist groups such as Hamas and Hizbollah. Even before Lebanon, in 2004, former IDF spokesman Nahman Shai, a senior figure in the Israeli establishment, said: "Despite all the anger, frustration, and disgust we feel, we ought to talk to Hizbollah. We must exploit every possibility to reach a compromise with them and gain precious time. Does it really embody all the evil in the region? What are we waiting for? We can always go back to fighting terrorism."
Early in January this year, Israel's former Mossad chief and former national security adviser, Efraim Halevy, said: "If Israel's goal were to remove the threat of rockets from the residents of southern Israel, opening the border crossings would have ensured such quiet for a generation." Daniel Levy, former adviser in the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, shows clearly where the wrong choices were made: withdrawing from Gaza without co-ordinating the "what next" with the Palestinians; hermetically sealing off Hamas and besieging Gaza after the 2006 elections instead of testing Hamas's capacity to govern responsibly; instead of building on the ceasefire, Israel was the first to break it on 4 November. In short, there were other alternatives.'
In most Jewish circles, if you pause to question this narrative and suggest that it might be exaggerated, that it unrealistically implies a level of dreadfulness and victimhood unique to Jews, you'll attract hostility and disbelief in equal measure, and precious little public sympathy. But in the work of Professor Salo Baron, probably the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century, we find powerful justification for just such a questioning.
Professor Baron spoke out angrily against what he called the "lachrymose conception of Jewish history", which placed suffering at the centre of Jewish life. "Suffering is part of the destiny" of the Jews," Professor Baron said in an interview in 1975, "but so is repeated joy as well as ultimate redemption." Another distinguished historian, Professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, said Baron always fought against the view of Jewish history as "all darkness and no light. He laboured mightily to restore balance".
Baron, who was born in Poland and went to America in 1930 to teach at Columbia University in New York, died aged 94 in 1989, perhaps one of the most significant years in post-war Jewish history. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, the suppression of Jewish religious practice and cultural expression came to an end.
More than two million Jews were finally free to choose to be Jewish or not. An astonishing number chose Jewishness and a remarkable revival of Jewish life began. This historic moment aptly illustrates the central truth of Baron's critique.
Twenty years on, that revival continues, but the world's response to Israel's war on Gaza and the dramatic rise in anti-Semitic incidents in a number of countries since the war began have led many to paint a very dark picture of the current Jewish predicament. So, in thinking about the accuracy of this, especially in view of the poisonous weed of anti-Semitism that Howard Jacobson, writing in The Independent last month, claims to find growing in practically every patch of criticism of Israel, I wondered what light Professor Baron would have found in the current darkness. Would he have concluded that the lachrymose conception of Jewish history has returned and that a restoration of some balance is required? Have we Jews succumbed psychologically to a sense of eternal Jewish victimhood, a wholly negative Jewish exceptionalism, or is paranoia justified?
Some pioneering research, published as Israel's bombing of Gaza began, throws some light on this. It reveals just how much the feeling that no matter what we do, we are perpetually at the mercy of others applies to Jewish Israelis. A team led by Professor Daniel Bar Tal of Tel Aviv University, one of the world's leading political psychologists, questioned Israeli Jews about their memory of the conflict with the Arabs, from its inception to the present, and found that their "consciousness is characterised by a sense of victimisation, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanisation of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering". The researchers found a close connection between that collective memory and the memory of "past persecutions of Jews" and the Holocaust, the feeling that "the whole world is against us". If such a study were to be conducted among Jews in Britain, I suspect the results would be very similar.
For Jews to see themselves in this way is understandable, but it's a distortion and deeply damaging. As Professor Bar Tal says, this view relies primarily on prolonged indoctrination that is based on ignorance and even nurtures it. The Jewish public does not want to be confused with the facts. If we are defined by past persecutions, by our victimhood, will we ever think clearly about the problem of Israel-Palestine and the problem of anti-Semitism?
To justify its attack on Gaza, Israel threw the mantle of victimhood over the residents of southern Israel who have lived under the constant threat of rocket attack from the territory since 2001.
