A few months back a friend told me that the business of this blog was to produce the prose equivalent of the classic French movie, La Guerre Est Finie. In that movie, a Communist played by Yves Montand comes to understand, in 1966, that the wars over Communism are over. It's a dead issue, the west is moving on. With that, the man's life is over, all his conceptions are of the past. (And yes, there's a ton of sex, just like on this blog.) My friend was saying that the people on this blog were bringing the news to young Jews, the war is over. The Holocaust is over.
Well Israeli Avrahum Burg, who like me is 53, but Israeli, is doing that job, which is why I'm so wild to see his forthcoming book, The Holocaust Is Over; Let Us Rise From Its Ashes. I believe he is saying a lot of the same things, from an Israeli perspective. I will be very curious to hear what he says about assimilationism–this son of an Orthodox rabbi who describes his own religion in "transcendental," non-Orthodox, "pluralist" terms.
The continuing business of this blog is to connect the end of the Holocaust to the end of the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby is intimately associated with the Holocaust. The Holocaust licenses the Israel lobby–as Mike Desch wrote in his landmark paper "The Myth of Abandonment", as Jeffrey Goldberg indicates in his book Prisoners; and as my mother said to me constantly growing up–because it is widely perceived that the State Department abandoned the Jews of Europe, and Roosevelt too, when he didn't bomb the trainlines. The Israel lobby is belated and meager compensation. The Holocaust is what gives Goldberg his aggrieved indignation about any challenge to Jewish power in the U.S. The Holocaust is the driver in the truly scary Iraq-war-tome-made-living-movie, The End of Evil, by Frum and Perle, in which they state, "Victory or holocaust," and say that it is fine to knock off Arab society after Arab society.
When Jimmy Carter spoke about apartheid on the West Bank at Brandeis nearly 2 years ago, the older Jews stuck their fingers in their ears and talked about the Holocaust. Alan Dershowitz angrily described the pre-'67 border as the "Auschwitz" lines, making the Jews vulnerable. I asked Jacob Cohen, an older Brandeis prof who introduced Dersh, about all the Holocaust talk–
I said, young people want to have a hopeful view of history. They don’t want to hear about the Holocaust all the time. They don’t want to see history as having a tragic destination.
Cohen became angry: “You’re talking about a symbol, the desecration of which deeply hurts the Jewish people …” He went on to say that if I thought that “the elimination of Israel” would end Islamic world’s hatred of the West, I was wrong. “Osama bin Laden is still remembering the Crusades.”
These people want to believe all this hysteria. Thus their talk of the new antisemitism. They want us at dagger points with the Arab world. They demand that Jews stop thinking freely, that these issues are decided, and dangerous. And it has taken Walt and Mearsheimer to look at things in a new way, and Avrahum Burg too.
A great intellectual liberation is afoot. We're post-Iraq. Post-Holocaust. And post-the-need-for a Jewish state. We're discovering the Nakba. And inventing Barack Obama because we need him.
Related posts:
- Burg Book Saying ‘Holocaust Is Over’ Is Covered as News in England, Not Here Yet
- Israelis Have B*g B*lls (Burg Got Blurb From Mearsheimer)
- ‘New Yorker’ Editor: Israel and Lobby Bear Responsibility for Iraq War
- Why Won’t Politicians Stand Up for Khalidi and Palestinians? A: The Israel Lobby
- Avrum Burg’s ‘Holocaust Is Over’ Book Due Out Here in 3 Weeks
{ 22 comments }
The holocaust is almost over.
It will be over when the Arab world accepts Israel, when the Jewish people have a permanently safe haven.
You are wishful thinking that the era of persecution of Jews is over, when siting only your personal Western, upper middle-class (largely Jewish) environ.
Even the Hudson Valley is largely Jewish.
Lebanon isn't. Jordan isn't. (Although there are wonderful Jordanians, there are also many that have harassed importers of fruit from Israel – even importers from Israeli Arab-owned companies). Egypt isn't. Iraq isn't. Iran isn't.
And, in all of those locales, if one wears tzitzit, visibly and specifically Jewish (as skin-tone of color is visible), one risks being harrassed, at the least boycotted.
The only places in those cultures that are the exception to that are where the visibly Jewish minority is regarded as human, accepted.
Its odd to say that the holocaust is over because of one's experience where the majority of Jews don't live, and to ignore that there still is persecution and threat where Jews do live.
Burg is a great suggestor of what could be possible.
And, to make it possible, the liberal progressive Zionists (including Israelis like Burg – progressive liberal ZIONIST) have asserted that even though the condition of threat exists, it is humane and practical to still relax and eliminate prohibitions collectively.
