Those Who Forget the Past (3 page)

Essentially, Lang said, the Holocaust didn't exist for Heidegger. He didn't
deny
it, but he might as well have: it wasn't a factor in his thought; it did not affect his view of history and human nature, despite the Hitler-friendly spin he gave to his philosophy in order to advance his academic career in the 1930s. After the war, Heidegger was more outspoken about the depredations of mechanized agriculture than he was about the mechanized mass murder that had happened under his nose. It was this . . .
knowing equanimity
that incensed the ordinarily mild-mannered Lang.

“Heidegger knew it happened and he didn't care,” Lang said. “His silence—it wasn't even denial. For him, it wasn't
im
portant!

“It wasn't important,” Lang repeated. And then again, “It wasn't important.”

His silence wasn't even
denial
. . . . Already, even in the pre– September 11 period, one could sense a curious kind of backlash, one might call it, against speaking of the Holocaust. It took various forms. While hard-core Holocaust denial was itself off the grid for most minimally educated people, it was clear that there were some who were tired of being reminded it had happened, some who resented references to it. Some consigned all memorializing to the derisive phrase “Holocaust industry” to deny there could be any good-faith reason for seeking to remember the Holocaust: It was all part of the Zionist agenda to exploit Hitler's crime for the supposedly Nazi-like crimes of the State of Israel.

But even among those who didn't use that particular noxious phrase “Holocaust industry” (with a not-so-subtle anti-Semitic stereotype of “mercenary Jews” embedded in it) there had evolved a new, more sophisticated way of seeking to banish the Holocaust from contemporary discourse or relevance: the attempt to delegitimize and silence any attempt to assert that there are historical
consequences
to the Final Solution. Consequences the Jewish state should take into account in assessing the dangers it faces today. The past indifference—if not complicity—of much of the world to Hitler's genocide might for instance be a factor in assessing how much to rely on “international guarantees” of the Jewish state's safety as opposed to its reliance on active self-defense.

Cynthia Ozick singles out an instance of what you might call “inconsequentialism” when she cites a writer who took Menachem Begin to task for invoking the memory of the million children murdered during the Holocaust when Begin defended the 1981 Israeli destruction of Saddam's Osirak nuclear reactor. A facility clearly intended to produce weaponizable nuclear material for a tyrant who would later threaten to “burn half of Israel.” Saddam made that threat during the first Gulf War, and who's to say that if Begin hadn't acted in defiance of world opinion, one of Saddam's Scuds, the ones he fired at Tel Aviv (as well as at American forces in Kuwait), would not have carried nuclear explosives. Should the fact that a previous genocidal threat (Hitler's) was in fact carried out have no consequences, deserve no mention from decision-makers?

Should Begin be shamed posthumously for telling the world one of his motives was, in effect, to save his people and their children from a second Holocaust, for seeking to avoid giving Hitler a posthumous victory?

This is not denial in the usual sense. It doesn't assert the event didn't
happen
. It just denies that it should have an
effect
on how one thinks about history and human nature in general, the fate of the Jewish state and its attempts to defend itself in particular. It is Heidegger's equanimity: It happened but . . . “It wasn't important. It wasn't important.”

3) LOOKING AWAY

I'd argue that another distinctive feature of post–9/11 antiSemitism, in addition to the existential threat, is the recurrence of emblematic moments of Looking—and Looking Away. I know I've been guilty of looking away.

When asked to speak at Jewish institutions such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center, at colleges, synagogues, and shuls on the nature of Hitler's anti-Semitism, I did not focus much on
contemporary
anti-Semitism. With one exception—Holocaust denial—it seemed incommensurable with Hitler's crime. After all, Hitler was history, Hitler was past, Hitler was dead.

And yet some ugly truths were hard to avoid. And writing about the culture of anti-Semitism that helped give license to Hitler clearly sensitized me to the situation in the Middle East. My reaction to one controversy in particular—Netanyahu and “incitement”—was a sign of that change.