Israeli government and military spokespeople seemed to get a remarkably sympathetic hearing in the media when they made this argument. But history did not begin in 2001. As the Israeli journalist Amira Hass notes, the origin of Israel's siege dates back to 1991, before suicide bombings began. The relentless emphasis on Israeli suffering, to the exclusion of all other contextual facts, and the constant mantra that no other country would tolerate such a threat posed to its citizens over such a long period provided the basis for arguing that the military option was the only alternative.
The victim is cornered and there's only one way out.
But the popular Israeli phrase ein breira, "there is no alternative", won't stand one second's scrutiny. There was a wealth of informed senior military and security opinion, especially following the disaster of the 2006 Lebanon war, which argued that there is no military solution to the problem of Islamist groups such as Hamas and Hizbollah. Even before Lebanon, in 2004, former IDF spokesman Nahman Shai, a senior figure in the Israeli establishment, said: "Despite all the anger, frustration, and disgust we feel, we ought to talk to Hizbollah. We must exploit every possibility to reach a compromise with them and gain precious time. Does it really embody all the evil in the region? What are we waiting for? We can always go back to fighting terrorism."
Early in January this year, Israel's former Mossad chief and former national security adviser, Efraim Halevy, said: "If Israel's goal were to remove the threat of rockets from the residents of southern Israel, opening the border crossings would have ensured such quiet for a generation." Daniel Levy, former adviser in the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, shows clearly where the wrong choices were made: withdrawing from Gaza without co-ordinating the "what next" with the Palestinians; hermetically sealing off Hamas and besieging Gaza after the 2006 elections instead of testing Hamas's capacity to govern responsibly; instead of building on the ceasefire, Israel was the first to break it on 4 November. In short, there were other alternatives.'
6 opmerkingen:
Alles wijst er toch op dat Israel geen vrede wil, maar land en het liefst alles en zonder Palestijnen. Verdriet, boosheid en rouwen, machteloosheid om de slachtoffers van nazi terreur kan ik meevoelen,maar om diezelfde slachtoffers te gebruiken als ruilmiddel,voor Pr reclame, geldelijk gewin en ondersteunen moordpartijen etc., vind ik erg stuitend. Daarom word ik altijd weer pissig als het Cidi en aanverwanten daarmee aankomen, omdat je weet dat het een bepaald doel dient! Zij zien zichzelf niet als slachtoffer,maar spelen de rol van slachtoffer. Het misbruiken van je eigen doden en ondertussen andere weerloze slachtoffers maken? Lager kan je toch niet gaan?
Las vanavond de website van Jan van Barneveld (christenen voor Israel) Wel godverdomme, zijn er ook christenen voor de Palestijnen?
anzi
@anzi
Bepaalde christenen worden helemaal warm van binnen als het om joden gaat, want joden dat zijn een soort van heel speciale wonderlijke mensen, die het lijden zo goed begrijpen, en ja wat wil je nog meer als goed christen, het lijden begrijpen.
Vóór de Tweede Wereldoorlog was die grenzeloze liefde en bewondering er nog niet zo erg, dat is ook al opvallend.
Als ik een christen/gristen was zou ik in plaats van het aanbidden van joodse Nazi's zoals Sharon of Barak, eerder opteren voor het injecteren van wat joodse principes, zoals deze:
"Rabban Shim`on ben Gamliël zegt:
De wereld staat op drie dingen:
op het recht;
op de waarheid;
en op de vrede.
Zoals gezegd is:
Waarheid en vredesrecht zult gij spreken in uw poorten."
Dat schijnt alleen om een of andere reden erg ingewikkeld te zijn.
In more recent years, the Holocaust industry has effectively turned into a shake-down racket in which more and more countries throughout Europe are being bludgeoned into coughing up compensation. Is there a Holocaust 'Industry'? As the annual Nazi Holocaust day approaches, delegates have gathered for a commemorative international conference in the Swedish capital, Stockholm.
And as compensation claims continue against companies and countries with one-time Nazi associations, tributes and museums have multiplied: many American cities now have their own memorials, and European cities such as Stockholm and Berlin are preparing to acquire theirs. It all testifies to the central - and haunting - position which the murder of between five and six million Jews by Nazi Germany has acquired in the Western consciousness. But for the first time in the last quarter of a century, a new school of academic thought is emerging - one which questions the accepted vision of the Holocaust and the universality of its moral teachings. In his forthcoming book, "The Holocaust Industry", Professor Norman Finkelstein of the University of New York argues that our present interpretation of the Holocaust has been deliberately devised by American Jewish groups for purposes of ethnic supremacy, political advantage and financial gain.
