This is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
As International Holocaust Remembrance Day dawned, I was in the Philippines on a month-long teaching and speaking tour. In the Philippines, remembering the Holocaust feels different. The experience of devastation and suffering is ongoing here. When Filipinos look back to their history of suffering, they see their future.
For Filipinos, the future is different than the future Jews around the world experience. Rather than empowerment, with the unbridled and increasing aid Israel receives from the United States, the Philippines remains dependent and vulnerable to American imperial power. It’s unlikely that the current or any future president of the Philippines will be invited to address Congress as Prime Minister Netanyahu did some months ago. Prime Minister Netanyahu was critical of the proposed US deal with Iran. If a Filipino president addressed Congress, and was honest, what would he or she have to say?
So when President Obama declared at the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C, that “We are all Jews,” Filipinos might wonder how that applies to them. If it did apply, the Philippines would soon have a memorial museum in proximity to the Mall in Washington. Such a museum would commemorate their martyrs to the Spanish, the Japanese and, yes, to the Americans. What would that museum be named?
To internationalize Holocaust remembrance, it must cease being Jewish in time and place. Or become truly Jewish in light of Israel and the Palestinians. With the organized, systematic and permanent oppression of the Palestinian people by Israel, with the enablement of Jews in America and the United States government, the Holocaust has ceased to be a prophetic warning for the future. The Holocaust has become an imperial export that continues the cycle of violence and atrocity in different parts of the world, often in its name.
Later that day, I lectured on a Jewish theology of liberation and paid tribute to those Jews who mined the meaning of the Holocaust for Jews and others. Holocaust thinkers probed deeply the disconnection between God and the Jewish people and human endeavor and ethics, as a challenge to Jews and humanity. Yet the trajectory of Holocaust thought is Israel, unmindful of the horrific suffering Israel is causing the Palestinian people. Such thought then censors dissent on the consequences of the use of the Holocaust as a blunt instrument against the Palestinian people.
With the suffering of the Palestinians in mind, I moved quickly to the second “after” of Jewish life. After the Holocaust, yes, but also after what Jews in Israel and beyond have done and are doing to the Palestinian people. If indeed “We are all Jews,” then Jews, too, must contemplate how the memory of the Holocaust functions to the detriment of others. It must be a critical force against the misuse of Jewish power
My Filipino audience resonated with the Holocaust’s dual after’s precisely because the onslaught here continues. But it isn’t only the Philippines where both after’s apply. The truly international importance of Holocaust remembrance awaits a further exploration as the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s permanent occupation of Palestine looms. When that exploration is named internationally, the horror of Holocaust will remain. It may even be disentangled from those who trumpet the Holocaust as an imperial and colonial power over others.
Thank you for this really thoughtful piece. You got the Imperial character of the maudlin commercialization of the dead exactly right.
One single detail, though: It’s the 69th anniversary of the Zionist entity’s permanent occupation of Palestine that will be coming later this year. Not the 50th.
I don’t where Obama got the idea of saying “we are all Jews” but perhaps it comes from when the Paris students in 1968 chanted “we are all German Jews” after the French education minister referred disparagingly to Daniel Cohn-Bendit as a “German Jew.” If it is supposed to mean “we all stand in solidarity with the persecuted” — not that Obama has the right to claim any such thing — then the contemporary equivalent should be: “we are all Palestinians.”
Ellis Sez:
“It’s unlikely that the current or any future president of the Philippines will be invited to address Congress as Prime Minister Netanyahu did some months ago.”
Maybe a President of the Philippines would be invited as well if the Philippines were under existential threats from Iran.
Ellis also sez:
“To internationalize Holocaust remembrance, it must cease being Jewish”
Why? I guess it is meaningless to you that it was perpetrated against the Jews and the Jews were the victims.
Whatever Obama may say, I am not a Jew. I suppose in a sense Catholics like me are Jews, but, as long as Israel behaves the way it does and too many Jews outside Israel support the misdeeds of Israel, I have no desire to identify myself as a Jew,
“WASHINGTON — In a German prison camp 71 years ago, Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds stared down the barrel of his Nazi captor’s pistol and refused to say which of his fellow prisoners of war were Jewish.
“We are all Jews here,” said Sergeant Edmonds, the highest-ranking American noncommissioned officer at Ziegenhain stalag that day, instead ordering more than 1,000 of his fellow prisoners to stand together in front of their barracks. The Geneva Convention required prisoners to provide only their name, rank and serial number, not their religion, Sergeant Edmonds said, warning the German that if he shot them all, he would be tried for war crimes.
That act of defiance in January 1945 spared the lives of as many as 200 Jews, and, on Wednesday, President Obama echoed Sergeant Edmonds’s words of solidarity with the Jews as he recognized him posthumously as the first American service member to be named Righteous Among the Nations, an honor bestowed on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.”