“Is the genocide of European Jewry being used as part of the negation of what is happening to the Palestinians?” Yitzhak Laor asks, rhetorically, in The Myths of Liberal Zionism (Verso, 2010), his book on the Jewish Israeli literati and the European press that courts them. Laor continues:
Who can doubt it? When Eli Wiesel or Claude Lanzmann or any other of the most distinguished bearers of Holocaust memory are recruited to defend Israel, everyone knows they do so on behalf of the Holocaust survivors and victims, namely the State of Israel. Again, this is all part of the blurred lines between Jews and Israelis, the mixed roles they play, all under one title: victims.
Reading Yitzhak Laor earlier this year, I was at times physically shaken by his searing narrative, and it was his thesis that came to mind last week while reading the French press on a short visit to Brussels. Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor, Aharon Appelfeld, is in France promoting the translation of his book with the French title of Le Garçon qui voulait dormir (The boy who wanted to sleep), from the Hebrew, Ha-ish She-Lo Passak Lishon (literally: The Man who would not cease to sleep). Several reverential reviews and interviews have appeared in the French press, notably Le Monde, which dedicated two pages of its broadsheet ‘Des Livres’ (Books) section on Friday 24 June to the author. The novel’s male protagonist, Erwin-Aharon, is – like the author – an adolescent escapee from the Nazi concentration camps, and at the end of the war, he is taken to Italy, then British mandate Palestine. It is at this moment that the novel is set; recruited with other young people by the Jewish Agency, Erwin, who changes his name to Aharon, and spoke German, Ukranian and Yiddish, learns Hebrew to prepare himself for the future State of Israel. Erwin has, however, taken refuge in almost constant slumber, conversing in dreams with family members murdered during the Holocaust.
One book review/interview resembles another – in part because Appelfeld has some stock phrases: he never speaks of the Holocaust, but always of the ‘catastrophe’. “Look, he says ‘Holocaust’ is like ‘anti-Semitism’: these words are too small!”; and he defines himself as ‘a Jew writing in Israel’ (se définit comme “un juif écrivant en Israël”). Not one of the interviewees asks him about Israel’s occupation of Palestine – something that would be improbable with his Palestinian counterpart, regardless of the subject of her/his book. In all these pages and audio minutes of interviews, the colonised Palestinians cease to exist and Appelfeld is simply a ‘Jew’. Appelfeld is understandably content to play along: if he can tour France promoting his book and avoid questions on the Nakba, and Israel’s military occupation and apartheid policies, so much the better. I shared my exasperation with Yitzhak Laor, and he responded that,
the discourse is not the Israeli writer’s, but rather his Western interlocutors’ construction. Of course, those writers who managed to become what is known today as International Writers play the game, either for very practical reasons or [because they] happen to be just the subject of such a discourse. This discourse is: We are part of you, the West. Don’t spoil that with questions that remind us and you of the colonial division between West and East (within or without the West).
Aharon Appelfeld was born to assimilated Jewish parents in 1932 near Czernowitz, Romania (now Ukraine), and was just a child when he witnessed the assassination of his mother. Together with his father, he was transported to a Nazi concentration camp, and his autobiography, The Story of a Life picks up the story from after his courageous escape from the camp. The book profoundly affected me when I read it – to the extent that I failed to question the absence of any reference to the Palestinian Nakba when, in the second part of the book, Appelfeld’s 14 year old self arrives as a refugee in British mandate Palestine in 1946.