That strikes me as a position of COURAGE, not worthy of contempt in the slightest.
To say that the holocaust is over, in the broader sense of the term, is to run with the ball before one has caught it – a FAILING strategy.
"The Holocaust is over" –
and what lesson does Richard Witty draw from it? "The Jewish people (must) have a permanently safe haven". What Richard forgot to mention is that that haven has to be permanently armed to the teeth, since, as Hannah Arendt said: 'the Zionists assume an eternal struggle between the Jewish people and their enemies'.
Witty: "there still is persecution and threat where Jews do live."
…therefore the Holocaust will never be over until Jews or their proxies are in authoritarian control wherever a couple of Jews happen to live, or emigrate. Sounds like Neocon rationalizing to me.
Cohen on the Holocaust: “You’re talking about a symbol, the desecration of which deeply hurts the Jewish people"
And Jewish Bolshevism and its murder of millions of Christians is a symbol, the denial of which deeply hurts the Christian people. I will continue brining up the Jewish Bolsheviks as a weapon so long as Jews continue bringing up the Holocaust as a weapon. Others will continue to bring up the Nakba. How does it feel? Maybe each should be turned into a religious tenet for Christianity and Islam respectively, as many Jews have done with the Holocaust and Judaism.
the existence of the Diaspora dates from the beginnings of Jewish history. Abraham discovers God outside the borders of the Land. Jacob leads tribes to outside the borders. The tribes become a people outside the borders. The Torah is given outside the borders. As Israelis and Zionists, this is ignored completely. They rejected the Diaspora. But Burg maintains that just as there was something astonishing about German Jewry, in America, too, they also created the potential for something astonishing. They created a situation "in which the goy can be my father and my mother and my son and my partner. The goy there is not hostile but embracing. And as a result, what emerges is a Jewish experience of integration, not separation. Not segregation. I find those things lacking here [in Israel]. Here the goy is what he was in the ghetto: confrontational and hostile."
Perhaps the model of traumatic stress disorder applies to all Jews.
It's what they learn in their children's upper class summer camps.
It's like the rag men who were sent in to fight (by mostly Jewish shrinks employed by the US Army) again and again, to protect the world from Hitler's last surge.
Perhaps we should recognize that a learned traumatic stress disorder (by stressing all the wrongs, never the rights of total Jewish history in the diaspora, sort of like what the African-American black
nationalists do today in the name of religio-liberation-marxism) is at the heart of those who hate Phil Weiss the most.
American working class Gentiles can die to protect American and Israeli Jews, but it doesn't mean a thing; ditto, American taxpayers, paying for Israel because their forefathers didn't look only to saving the Jews when the whole world fought for its life…
At the core of this problem is the idea of being chosen, an idea that puts, for example, the Armenian experience in lower caps, while the Shoah is ALL CAPS.
Ultimately, the real issue is, would the Jews exist as Jews without an enemy?
Like a bunch of cracker hillbillys feuding, if they didn't have the other clan to unite them in a fight against the other, they would have no reason for being.
No wonder people attack Phil Weiss. They are even more afraid than he is of vanishing.
Better to have a clear enemy.
Who wants to face the engineering of their own identity?
Sartre was only wrong in that he conveniently left out the Jewish
side of being a NAZI.
Phil and Richard-
I wouldn't put much stock in what Abe Burg says, he is a discredited, corrupt, deceitful, failed politician. Yes, the newspaper Ha'aretz, which is read by something like 2% of the population runs his babblings, but few other people pay any attention to him. Just a reminder, he ran for the leadership of the Labor Party in 2001 (IIRC that was the year) and supposedly "won" the primary election, but then it was discovered that this paragon of "honesty" had his minions do massive ballot-box stuffing which led to the results being cancelled. A rerun of the vote led to him losing the the election. Later, he used influence peddling to get the government to hand over a government owned defense plant for far less than its real value to business partners who were active in organized crime. Fortunately, the state controller intervened and stopped this daylight robbery of the Israeli taxpayer. A criminal probe of his relationship with these mobsters claimed that he "didn't know" criminal connections of his business partners.
Then there was his demand for a chauffeur driven car for life because of the few years he headed the Jewish Agency (it is ironic to have an anti-Zionist head such an organization). He went to court to get them to give him this taxpayer-funded luxury but he lost and then whined about how "unfair" it was in his rambling interview with Ari Shavit in Ha'aretz (it is interesting how the rest of the people manage to buy their own and drive their own cars, wherease this "champion of the poor" wants us to pay for his luxuries which he apparently can't do without).
