I'm the last to know, but this is great news. On October 28 Macmillan will publish former Speaker of the Knesset Avrahum Burg's book, "The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes," which caused such a stir when it came out in Hebrew a year back. Beautiful title, huh. The promo:
Burg argues that the Jewish nation has been traumatized and has lost
the ability to trust itself, its neighbors or the world around it. He
shows that this is one of the causes for the growing nationalism and
violence that are plaguing Israeli society and reverberating through
Jewish communities worldwide. Burg uses his own family history–his
parents were Holocaust survivors–to inform his innovative views on
what the Jewish people need to do to move on and eventually live in
peace with their Arab neighbors and feel comfortable in world at large.
I was shocked by Burg's interview in Haaretz 15 months ago in which he said the Law of Return mirrored Hitler. So was David Remnick. Excerpts of a Burg interview in the Jerusalem Post in August:
The question of this future generation will
not be about pogroms and anti-Semitism. Rather, it will be about
whether the Jewish people can survive without an external enemy. Do we really trust the world?…That's the beginning of the conversation,
because I do. This is so difficult for Israelis to accept. I say, let's
move slowly but surely – not overnight – from trauma to trust. ..
Look at a thousand years of European history.
Europe was a continent of bloodshed, where everybody killed everybody
else. It is therefore a very biased description of history to say that
all of them were against us. Especially since, during this 1,000 years,
most of the time, the conversation
between the Jews and the world was very impressive and positive. Can
you understand Western civilization without grasping that Jesus was
born as a Jew, crucified as a Jew and buried as a Jew?
Brings tears to my eyes. What a great man. Says this too:
survived throughout the ages is that we simply screwed the system. The
system never trusted us and, in return, we never trusted it – never
fully merged into it. We always survived by going around it somehow.
This completely explains the relationship of Marty Peretz/Israel and the United Nations. We'll grab partition then expand on it, and ignore every condemnation for the next 60 years because these are the people who wanted to screw us.
And this explains destroying Lebanon when two soldiers are catpured:
The problem lies in the psychology of trauma. It is not about the Holocaust,
per se, or about 1967. It is about the years between 1945 and 1948 –
three years between the end of Auschwitz and the beginning of Israel's
War of Independence. And what we did was to take this one three-year
period out of our entire past, so that whenever Palestinians kill
someone, it's not just one victim. It's one victim plus six million
plus 2,000 years.
