This is part twenty-eight of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
After genocide, no justice. A mantra for our age.
After ethnic cleansing, no justice. Another mantra for our age.
After atrocity – endless, isn’t it?
There is retribution. Mostly retribution is visited on those who have nothing to say about more or less anything beyond their daily lives. It’s just violence and atrocity continued. Recycled. Those caught in between don’t know the difference between insignias. Violence all around. Same stuff from every side.
So what to do when empowerment leads to another kind of enslavement? Imprisoned in power, on the hand, and now, on the other, deathly afraid of any crack in that power. If you let your power guard down the cycle of violence and atrocity, which you suffered and now continue, might roll over you in the wrong direction. Let others suffering. We’ve had enough.
Rwanda had plenty and more. Best to dish it out to others. Like Israel. Always a sense of being besieged and yes being besieged is the real deal sometimes. Imprisoned in power, however, the feeling is that the siege is permanent, it has to be, otherwise time-limits might apply. Back to normal? The siege can’t last forever, can it?
On the Israeli front, it doesn’t matter how much power Israel has, it thinks it’s under siege. Eternally. This means no way out of the imprisonment of power. Of course, a permanent war footing is immensely lucrative for the super-patriots among us. Don’t think that patriotism trumps the dollar.
So the original ending of Elie Wiesel’s Night had he and other Jews planning to rape German woman and poison the German water supply. Revenge a la mode. It’s not for me to judge, I suppose. Nor his later ending, existentially loaded, with him staring in the mirror and hardly recognizing his reflection. That’s right after the “liberation,” whatever that can mean in the Holocaust context. The more relevant question is what he sees in the mirror today, other than his Madoff drained and no doubt regained wealth.
Of course, Wiesel and many other Jews achieved success after the Holocaust. Is that justice? The six million dead are scattered everywhere. Is the Holocaust banner so dutifully raised a form of justice for them? Specifically, those Jews who went to Palestine, who the fought war for their independence – justice achieved?
In the cycle of violence and atrocity, one person’s justice is another person’s injustice. As I said, the cycle of violence and atrocity rolls along .
Now the question on the micro-level. Last year while teaching a course where international students were present, a student from Rwanda approached me. Having heard I was an “expert” on the Holocaust, he asked if I might be able to advise Rwanda on how to commemorate its genocide.
An obvious invitation was being dangled before me. I had never been to Rwanda, so initially I felt eager to share my knowledge. But almost immediately second thoughts entered my mind, first about using my Holocaust expertise to travel – a Holocaust credit card? – second, whether I should encourage genocide memorialization with the track record Holocaust commemoration had accumulated. Rwanda might end up with something similar to community Holocaust commemorations that feature yellow Star of David stick-ems attached to your jacket. This functions as a sign that Jews are truly mourning and that Christians are truly sorry. (But I wonder if the one I wore a few years ago when I was trying to be politically correct and attended a community Holocaust event might look dazzling on the helicopter gunships in the Ark of the Covenant. Not sure, though, whether the stick-ems will stick twice.)
So I paused; remembering is a slippery-slope. Would I be able to share that part of the Holocaust with my Rwandan hosts? Could I speak to them about the cycle of violence and atrocity, how we Jews have used it against others, asking the Rwandans if they were prone to the same abuse? You see speaking about the Holocaust to those who have no idea of what lies ahead is far from simple. Being respectful to them, should I hold back on the pitfalls that Jews are now mired in? How do I speak about the suffering of Jews without romanticizing Jews, balancing the actual suffering and the response to that suffering, keeping the complexity of both alive?
I have to keep in mind how difficult it is to institutionalize anything without losing the essence of what is being raised up. Since I’ve been critical of the Rwandan remembrance – and the way the Holocaust is remembered – I have to confess to the corners I’ve cut in my institutional journey. In the two centers I founded and directed I have always been on the cutting edge of wherever I’ve been. I’ve also had to negotiate the culture and religion, the context.
So if I – or you – had the freedom, how would we construct these memorial museums? If we accepted the task, how would our website read? If we refused because too much compromise was demanded, would that mean that the victims of Holocaust/genocide would be forgotten?
I suppose we can play the same mind-games with constructing a state, say the state of Israel, after the Holocaust. Or even now, if you or I were the Prime Minister of Israel, what would we do? In fact, due to the many constraints on power, what could we do?
If the answer is no Jewish state, never, that would be fine. Since there is state now, if you don’t want one, tell me your plan for dismantling it. I’m all ears. This isn’t about silencing your griping or mine, it’s to add a dose of realism to the war of ideas in the Middle East. My solution to these dilemmas is radical questions to keep pushing moderate solutions to the next level. This means that the solutions have to be a on a human and doable scale so that people can live ordinary lives – in real time.
Yes, moderation isn’t working and I don’t want to be lumped in with Michael Lerner – or for that matter with Norman Finkelstein. There has to be a way forward that is human and just, without the patronizing colonial mentality or International Law histrionics, one that respects the fact that universal human rights are political and have a particular face.
This means following and implementing a policy I call revolutionary forgiveness. At its heart revolutionary forgiveness includes justice whose color is gray. More about this another time.
The best anyone can get after Holocaust/genocide/ethnic cleansing/atrocity is a justice that lives for the future. No retrospectives. No do-overs. And since empowerment for its own sake is just another prison in need of a jail-break, revenge is just another word for everything to lose.
