Memory and reality misused

PAT JOHNSON

The true victims of the Holocaust are the Palestinians. This is, in a nutshell, how the anti-Zionist narrative responds to the Holocaust. For those trying to make some kind of sense of the ideological anti-Zionism running rampant over the past decade, Israeli academic Elhanan Yakira presents arguably the finest insights yet on how this inverted narrative has been able to take hold.

The morality of Israel has been besmirched in the global arena, while Israel’s enemies have been able to assume the moral high ground. Nowhere has this phenomenon been more successful or more dreadful than in the treatment of the Holocaust.

In the just-published Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust: Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting and the Delegitimization of Israel, Yakira uncovers a disturbing intellectual demimonde of Holocaust denial, misuse and abuse. In its simplest permutation, anti-Zionists claim Israel uses the memory of the Holocaust to deflect every criticism. Yakira demonstrates in three startling and engaging essays how it is the anti-Zionists who do injustice to the memory of the Holocaust and its victims, negating any advantage Zionism might take from this history, while inverting the guilt of the perpetrators and turning it on the victims: Jews, in the form of Israel and Zionists.

In the narrative that holds sway among European, North American and some Israeli “progressives,” Yakira writes, Zionists exploit the Holocaust in order to justify anything and everything in the battle against the Palestinians. In this construction, he writes, the Holocaust “is a tool of blackmail – emotional, moral, political and economic – employed against Europe and the whole international community.”

Founded on the misperception that the Holocaust is the sole justification for the creation of Israel, a corollary is that the “wickedness” of Israeli society can be traced back to the wickedness of the Nazis, roughly in the way that children of alcoholics might themselves exhibit the same traits. By drawing plausible connections between Israeli actions and those of Nazis, the negation of the Holocaust as a justification for Israel’s existence is complete.

“If Israel is a Nazi state, their point has already been proved: Hitler was not unique and, in the crime against the Jews, he had collaborators,” Yakira writes. The uniqueness of the genocide against the Jews is erased by the allegation that it is taking place again, now, and by the very victims of the Nazis. This is a position made palatable only with a huge dose of ideology, as Yakira summarizes the narrative: “What happened at Auschwitz was, in the last analysis, just another instance, among many, of the true source of all crimes: colonialism, imperialism, capitalism and Zionism.”

Yakira, a philosopher at Hebrew University, has spent great periods of time studying and in discussion with Holocaust deniers of varying stripes, from those who outright deny that the events happened to those who minimize their magnitude and those who otherwise disfigure the truth to suit ideological ends. The irony, he notes, is that those most likely to deny the Holocaust are among the first to exploit its imagery for their own ends.

“Those who deny the Holocaust dispute its factuality while at the same time making use of the symbolic power of the term ‘holocaust’ to advance the idea of destroying Israel,” he writes.

All of this is, of course, tough terrain. Yakira manoeuvres eloquently – even with occasional sharp wit that makes this book far more readable than its title would suggest. He acknowledges the double-edged sword of this debate and how difficult it is for Zionists to win it. “[T]here is certainly a close, integral connection between the Holocaust and Israel,” he writes. “There cannot be any doubt that the two most important events in modern Jewish history have been the destruction of one-third of the Jewish people and the establishment of Israel.” But this truth has allowed enemies of Israel to draw false conclusions.

According to Yakira, in the anti-Zionist narrative, “The Holocaust is, indeed, the only argument in favor of the Zionism program: the Jews are not a nation deserving of self-determination, Zionism is a colonialist phenomenon, and the state of Israel was erected on the ruins of another people’s homes, following a long series of crimes Zionism committed against them. Consequently, the Jews living in the piece of land called Israel do not have a ‘natural’ right to self-determination or a state.”

Yakira describes opponents turning the historical experience of the Jews against the victims themselves, in what amounts to a “social psychology” prognosis of a frightening order. Israel, in the anti-Zionist narrative, is a sort of paranoid figure whose pathology allows every legitimate security concern to be dismissed or delegitimized.

“This leads to the conclusion,” writes Yakira, “that the struggle of the Arabs against the Jews is essentially a rational one, for the Jews ... are trapped ‘in a world of monsters and myths’ and do not live in ‘the real world.’”

While it may seem irrational for contemporary so-called “progressives” to side against pluralist, democratic Israel and to make common cause with some of the world’s worst defilers of human rights, this illogical position is not without precedent. While those who defend terrorists’ right to kill Israeli civilians may not rightly be described as pacifists, this is an affectation to which many “progressives” aspire. The seeming madness of contemporary anti-Zionists makes slightly more sense when compared with their ideological predecessors of the 1930s and ’40s, who, Yakira writes, exhibited “an absolute refusal to recognize the existence of any evil greater than that of war itself – seeing the latter as an evil to be fought more than any enemy.... [A]nd if the Jews had to be sacrificed in order to avoid war, it was a price consistent pacifism was prepared to pay.”

Successfully contesting the right of Zionists to integrate the memory of the Holocaust into the narrative, while misappropriating the Holocaust for use against Israel, the anti-Zionists have successfully check- mated Jews. “We Israelis thus find ourselves in a bind,” Yakira states, “passive and infantilized, the victims of a double manipulation: if we are constrained to keep silent, it will be a crime against those who perished, for they and their suffering will be forgotten; but if we feel compelled to talk about the Holocaust and keep the memory of it alive, we will also be committing a crime against the victims, because we will thereby be instrumentalizing them and using their memory and that of their suffering in order to send our children to kill Arabs.”

Yakira concludes that the anti-Zionists have succeeded in taking the facts, which should benefit Zionism, and manipulated them for use against Zionism. “It is the exact mirror image of the truth.... They use the little historical truth they accept in order to distort the larger truth, to turn it on its head, and to bolster their ideological message.”

Among those inverted truths is the underlying premise that Zionists are able to (or would even seek to) use the memory of the Holocaust to silence all criticism of

Israel. Yakira quotes one of the anti-Zionist writers: “It is enough to mention ‘the six million’ to put an end to any criticism of Israel or Zionism, just as holding up a cross or a bulb of garlic stops a vampire.”

If only it were so easy.

Pat Johnson is, among other things, director of programs for Hillel in British Columbia.

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