Back in 1996, you'll recall, Benjamin Netanyahu, then newly elected Israeli prime minister, came under attack from just about everyone here in America (and on the left in Israel) for his alleged stubbornness in not “moving forward with the peace process.” His particular stubbornness was said to consist in his demanding that the Palestinian side live up to its commitment in the Oslo accords to remove references from Palestinian textbooks which incited hatred of Jews and Israel. Everyone, it seemed, wanted Netanyahu to move on—to move forward to the next step in “the process,” to give up another chunk of West Bank land to the Palestinian Authority as part of the “land-for-peace” peace process—and ignore the incitement issue, and the Palestinians' failure to address it.

Up till then, I had been a hopeful believer that the Oslo peace process would bring about two states—and peace. But Netanyahu was being portrayed in terms that bordered on ancient Christian anti-Semitic stereotypes. The Jews, in the New Testament, are a stubborn people for not bowing to Jesus as Messiah; Netanyahu was being stubborn for making a fuss over incitement, over the Palestinians' failure to live up to the other, less tangible, side of the “land-for-peace” agreement: peacefulness. He was portrayed as ignoring the Big Picture in favor of—again the shadow of the stereotype was there—Semitic pettifogging.

I found myself surprised to be in agreement with the position of the supposedly stubborn Netanyahu. Anti-Semitic incitement was no minor issue, no window dressing. Incitement to hatred
was
the Big Picture. Anyone who has studied the history of the twentieth century knows that “incitement” is the heart of the matter, the source of the hatred that spills over into mass murder. And incitement of children to hate is even more lasting in its damage. But instead, everyone was telling Netanyahu, essentially: Ignore the incitement, get on with “the process.” Look away. We are now witnessing the consequences of ignoring a generation of incitement.

AND THEN THERE WAS the matter of two televisuals: the lynching of two Israeli Jews in Ramallah and the videotaped throat-slitting murder of American Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. To look, or look away?

In the fall of 2000 I was watching CNN when the footage of the lynching at Ramallah was broadcast. Do you recall? Two Israeli reservists heading home from duty took a wrong turn near that West Bank town. They were seized and taken to the town's Palestinian police headquarters, which was soon surrounded by an angry mob demanding their death. They were slaughtered in an upper room, under the eyes, if not by the hands, of the Palestinian Authority, and then their bodies thrown to the cheering crowd below. Following which their murderers appeared in the upper windows of the killing room and brandished their bloody hands to further cheers.

In some ways I had no choice whether or not to watch the lynching in Ramallah. I would have actively had to switch away from CNN. That was not the case with the Daniel Pearl video. The actual sequence of events in that video is somewhat unclear, but at one point one can see Daniel Pearl telling his captors and their camera: My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish. Following which the video presents his throat being slit, his head being severed, the severed head held up by the gloating killer.

When the video subsequently became available on certain websites in the United States, a debate broke out over whether one should watch. Daniel Pearl's wife and parents argued that to watch it was to serve the terrorists' purposes, to become accessories after the fact to murderous terrorist propaganda. On the other hand, many respected figures argued that one must not avoid watching: one has to face the truth of the nature of this hatred. “Truth is more important than taste,”
The
New Republic
argued in an editorial entitled “The Face of Evil.”

“Don't Look Away,” Samuel G. Freedman entitled his essay. And while I see his argument, while I tend to
agree
with his argument in the abstract, I have yet to bring myself to watch the video. There is a line in Jonathan Rosen's piece about the “private balancing act” one has to engage in, in this as in all grim realities: “You don't have to read much Freud to discover that the key to a healthy life is the ability to fend off reality to a certain extent. Deny reality too much, of course, and you're crazy; too little and you're merely miserable.”

And thus in my private balancing act, I guess, I have looked away from the horrid spectacle of Daniel Pearl's death and dismemberment. In part perhaps because I've spoken on the phone about this question with Daniel Pearl's father, Judea Pearl. Dr. Pearl is a man of extraordinary strength in the face of extraordinary pain, and I felt somehow that to watch his son being slaughtered would be a kind of personal betrayal. But I won't say that's the only reason. The philosopher Berel Lang argues in his book
Holocaust Representation
that there are some aspects of the death camp process that, by an almost universal human consensus, should just not be represented. Or, if they are, not watched. But I'll admit my reluctance is not entirely philosophical; it's part of my “private balancing act.”

