Last night I went to the New York Public Library for a conversation between Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Israeli Knesset whose new and often-stirring book is The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, and Omer Bartov, who teaches history at Brown.
The first thing to be said is that Burg is a politician and he does not disappoint in public. He is very tall and physical, with long arms, and has a withering/arrogant German-Jewish sense of humor mixed in with Israeli shtik. Some day I will tell you his watermelons joke. His voice sounds exactly like Arnold Schwarzenegger's. This was fun. Burg is even better on the stage than on the page.
Bartov is also a very smart guy, probably smarter than Burg, as Burg actually protested, effectively, calling him an academic. Bartov, a roundshouldered twinkling-eyed silverhaired intellectual with a dispassionate indomitable manner, actually dominated the conversation, and got a lot of points on Burg. The main criticism he issued (which I made myself, not as well, when I called Burg's manner too exalted for my reading taste) is that Burg is a utopian who is not engaged in the real question of what to do. Your role model Hannah Arendt did not like utopias. Lots of people die when utopian visions meet reality. What are we to do about the Palestinians, whom you skirt throughout? What about the West Bank? Very good criticism.
And Burg's response was even better I thought--saying in essence, You got to keep your eyes on the prize. Have heavenly goals.
Now let me get to my criticisms, which are multiple. I found myself deeply annoyed by the event on nativist grounds. I'm not a nativist, I'm an internationalist, this blog is Mondo. And yet here were two Israelis sittin around talking--or maybe Bartov is a transplanted Israeli, I don't know, the revolving door policy is so confusing you may have noticed--about how they listened to the Eichmann trial on radio back when, and they were introduced by yet another man with an Austrian accent, Paul Holdengraber. I wanted a more American perspective in the conversation. This is the United States, which is blindfolded and wounded, in some measure because of the Israel lobby. But again: we are being lectured by Israelis about what Israel means. We need to figure out what Israel means for ourselves. Holdengraber understood the problem. As soon as he could end the dialogue with questions, his first question was down to earth, What do you say about the 2-state solution? Then Obama and Israel?
Burg said that the two sides each now have a one-state solution, Netanyahu and Hamas, and the two-state solution is coming to an end soon. (In a way, he is saying Let us try and imagine one state better, but he's hard to pin down.) Bartov said the 2-state-solution is the only solution. One state will mean ethnic cleansing. (Which is going on now in gradualist fashion.) He also said that the Palestinians now have their own Holocaust narrative-- and their own "Treblinka."
This was an ugly statement, that blinked right by. I assume he was referring ironically to the Nakba. The Nakba is an important narrative. Americans are learning about it. The two Israelis made scant reference to Palestinian suffering--though to his great credit, Bartov used a word that Mark Cohen used at JTS last week and that American media and politicians wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, "oppression" of the Palestinians on the West Bank. Very good. Move us forward. Oppression. But Treblinka--that is a blinkered and nasty comment. Mariam Said was in the audience, Edward Said's gracious widow. I don't think she or her late husband would ever have said that the Palestinians experienced Treblinka. They experienced something different. Let us try and understand it in real terms.
At that moment, Bartov seemed a particularist of the deepest dye. While Burg, wearing the white shorts, extolled universalism and extended the Holocaust/genocide understanding to all peoples, not just Jews. That type of generosity is necessary. I was also offended by Bartov's statement that the 600,000 people living in Palestine in 1945 who said, "Never again," allowed it to happen again--with reference to Darfur or Rwanda, it seemed (have to listen to the tape). Well there was no acknowledgement that these 600,000 were only the Jews of Palestine, and the several hundred thousand Palestinians were soon visited with massacres and ethnic cleansing by the Jews.
Though in fairness to Bartov, he also said that when an Israeli soldier killed a Palestinian boy by throwing him from a Jeep, in 1988, he wrote to Yitzhak Rabin, then Defense Minister, and made the Nazi analogy--we know where this kind of brutalization leads. Rabin wrote back in rage.