Appelfeld is a complex character, with an openly ambivalent attitude to Israeli identity and to Zionist ideology, which he has nevertheless defended as ‘necessary’. In a 2004 interview with Haaretz, in Hebrew (English translation), he criticized “an aggressive element” in Zionism, whilst yet being openly indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians: “I am not familiar with the Arabs. For me they are an abstraction”. He also expressed anger towards Europe for its continuing failure to acknowledge its full role in the Holocaust and was resentful of any criticism of Israel, which he dismissed as anti-Semitism: “Europe has not given itself a full reckoning of what happened between 1939 and 1945… because to this day they haven’t made a confession, the Europeans feel the need to say of the Jews that they are no better than them… They are already preparing the argument that if something happens to the Jews again, it will be the Jews’ fault, not theirs.” Empathy for the plight of non-Jews is severely lacking:
Week after week the newspapers write about some Palestinian disaster. Very faithfully. Week after week, some Palestinian disaster is described. And I ask myself why isn’t some Jewish disaster written up once in a while? Is there a shortage of Jewish disasters here? Isn’t there Jewish pain here? On every street, there is pain like that. In every house, there is a disaster like that. Wouldn’t it be good to write about a Jewish disaster one week and a Palestinian disaster the next week? Wouldn’t that put things in a more correct perspective?
(A. Shavit, “Not Good for the Jews: An Interview with Aharon Appelfeld,” Haaretz, Feb. 13, 2004)
While Appelfeld cannot be considered a member of the ‘Israeli Peace Camp’, Laor’s examination of the reception Israeli writers get in Europe in The Myths of Liberal Zionism also applies to him:
Of course the Israeli Peace Camp figures do not have the same values as the liberal readers of Le Monde, Liberation, the Guardian, or La Repubblica. Of course, not one of those readers would publically demand the kind of constitution those writers support in Israel… property laws under which Arabs are prevented from purchasing land, not to mention Israel’s laws of citizenship that discriminate against non-Jews.
During an audio interview with France Culture, Appelfeld elaborates on the theme of his Jewish identity, and to the question, “What does it mean for you today to be Israeli?”, he answers:
I am a Jew and I stay a Jew. Jewish is a much wider, extensive notion that Israeli; an Israeli means that I am a Jew in a specific place; I am Jewish and I exist in many places… One cannot describe modern life without the Jews, like Marx, Freud, Wittgenstein, Kafka… and I am linked to them all, like I am linked to Maimonides.
He later adds: “I am very Jewish and therefore very European.” Although the 79 year-old author of several novels and books of essays has lived for 64 years in the State of Israel, he refuses to be drawn on what this citizenship means.
The French journalist Marc Weitzmann takes an admiring look at ‘The Appelfeld paradox’ in Le Monde: “If all his work is centered around a historic cataclysm, each of this books, however, erases as much as possible all reference to the history… and [there is a] radical absence of causality.” Weitzmann is referring to the silences in Appelfeld’s narratives on the Holocaust itself – his books are set during the aftermath of WWII in displacement camps in Europe, then in Palestine and Israel after the creation of the Zionist State in 1948. Regarding Appelfeld’s mantra he is a Jew more than an Israeli, he adds: “If the creation of the State of Israel is the means by which Jews entered into history, Appelfeld cannot but feel exiled from history”. Elsewhere, journalists speculate on whether his “silence was the price paid for building his new country”. Indeed they refer to his own explanation that he had to “create his country”. These writers fail to interrogate the absurd notion that the terrible crimes committed against the young Appelfeld, his family and millions of European Jews can be healed with nation-building.
Examining the complex relations Israeli culture maintains with Western culture in The Myths of Liberal Zionism, Laor finds
Our forefathers adjusted their culture to a foreign model, in a long and torturous process, with physical extermination as one of its stages, and this dislocation has never been mended. On the contrary – Zionism took it one step further when it promised the Jews that it would be mended through the colonization of another people.
The author exposes the role of Israeli writers Amos Oz, A.B. Yeshoshua and David Grossman in Israeli propaganda overseas, warning us: “Dear reader, do not look down on intellectuals. Their words have an aura of Truth, and their truth is made of words, and these words are cheap, very cheap”. On reflection I do not blame Appelfeld for his silences on Palestinian suffering – his very career is built on them; rather I hold the French media responsible for their absurd tone of reverence, for not daring to consider the Palestinian narrative in the presence of a story of European Jewish suffering.
