The insightful article below appeared more than a year ago in one of my favorite (but sometimes aggravating) journals, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It is a remarkable piece!
It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the editors of the WRMEA are ***keenly*** aware of the full extent to which the Holocaust has been used by Israel against its enemies - not just the Palestinians, but all of Israel's imagined enemies around the globe, including America. If there has been the customary editorial footsying to placate the Holocaust Lobby, it's been for the realities we all understand.
In light of the spectacular Irving Trial, this piece assumes a special poignancy. The Holocaust is coming unraveled - and the powers that be are attacking their own:
Jews and Israel
The Politicization of the Holocaust: Examining the Uses and Abuse of Its Legacy
By Allan C. Brownfeld
October/November 1998, pages 47-49, 100
Brownfeld:
For many years, every foreign visitor to Israel, soon after arriving, has been taken to Yad Vashem, the memorial in Jerusalem to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.
Early in 1995, this policy was changed. Since then, Israel has decided to merely suggest that those making official visits walk through this museum of Nazi barbarity and Jewish suffering. Only presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers will still be taken as a matter of course.
When he was deputy foreign minister, Yossi Beilin, the architect of this new policy, said that compelling people to visit a particular site is "Bolshevik" behavior and that Israelis must stop thinking that "we know better than you what you should do."
Zundelsite:
Much in Israel is Bolshevik, a direct outcome of the pro-Communist leanings of Israel's Labour Zionist founders.
Brownfeld:
New York Times correspondent Clyde Haberman reported that, "Forced visits to the memorial discomfort some Israelis for other reasons. They see the tours as perhaps overemphasizing Jews as victims in the national self-definition, and suggest alternative sites that show modern Israel's accomplishments, like desert farms or science centers."
Zundelsite:
How about the Germans adopting the same policy now in the New Millennium? Instead of doleful wreath-layings in Bergen-Belsen or Dachau and endless mea culpas - take visitors to BMW, Audi, Volkswagen or Mercedes Benz factories instead?
Brownfeld:
Israel's relationship to the Holocaust, and the manner in which that event has been used and abused for contemporary political purposes, has been the subject of much discussion.
Zundelsite:
". . . used and abused for contemporary political purposes. . . " Has Ernst Zundel or David Irving claimed anything else?
Brownfeld:
In an important book, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, Tom Segev, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, presents a chronicle of the impact of the Holocaust upon Jews in Palestine and, after 1948, in Israel, and how it has been dealt with by political leaders in both periods. He shows how viewing the world through an ideological lens such as Zionism - as others have viewed events through other closed systems from Communism to Fascism to one or another form of religious fundamentalism - often distorts reality in order to accommodate ideological imperatives.
While the Holocaust was taking place in Europe, Segev argues that the immediate needs of the victims were often ignored as Zionist nationalism blinded the leaders of the yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, to the threats from Hitler.
In December 1935, David Ben-Gurion declared: "We must give a Zionist response to the catastrophe faced by German Jewry - to turn this disaster into an opportunity to develop our country, to save the lives and property of the Jews of Germany for the sake of Zion." For Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders, Segev shows, the priorities of Palestine must take precedence over the immediate needs of the endangered communities in Europe.
Zundelsite:
How often have we said it? That Tom Segev, in his book The Seventh Million, lets it all hang out!
Brownfeld:
Zionist ideology harbored deep contempt for Jews outside of Israel.
At one point, Ben-Gurion declared: "If I knew that it was possible, to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second - because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people." In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, Ben-Gurion commented that "the human conscience" might bring various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany. He saw this as a threat and warned, "Zionism is in danger."
Zundelsite:
This is why the Roper Poll, which so shocked the American Jewish establishment in 1993, stated that more than 20 % of Americans did not believe in the Holocaust and thought that Jews shared part of the guilt of what happened.
Brownfeld:
While Segev concedes that the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine could not have saved millions of Jews, he believes that it did far too little. Part of the reason was Zionist ideology itself which harbored deep contempt for Jews outside of Israel - the Diaspora - and a sense of moral superiority and an all-consuming focus on state-building.
The rise of the Nazis was seen in Palestine as confirming the historical prognosis of Zionist ideology. The newspaper Hapoel Harsair described the Nazi persecution of the Jews as "punishment" for their having tried to integrate into German society instead of leaving for Palestine. Now they would have to run in panic, "like mice in flight," the paper said.
The Revisionist paper Hazit Haam used even stronger language: "The Jews of Germany are being persecuted not despite their efforts to be part of the country but because of their efforts."
Zundelsite:
That was at the core of Theodore Herzl's thinking: Jews, remove yourselves from Gentile nations, or continue to get holocausted!
Brownfeld:
It appears that many in Palestine were ideologically and psychologically complicit with the Nazi catastrophe, Segev writes, because Zionism itself was founded on the belief that Jews had no future in Europe, that the emancipation of the Jews would fail and that the only solution to anti-Semitism was a sovereign state. Moshe Sharett declared: "The Zionists do not mean to exploit the horrible tragedy of the Jews in Europe, but they cannot refrain from emphasizing the fact that events have totally proven the Zionist position on the solution of the Jewish problem. Zionism predicted the Holocaust decades ago." Davar went so far as to publish an article describing the extermination of the Jews as "punishment from heaven" for not having come to Palestine.
In Palestine, many Jews had contempt for the European victims of Nazism, not sympathy. "Negations of the Exile," writes Segev, "took the form of a deep contempt and even disgust with Jewish life in the Diaspora, particularly in Eastern Europe, which was characterized as degenerate, degraded, humiliating and morally corrupt. In their tragedy, Diaspora Jews seemed even more repellant...The disparagement of European Jewry was heard often, even when everyone already knew everything and when Auschwitz had become a household word.
Zundelsite:
Auschwitz did not become a household word until the middle to late sixties. Holocaust as a term was only used in the late 70s after the film by that name. Take yourself on an educational trip to your nearest library and trace the bloating of the Holocaust through various encyclopedias.
Brownfeld:
"The resentment against the victims of the Holocaust recalled the way Zionist poets such as Haim Mahman Bialik had depicted the victims of an earlier pogrom: 'They fled like mice, hid like bugs, and died like dogs over there, wherever they were found.' Even then the emphasis was on there. Had they come here earlier, it would not have happened to them."
Eventually, the negative view of the victims of the Holocaust receded and a deepening identification with the Holocaust began to grow. This was aided by the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann. Even before that, Israel made peace with the new West German government and negotiated a restitution agreement for the victims. This, Segev declares, represented a "piece of Zionist irony." He notes that, "The money from Germany was supposed to express the victory of Zionism and revenge against the Nazis, but many of those who filed for compensation based their claims on the argument that they would not have left Germany if they had been allowed to stay. Hence, they should be seen as political refugees, whose lives in Israel were something less than they would have been in Germany."
Zundelsite:
This did not happen by magic. It was a policy actively launched by Menahem Begin and his ilk.
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(Allan C. Brownfeld, who wrote this article, is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues , the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.)
(To be continued tomorrow)
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Thought for the Day:
"Sin is whatever obscures the soul."
(Source unknown)
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