I am trying to convey my annoyance that this sophisticated audience, mostly Jewish, it seemed, was taking its cues from two Israelis. When we all would have been better served if Burg had been in a dialogue with, say, Rashid Khalidi, who has a New York accent, or the guy I was sitting next to, realist and Holocaust scholar Michael Desch, who has a midwestern accent. The conversation would not have been quite so philosophical, we wouldn't have spent so much time on semantical/rabbinical questions about the Jewish state and the law of return; and the oppression of the occupation, which Bartov said he was circling round, and only circled round, might have been on the table.
Desch wrote out a question. It wasn't asked. He shared it with me today:
I asked him to reflect on the different experiences of the Holocaust among Israeli and American Jews. It is my opinion that for the latter, it is a doubly neurotic issue: guilt re: what American Jews did not do at the time plus a contemporary guilt that they live so well here (and have no intention of giving that up) while the Israelis are on the front line. I think a lot of American Jews compensate for this by being uber-pro-Israel. I think it is analogous to how secular American and Israeli Jews deal with the Orthodox: they’ll never become one but they are happy to defer to them on matters of faith, morals, and the definition of Judaism. Of course, then they’re surprised when they see the results of that, especially in Israel.
I agree with Desch--the Holocaust is at the heart of the Israel lobby. It is the reason we Jews grant ourselves such extragovernmental powers, because we are angry at the US government for failing us in WW2 and cannot trust the government. "The Myth of Abandonment," per Desch's groundbreaking paper. I wanted more American stuff in the conversation. Later today or tomorrow I will listen to my tape and render a typescript of Burg's best comment of the talk, when he spoke of "semi-autonomous" American Jewry as being a post-Holocaust creation, powerful, influential Jews with access to the corridors of power, and cultural power too. Semi-autonomous? That means the Israel lobby; we are joined to Israel.
There was one moment when I wanted to scream my lungs out but sat there like a domesticated pea hen. The two Israelis were bewailing the lack of Israeli leadership when Bartov said, "Why don't we have a Barack Obama?" He praised Obama as a man of great intelligence whose feet are on the ground and then he said it again, Where is our Obama?
I wanted to shout, Obama is mixed race. Obama was made by Lincoln dying to end evil 150 years ago, even when he did not think blacks were equal, and a very long, painful struggle since then to try and treat black people as equals and believe they are equals. Israelis should learn from us, and not the other way around. As Bartov himself said, Arab citizens of Israel are not really equal. Maybe if you fix that, you will find your Obama. Maybe he is under your boot.
Weiss: “He also said that the Palestinians now have their own Holocaust narrative– and their own "Treblinka. This was an ugly statement, that blinked right by. I assume he was referring ironically to the Nakba.”
Christians and dissidents in Soviet Russia experienced the original “Treblinka,” in the Gulag, at the hands of apostates, Jewish Bolsheviks, and violent totalitarian liberals long before the Nazis came along. A similar coalition is consolidating around Obama right now, with corporatist fascists thrown in for good measure. Let’s hope “Israel’s Obama” never emerges. It would likely mean death for millions more “backward people” unfortunate enough to live in the neighborhood of organized psychotic “liberals.”
Yes, things are gray–I just wish the American publc was given a chance to be clued in re I-P. Speaking of which, Witty has often answered various posts here by referring to the dispossesion of Jews in the middle east (overlooking the larger power scenario), and so here is an analysis of just one group of Jewish Arabs, the IraqI Jews, which shows just how gray the whole larger scenario is:
http://www.realisticdove.org/
The Jewish exodus from Arab lands: Why Zionists and anti-Zionists are both wrong–check out Realistic dove. Offered here as Witty often brings the issue up while he ignores the giant disproportionate
powers.
