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.