Phil-I know how you get so excited at anecdotal stories of how some young Jew "outs" himself and announces that he has discovered the value of "anti-Zionism"…well, here is another anectodal story…..a good friend of my daughter (in Israel) had two leftist, anti-religious parents and grew up in Tel Aviv and attended the prestigious "Ironi Aleph" High School where half the graduates avoid army service (the students come from Israel's Secular 'Elite'). She met "settler" Jews from Hebron, became religious, became "right-wing", and sat in military brig for a week because she refused to carry out orders in her military service to kick Jews out of Gush Katif. I am glad that young Jews are seeing the light.
BarKochba,
I'm an advocate of law, not of anti-Zionism nor of odd interpretations of Torah that somehow diminish the importance of "keeping my commandments" meaning the TEN authoritative principles.
As an advocate of law, force or mob pressure (Palestinian or neo-Jewish) is NOT the measure of compliance.
Be very careful what you say!
If you deny the holocaust or even suggest that, you will go to jail for many years! Maybe you could blog from there? -:)
A post holocaust world sounds like a world with less hate, angst and differenceness.
so, the NAZIs kept the Jews alive as a distinctive people? Nice. Hitler won.
Please consider, Witty is an accountant, not a lawyer.
First, we had the Thora Jewry.
Then we had the secularised post-Thora Jewry that defined itself by the Holocaust.
Now, what does a 'post-Holocaust' Jewry mean?
Is there any rationale left for defining oneself as Jewish?
Yes there is: the defense of Israel.
What does happen to Jewry when the Thora, the Holocaust and Israel are no longer identity-defining because they are all over?
OK Klaus, you got me, what the fuck is "Thora"?
As an advocate of law, force or mob pressure (Palestinian or neo-Jewish) is NOT the measure of compliance.
If I understand it correctly, Richard, it does not help to be an advocate of law under these conditions:
The Israeli Supreme Court has never ruled on the legality of settlement as such. If you want to understand the technical reasons for avoiding such a ruling, read David Kretzmer’s authoritative work, The Occupation of Justice.
Or is this not the law you have in mind?
bar_kochba132, what is the Israeli paper you trust, and why?
The end of the Holocaust, and the Lobby, will mark the end of a secular era lasting two-thirds of a century. Whereas Obama, at best, will preside over eight years. Small change, compared to seven decades.
I don't begrudge your fondness for Obama, but you romanticize him too much. This issues treated by this blog will remain vital, long after Obama has passed from the scene. US politics are an ephermeral triviality; an intellectual wasteland for well-coiffed poseurs, grifters and cons. Follow the money, not the empty suits, vapid faces and babbling commentators. They're toast.
Ed,
'Thora' unscrambled is 'Torah'
"Yes, the newspaper Ha'aretz, which is read by something like 2% of the population runs his babblings"
the rest of the Israelis watch fox news then?
hee hee hee
moron.
Lest we end up relying on "americangoy" for an analysis of the Israeli press— "Ma'ariv", and Yediot Ahranot," and "Israel HaYom" are the dailies most Israelis read.
Especially considering the state of the American economy and presidential campaign, an analysis of the USA press reveals a huge dirth of coverage, e.g.,http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/cost_of_israel.html
Why do you keep calling him AvraHUM Burg? His name is AvraHAM Burg, though nicknamed I believe "Avrum".
/Göran
I'm reading "The Holocaust is Over" and it blows me away. I am not religious but feel I could talk forever with Burg.
I am also a proponent of the USA asserting its defence of Israel's security and THEN DEMANDING, solely on the basis of enforcing international humanitarian and human-rights law, that Israel REMOVE the WALL and the SETTLERS from all occupied territories (i.e., outside pre-1967 Israel), the wall and settlers being quite clearly illegal (see 9 July 2004 International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the wall) as well as, of course, being major obstacles to peace.
Here's an experiment: if Israel DID remove the wall and the settlers, would Israel rebuild the wall, but inside pre-1967 Israel, thus apparently asserting that the wall was built for defence and security, or would it leave it un-rebuilt, admitting that its purpose was political and oppressive rather than defensive.
Zionism sometimes seemed to claim a desire that Israel would be a country just like other countries. Perhaps this meant "and therefore allowed to break international law and oppress minorities just as all other countries do", but I'd prefer the idea that it meant that Israel would become a member of the community of nations, obeying the treaties and conventions to which it is a party and complying with international law just as (perhaps) the USA will do now that Bush is out and Obama is in.
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