Het is typerend, maar zeker niet onverklaarbaar, dat zodra de zelfbenoemde 'Joodse staat' weer eens haar fascistisch gezicht heeft getoond, het gezever over anti-semitisme onmiddellijk opbloeit, in een schaamteloze poging om de aandacht af te leiden. Schaamteloos, omdat hier de dood van zes miljoen joden tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog misbruikt wordt om fascisme te legitimeren. Ik gebruik met nadruk het begrip fascisme, in de betekenis van de politiek van het recht van de sterkste. Al in 1981 verklaarde Nahum Goldman, van 1956 tot 1968, president van de World Zionist Organization, met betrekking tot gecultiveerd joods slachtofferisme:
We zullen moeten begrijpen dat het joodse lijden tijdens de Holocaust niet langer meer als verdediging zal dienen, en we zullen zeker moeten nalaten de Holocaust als argument te gebruiken om gelijk wat we ook mogen doen te rechtvaardigen. De Holocaust gebruiken als een excuus voor het bombarderen… is een soort 'ontheiliging,' een banalisering van de onschendbare tragedie van de Holocaust, die niet misbruikt moet worden om een politiek twijfelachtig en moreel onverdedigbaar beleid te rechtvaardigen.
Vanwege zijn gematigde houding en zijn streven naar coëxistentie met Israel's Arabische buren werd Nahum Goldman tenslotte diep gehaat door zijn mede-zionisten. Vrede had voor hen geen zin, aangezien ze onder aanvoering van Ben Goerion uit waren op Eretz-Israel (Groot-Israel) en de hegemonie in het Midden-Oosten.
In his later life Goldmann had extensive conversations with David Ben-Gurion. In his bookThe Jewish Paradox, Goldmann recalls a late night conversation he had with Ben-Gurion in 1956 about ‘the Arab problem’. Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann:
'Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their [the Arab’s] fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance.'
(Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox: A Personal Memoir of Historic Encounters that Shaped the drama of Modern Jewry, Grosset & Dunlap, 1978, p. 99)
De vooraanstaande Joods-Israelische historicus en auteur Tom Segev schrijft over hem:
Goldman believed in the limits of power and in the power of self-restraint. Thus he was in favor of postponing the Declaration of Independence, in the hope of preventing the war, and he thought that the Sinai Campaign and the Six-Day War broke out basically as a result of mistakes made by the government of Israel. After the Six-Day War and until his death, he believed that it was to Israel's benefit to withdraw from the territories. As opposed to the thesis that Israel's deterrent power would ensure its existence, he believed that only the Arabs' agreement to accept it in their midst would ensure this.
The president of the World Jewish Congress and the president of World Zionist Organization walked a tightrope between the Jewish interest and the Zionist interest, and between both of these and the interest of the State of Israel. In contrast to the founding fathers of the state, and first and foremost Ben-Gurion, Goldman tended to see Israel as one among many possible alternatives for organizing Jewish life, including Jewish life in the Diaspora.
It turns out that he was right and perhaps this was his major sin: Jews can live outside of Israel, they can live well and many of them can live better there than in Israel... He not only aroused the envy of the Israelis, but also subverted some of the basic truths of their existence.
Inderdaad, in de ogen van de zionistische extremisten was Nahum Goldman's 'grootste zonde' zijn overtuiging dat 'Jews can live outside of Israel, they can live well and many of them can live better there than in Israel.' Dat werd ervaren als vloeken in de synagoge. Het was een ernstige aantasting van de belangrijkste leerstelling van het zionisme, namelijk dat het antisemitisme alle joden op aarde dwingt naar het 'beloofde land' te emigreren. De werkelijkheid is evenwel wezenlijk anders. Dat is ook de reden waarom nog steeds de meerderheid van de mensen, die zich joods beschouwt, het verkiest om niet in Israel te leven.
De Pools-Britse socioloog van joodse afkomst, Zygmunt Bauman, stelt in zijn boek Modernity and The Holocaust (1989):
Richard L. Rubenstein has drawn what seems to me the ultimate lesson of the Holocaust. 'It bears,' he wrote, 'witness to the advance of civilization.' It was an advance, let us add, in a double sense. In the Final Solution, the industrial potential and technological know-how boasted by our civilization has scaled new heights in coping successfully with a task of unprecedented magnitude. And in the same Final Solution our society has disclosed to us it heretofore unsuspected capacity. Taught to respect and admire technical efficiency and good design, we cannot but admit that, in the praise of material progress which our civilization has brought, we have sorely underestimated its true potential.
'The world of the death camps and the society it engenders reveals the progressively intensifying night side of Judeo-Christian civilization. Civilization means slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps. It also means medical hygiene, elevated religious ideas, beautiful art, and exquisite music. It is an error to imagine that civilization and savage cruelty are antithesis ... In our times the cruelties, like most other aspects of our world, have become far more effectively administered than ever before. They have not and will not cease to exist. Both creation and destruction are inseparable aspects of what we call civilization.'
Bauman wijst erop dat
Rubenstein is a theologian. I have keenly searched the works of sociologists for statements expressing similar awareness of the urgency of the task posited by the Holocaust; for evidence that the Holocaust presents, among other things, a challenge to sociology as a profession and a body of academic knowledge. When measured against the work done by historians or theologians, the bulk of academic sociology looks more like a collective exercise in forgetting and eye-closing. By and large, the lessons of the Holocaust have left little trace on sociological common sense, which includes among many others such articles of faith as the benefits of reason's rule over the emotions, the superiority of rationality over (what else?) irrational action, or the endemic clash between the demands of efficiency and the moral leanings with which 'personal relations' are so hopelessly infused. However loud and poignant, voices of the protest against this faith have not yet penetrated the walls of the sociological establishment.
Het gezever over anti-semitisme wordt maar al te vaak gebruikt door verwerpelijke types om te pogen hun haat tegen de al even semietische Arabieren, en daarmee Palestijnen, te verhullen.
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