Power over others does not lead to healing. Perhaps this is the real lesson that the Holocaust has to teach the Rwandans.
Yet what are the incentives for Rwandans to listen. At least, their government, won’t accept these lesson plans that says move on together.
After genocide, no justice. Obvious. However, the race for power others doesn’t lead anywhere either. Over the long run.
Thus the prophetic is on notice before, during and after genocide. And Holocaust. No time off.
“My solution to these dilemmas is radical questions to keep pushing moderate solutions to the next level. This means that the solutions have to be a on a human and doable scale so that people can live ordinary lives – in real time.’
So which people can live ordinary lives? All people?
For Palestine and Israel the solution is simple.
Israel has to get off ALL the land they stole…..Israel has to be limited to the exact amount of land given it by the UN agreement. Period.
Moving 500,000 Israelis off Palestine land far is more doable than moving millions more Palestines off their land.
while on a much smaller scale the memoralization of the all too frequent massacres (such as the recent one in aurora) in the u.s. of a. have some of the characteristics of commemorations of actual genocides. for example, there’s the glorification of the victims, prayers for their departed souls, and calls for memorials to be set up to ensure that the victims will never be forgotten. another similarity is a seeming lack of concern for the underlying cause of the mass murders, in the aurora and similar mass murders, among other factors, guns available for everyone (no questions asked), and with the holocaust, the emergence of societies based on racial or religious supremacy. it’s this separation of cause and effect that allows the memmorializers to to avoid asking the question, “what can i do to make sure that tragedies such as this one are never repeated?” and without asking this question, other than an attempt to absolve oneself of any responsibility for past, present and future massacres, what does commemorating victims amount to?
Prof. Ellis:
I am unsure about your statement, and would like you explain more about this, when you write:
It seems to me that if a friend of mine was harmed and had a label put on them, then by wearing the label in a commemoration I would be showing solidarity or sympathy with my friend. It would also show that I felt bad for my friend. But simply wearing the label wouldn’t necessarily mean that I was responsible for my friend’s harm. For example my friend could have been harmed when I wasn’t there, or I might not have been strong enough to stop the abusers from harming him.
I highly doubt that Christians as a set category are responsible for the Holocaust. The New Testament tells its followers to avoid harming people with other views, even going so far as to “turn the other cheek.” The Church in Bulgaria pushed for its Axis government to protect the Jews, which it did. Meanwhile Christians in other eastern countries were fighting hard to liberate the camps where very many of their citizens were.
As for Christians in the US, I think the genocide was carried out during the time the US was fighting Germany. Before then, it seems to me Americans generally were unaware of the genocide. Leading up to the war, they would have disapproved of Hitler’s racist Nuremberg Laws, but it is worth pointing out the US was not yet a superpower, had a non-interventionist outlook, and would continue its own racist Segregation laws for the next 15 years.
It seems Americans had the ability to indirectly prevent the Holocaust but failed to do so, since leading up to the war they lacked a strong campaign against Segregation policies worldwide. Such a campaign should naturally have included a campaign against racist laws in some of their own states, and could have ended up affecting policies in other countries. But still, since Americans rejected the Nazis genocide and fought against it, it seems they were in fact responsible for ending it, along with the other Allied powers.
If one is to draw a lesson, it seems to me that the strongest defense against genocide is to mount a strong worldwide campaign against racist, ethnocentric policies worldwide, including ones sponsored by one’s one country. If the campaign is only used as a foreign policy tool against political opponents, then it does not really teach the world that ethnic discrimination is itself wrong.
“If the answer is no Jewish state, never, that would be fine. Since there is state now, if you don’t want one, tell me your plan for dismantling it. …so that people can live ordinary lives – in real time.”
Wow! A coherent and worthwhile paragraph at last.
(Except for the “My solution …next level”* bit. It isn’t a solution. It is just a way of trying to improve solutions that have been proposed.)
*What are all these “next levels” I keep hearing about? Does everyone think they live in a video game now?
I am a little disappointed in this rather confused and confusing discourse. First, I don’t see the common understanding of justice as being quite so arbitrary. We all learn in kindergarten that if you take something from someone else you have to give it back, ethnicity, personal histories and other categorical definitions of both parties notwithstanding. I also, along with most religious and moral systems, see forgiveness as a natural response to confession and apology which precedes it, followed by appropriate restitution. The victim is not expected to forgive unconditionally absent the aggressor’s acknowledgment of guilt, which is also a human universal. This in turn requires an egalitarian perception of common humanity without special entitlement, also emphasized in kindergarten.
Accordingly, I question Ellis’ casual dismissal of International Law as “histrionics” since these enshrine kindergarten rules for all of humankind – the only collective category we should treat as meaningful if we are to work together against global warming and endless war to save our common species from extinction on the fragile planetary sphere we share in common.
Since Israeli policy makers for the last six decades appear to have skipped kindergarten, they should be required to attend these basic human instructions before proceeding another day. This would enable transformation of their collective self-image to “human” rather than “Jewish” and launch a corresponding agenda of transformative behavior starting with humility, shame, confession, restitution, and commitment to being good neighbors in historic Palestine and their larger region. Who knows, with their technological vanity and a radical change of attitude they might actually be able to contribute something of value to the monumental challenges we humans now face.