"Since the late 1960s, there has developed a kind of Holocaust industry which has made a cult of the Nazi Holocaust. And the purpose of this industry is, in my view, ethnic aggrandisement - in particular, to deflect criticism of the State of Israel and to deflect criticism of Jews generally," Professor Finkelstein says. The discovery of the Nazi concentration camps of World War Two by allied troops and journalists has shaped our perception of the very worst of human nature. It has also defined our view of Hitler's principal victims, the Jews, as a martyr nation deserving eternal atonement. But for Professor Finkelstein, himself the son of concentration camp survivors, that view of the Holocaust is a manufactured one.
For Professor Finkelstein, the Holocaust is not incomparable. To compare and contrast - he argues - is a historian's duty.
For most scholars, however, the Nazis' barbarity in their treatment of the Jews was unique and unparalleled. This case is argued by David Cesarani, a teacher of modern Jewish history at the University of Southampton in England. "The Nazis' attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe, and indeed the Jews of the world, is unique, because it's the first time that all the apparatus of a modern state was applied to destroying a group of people who were defined according to racial, biological politics," Mr Cesarani says. Although Professor Finkelstein's view is shared by few in today's academia, he is not an entirely isolated figure.
Several younger scholars agree that the Holocaust should not be a moral narrative with a single authorised reading. For Tim Cole of the University of Bristol, an authority on the Budapest ghetto, the Holocaust's significance has varied considerably according to place and time.
Tim Cole draws attention to the fact that there were no Holocaust museums back in the 1960's. "It's only much more recently that museums have been built. If you like, it's a kind of 1980s, 1990s ideology, sentiment thing, if you like, to build Holocaust museums - that we, at this particular point in history, remember the Holocaust for all sorts of reasons," Mr Cole says. This is disputed by Michael Friedman of the Jewish Congress.
It took 20 years, he says, to build these memorials because the shock of the Holocaust was so great. "How could the brain immediately react? Take a private tragedy - if you lose your parents or children by accident, how long do you need to come back to a minimum of emotionality and working out this tragedy. And multiply this by the biggest human tragedy that ever happened on earth," Michael Freidman argues. Schindler's list, the Oscar-winning film about the Holocaust directed by Steven Spielberg, was a huge success across the world in 1993 - and is said to have popularised the suffering of the Jews to an unprecedented extent. Some academics have scorned such material as a less than accurate and easily digestible view of history. Historians are increasingly disputing another historical interpretation - that the whole of the German nation was to blame for the fate of the Jews. It is, however, something that Dr Friedman of the Jewish Congress strongly believes. "After World War Two, when I came to Germany at the age of 10, 15, the majority of Germans said to me: "We didn't want Auschwitz". And I would believe them, that they didn't want it.
"But what does this mean, this statement? Was what happened not enough to say "No" to? Because they didn't say "No", Auschwitz happened. Even if they didn't want it, they are responsible for it. They are responsible because, without their daily acceptance of the steps beforehand, it wouldn't have been possible to build the concentration camps," Dr Friedman says.
There is something slightly absurd - if not laughable - about the fact that the United States should erect a museum to the Nazi Holocaust, but not, for example, erect a museum to commemorate the African-American slavery or the extermination of the native population. Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me - not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on, neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a 13 year old school girl. Attempts were made to relativise the Holocaust. "Oh, what happened to the Jews is no different to what happened to the Armenians or what happened to the Biafrans or Rwandans. " Well, it was different. It was different in scale, in quality, and above all its origins are quite singular.
Yelamdenu
Yes, die 3 peilers zijn betere voorwaarden en helaas worden die vaak onderuitgehaald door fanatieke gelovigen (omdat zij geloven?)
Anzi
holahoaxerkenner
Gaan we over nadenken!
Anzi
@Anzi
Yes, die 3 peilers zijn betere voorwaarden en helaas worden die vaak onderuitgehaald door fanatieke gelovigen (omdat zij geloven?)
Niet omdat ze "geloven", maar omdat ze in een afgod geloven (de afgod van een "volk", een "staat" of iets dergelijks.)
De religie is maar een excuus.
grt,
herman_m
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