Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland
Did you see this? From Ha'aretz, "Study: IDF officers less committed to Jewish values after visits to Nazi death camps." The headline exposes unsatisfactory indoctrination levels in IDF soldiers. The whole article is worth a read (especially to see how the paper doesn't quote the actual report at all, yet then tries to do damage control by referring to a different survey that showed increased indoctrination levels among Israeli high schoolers who take similar trips).
Here's the key section:
The study found that before going on the trip, officers expressed a very high level of commitment to the Jewish people and to preserving their Jewish heritage, and high levels of solidarity with the fate of other Jews.
In contrast, they expressed a lower - though still high - level of commitment to more universalist ideas, such as understanding the universal context of the Holocaust.
After they returned from the trips, however, the researchers found a drop in commitment to all values related to Jewish identity, including the importance of the Land of Israel for the Jewish people, the importance of the IDF's existence, feelings of national pride in being Israeli, and a sense of a shared Jewish fate.
The study found a particularly dramatic decline in the importance the officers attached to Jewish and Israeli symbols, and to Diaspora Jewry.
The trips also produced a decline in IDF-related values, including commitment to the state and the army, feelings of leadership, and love of heroism.
In contrast, the trips produced no change in the officers' commitment to universal democratic values such as human dignity, the sanctity of life and tolerance.
As a result, Ha'aretz reports, "Army sources said they were 'stunned' by the findings, which seem to indicate that the trips are achieving the opposite of their declared purpose."
Note how the bad news of the report is that tribalist and exclusivist ideologies decline while ideas "such as understanding the universal context of the Holocaust" and a "commitment to universal democratic values such as human dignity, the sanctity of life and tolerance" remain the same. Yeah, what a bummer.
About Nima Shirazi
Nima Shirazi is a political commentator from New York City. His analysis of United States foreign policy and Middle East issues is published on his website, WideAsleepInAmerica.com, and can also be found in numerous other online and print publications. Follow him on Twitter @WideAsleepNima.
The crucial question is why this is occurs. Is it remotely possible that IDF members had some glimmer that the inhuman devaluation of life they witnessed was in any way similar to their indoctrinated view of Palestinians and Arabs? Now that would be worth the trip, if they could see themselves in the wider context of ethnic nationalism and its racist, elitist behaviour.
Perhaps seeing the Nazi machinery of dehumanization, torture, and sheer inhumanity, brought many soldiers face to face with the ugliness and the evil they themselves have committed in the name of the Jewish and Democratic State™.
That decrease in morale is certainly an indicator. One walks out of the camps with the feeling of disgust and disappointment in one’s self and one’s country.
Maybe shock indoctrination/brainwashing works better on teens than on adults. Maybe the officers recoiled at the primitive attempt to condition them and manipulate their emotions, and instinctively resisted by refusing to draw the facile, jingoistic conclusions their handlers were obviously after.
Another theory. I wonder how many of these officers (keeping in mind that they tend to come from higher socio-economic backgrounds) had been through this before, as teens, and refused to be manipulated a second time.
“Maybe shock indoctrination/brainwashing works better on teens than on adults”
Wishful thinking, Israeli teenagers on those ‘camp’ trips are a nuisance in Poland ,…
link to polishpress.wordpress.com
@ Split — That link is shocking. If even half of it is true it is shocking. Where is eee? These people have no manners at all. Why does Poland put up with it? -N49.
yes, indoctrination does work better on teens. the military has known this for a long time, which is why they like to get kids right out of high school, destroy their individuality, then build them back up as a member of the group. and in fact, modern science is learning why: the prefrontal cortex is not fully ripe until about age 25.
link to hhs.gov
link to youtube.com
The effectiveness of this “camp” trip on indoctrinating high schoolers was well documented in the amazing movie Defamation, which I believe is available for view online at link to youtube.com.