850,000 Jews were killed at Treblinka Ed, Now I know that to you that's a great thing, you too Eva. But I fail to see the Palestinian analogy. Perhaps you can enlighten me. Also, a little information on that paradise for Jews that was known has the Soviet Union. Just because a KGB officer was born Jewish means nothing. Or that Trotskys original name was Bronstein. Look , at Phil. He was born Jewish and is an advocate of the destruction of Israel with the death and dispersion of the Jews there. Thinks the mumbai terrorists were jolly fellows and feels that we got in to WW2 on the wrong side. Being Jewish by accident of birth means shit .
Where is our Obama? I wanted to shout, Obama is mixed race. … As Bartov himself said, Arab citizens of Israel are not really equal. Maybe if you fix that, you will find your Obama. Maybe he is under your boot.
Not that anything the phallic symbol of gideon(aka side curl bob)ever makes any sense, but I've noticed a lot of people seem to think like him. A Jew who becomes a commie and murders hundreds of thousands of people is no longer a Jew. I guess because he became a commie. When it becomes clear to every one that the butcher of New York, Ariel Sharon, was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, because he knew about them and did not warn us, he will stop being a Jew and will just be a mass murderer. A group could get away with a lot of shit thinking like this.
What makes somebody Jewish. A communist by the very definition has repudiated his religion. Much like Phil. And how was Ariel Sharon
complicit in 9/11. If Phil converted to Islam would he still be Jew. or even note worthy. The very nature of this blog is a man bites dog situation. Jewish guy shits on his people. Even though we are not even his people anymore.
Terror, schmerror. It's the Reds! Even bin Laden was anti-communist.
The Palestinian/Israeli Obama(s) has already been killed by Mossad or Fatah. Or both.
Totalitarians are neither liberal or conservative. Totalitarians are their own political type, regardless of their political economy preferences prior to becoming totalitarian. What totalitarians do have in common, though, is an ideology that can easily identify enemies, whether through race, class or religion, for example, which are then eliminated to achieve the perfection of the ideology.
Over-reaction to “anti-Semitism,” real and imagined, spurred the Jewish Bolsheviks toward their totalitarianism and mass murder. The origins of the over-reaction lay in the Jewish milieu, which on the negative side is generally self-absorbed, vindictive, conspiratorial, bitter, semi-hysterical and ethnic fundamentalist. I do concede that Jewish Zionist Israeli crimes haven’t yet reached the level of Communist crimes and retaliatory Nazi crimes, but Jewish diaspora Neocons and Neolibs and their socialist/corporatist partners are working to change that. The Iraq war was merely the first installment of their plan.
Organized Jewry should really thank Weiss, instead of berating him. He's actually trying to prevent his people from making yet another epic error in judgment by changing up their thinking, bringing it a new viewpoint. As I libertarian, I just differ with his socialist remedies, which I view as a replay of the Bolshevik loop. Organized Jewry in general seems caught in some kind of accursed-loop group-think, where it keeps repeating the same mistakes time and again, digging itself deeper each time. Maybe its so old and tired, it's become suicidal, hence its disinterest in Weiss’ fresher perspective. All its greedy plotting and scheming may be a deliberate, sub-conscious laying of the groundwork for the Samson option. As the Peter Green-written Fleetwood Mac song goes: "Oh Well."
Ed, still waiting for you with my .50. How's that for bitter?
The level of projection in here by some of the posters is impressive.
"Jewish guy shits on his people. Even though we are not even his people anymore."
Isn't it funny how the right-wing, fascist jews claim to speak for the entire group?
Whose "we", SOG?
I would say that its Jews who like being Jews. That's my people. Jews who hate being Jews and want to see the death of our people, whether through the tender mercies of the Arabs or through total assimilation. Well, that's Phil. Lowenstein, Chomsky, and others.
No problem. SOG makes Hitler happy. When Ed sticks it up SOG's ass while SOG is prowling around with his absence of American GI training, the world will rejoice.
While Ed is a kind of libertarian nut trapped in a polarized world of political economic identification, Sword of Gideonthe point is a racial ideologue who could rationalize the mass murder of billions.