This surprising study is no doubt quite troubling. The next thing you know, some Israelis may be tainted with the dangerous notion that all people should enjoy full equality in the land of their birth regardless or religion or ethnicity. On second thought, no worries – that’s too unrealistic.
link to haaretz.com
“Thus, and also as a result of the demographic phobia, another chapter was written this month in the attempt to harass the minority. The Citizenship Law prohibits Palestinians from living with their Israeli spouses within Israel proper. So, in the guise of an innocent “regulation,” women are separated from their husbands and children from their parents, and their lives are turned into an ongoing nightmare.”
Maybe some of the soldiers recognised the past in their own country’s modern behaviour . Maybe some of them figured out how power works in reality. It could be Jews or it could be Germans doing the killing .
When I lived in Poland, the universality of the Nazi evil was they way we perceived the Second World War. I don’t think that many people did not have the subconcious understanding that the Jews were but the first batch of undesirables that Nazi death machine was meant to do away with. Poles were sitting on the land that Germany coveted for centuries, and were seen by many as lesser mortals, much less able to make dessert bloom, so to speak, and therefore very much in the queue for extermination at some future point in time.
Of course we were all running the gauntlet of Soviet-inspired propaganda, undoing of which will even today get people smeared as Holocaust deniers, and which fed us an endless stream of German bad, Pole and Russian good, black and white (ideologically speaking) war movies.
Of course now we all running the gauntlet of Israel-inspired propaganda, undoing of which will even today get people smeared as Holocaust deniers, and which feeds us an endless stream of Jews good, Europeans bad, black and white (ideologically speaking) media pieces.
The most tragic part of that is that we do not have knowledge of death camps and Holocaust that we could have, had we be able to treat the subject as one treats any other research topic, with debate about the relative importance of each step that took Germany and it’s victims into the tragic end.
Once decision to kill a specific group of people is taken, it is usually much too late to start organising the rescue. With current technology, the efficiency of genocide can be modified, to suit the perpetrators.
I’m sure many of the Jewish officers know this prison.
link to guardian.co.uk
“The room is barely wider than the thin, dirty mattress that covers the floor. Behind a low concrete wall is a squat toilet, the stench from which has no escape in the windowless room. The rough concrete walls deter idle leaning; the constant overhead light inhibits sleep. The delivery of food through a low slit in the door is the only way of marking time, dividing day from night. This is Cell 36, deep within Al Jalame prison in northern Israel. It is one of a handful of cells where Palestinian children are locked in solitary confinement for days or even weeks. One 16-year-old claimed that he had been kept in Cell 36 for 65 days.
The only escape is to the interrogation room where children are shackled, by hands and feet, to a chair while being questioned, sometimes for hours.
Most are accused of throwing stones at soldiers or settlers; some, of flinging molotov cocktails; a few, of more serious offences such as links to militant organisations or using weapons. They are also pumped for information about the activities and sympathies of their classmates, relatives and neighbours.
At the beginning, nearly all deny the accusations. Most say they are threatened; some report physical violence. Verbal abuse – “You’re a dog, a son of a whore” – is common. Many are exhausted from sleep deprivation. Day after day they are fettered to the chair, then returned to solitary confinement. In the end, many sign confessions that they later say were coerced.”
I’m sure some of them see the German point of view when they go to Auschwitz.
It’s shameful that the reporter seems to think it’s a bad thing that the humanism rises and tribalism declines after such a trip.
But I’m rather surprised by this result. What I gathered from documentaries such as Defamation and other accounts was that the blind patriotism and racist suprematism is generally rising after a visit at concentration camps. If the result is true, I hope this is a sign of Jews slowly catching up with Avraham Burgs semi-universalist message of “The Holocaust is Over. We must Rise from its Ashes.”
Well I wouldn’t be surprised if their are two reactions.
One, especially among young adults, who are sheltered from the ugliness of the Occupation, is blind patriotism and support for the country.
The others, probably have some experience dealing with the other side and have seen some of the uglier behavior in the Occupied Territories. They might work with Arab population regularly, and can not view them merely as the “other”. Recognizing similarities in the methods of dehumanization, or breaking a suspect down might make them slightly uncomfortable.
MLE,
that sounds logical. Now that I think of it, the Jews who were turned more or less fascist by their visit to Auschwitz were indeed schoolchildren. Time to stop this dangerous practice.