You'll recall that in the classical myth, those who gazed on the Medusa's head turned to stone. In some respects I think of the savagely severed head of Daniel Pearl as something like the Medusa's head of contemporary anti-Semitism.

So, I understand the reluctance of some to gaze too deeply into such acts of darkness. I've felt it. I just don't think it should become a principle, a general rule.

Looking and looking away. How much does one want— need—to know? I had a curious experience, one I've come to think of as inadvertently emblematic of this dichotomy, in compiling this anthology.

One of the most important and influential, if dispiriting, examples of reporting I read in the months after September 11 was Jeffrey Goldberg's “Behind Mubarak” in
The New Yorker
. It was a courageous piece of reporting in which Goldberg, who did not disguise his Jewishness, walked into mosques, madrasas, and media centers in Cairo and asked mullahs and newspaper columnists to talk about 9/11, America, and the Jews. It was about this time that an influential mullah in Cairo (who was also head of the Islamic Cultural Center in New York City) advanced the claim that the World Trade Center attack was the work of Jews and added, “If it became known to the American people, they would have done to the Jews what Hitler did.” He did not make this sound like an unattractive prospect to him.

It was the first instance I'd come across of what began to blossom into a kind of subgenre of radical Islamist rhetorical appeals and encomiums to Hitler. These began to surface in English through the important efforts of the Middle East Media Research Institute. It was an organization founded to promote understanding by translating Arabic media into English. But one of the less savory themes MEMRI
⁶
brought to light was a disturbing tendency one could find in Islamist rhetoric: the apostrophe to Hitler.

Goldberg cites one example, a tribute to Hitler written by a columnist in a self-described “very moderate publication” in Cairo: “Thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians took revenge in advance, against the most vile criminals on the face of the Earth. . . .”

“Revenge in advance”: retrospectively “justified” genocide. But he doesn't stop there. He feels Hitler did not do enough: “[W]e do have a complaint against him [Hitler], for his revenge was not enough. . . .” In other words, he failed to kill every single Jew. This, again, in a “moderate” Egyptian newspaper.

This was exceeded in vile ingenuity by another quote from the Egyptian media, courtesy of MEMRI's translation. Another kind of complaint against Hitler: “French studies have proven that [the Holocaust] is no more than a fabrication. . . . But I . . . complain to Hitler, even saying to him from the bottom of my heart: ‘if only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened . . . so the world could sigh in relief.' ”

“Sigh in relief,” knowing all the Jews were dead. A unique and groundbreaking fusion of Holocaust denial and Holocaust craving. Even “mainstream” Holocaust deniers at least publicly imply that the mass murder of Jews would have been a bad thing (otherwise why bother to defend Hitler from the charge?).

But the laments about Hitler's failure to be ruthless enough were not the most disturbing aspect of Goldberg's piece. That honor goes to Mustafa Bakri's dream. Bakri is the editor of another Cairo newspaper, and Goldberg says he had “wanted to meet him for some time, ever since I read a translation of a column in which he described a dream. The dream began with his appointment as one of Ariel Sharon's bodyguards, assigned to protect the Israeli Prime Minister at Cairo's airport [during a state visit], and in the column . . . he wrote:

The pig landed; his face was diabolical, a murderer; his hands soiled with the blood of women and children. A criminal who should be executed in the town square. Should I remain silent as many others did? Should I guard this butcher on my homeland's soil? All of a sudden, I forgot everything . . . and I decided to do it. I pulled my gun and aimed it at the cowardly pig's head. I emptied all the bullets and screamed. . . . The murderer collapsed under my feet. I breathed a sigh of relief. I realized the meaning of virility, and of self-sacrifice. . . . I stepped on the pig's head with my shoes and screamed from the bottom of my heart: Long live Egypt, long live Palestine, Jerusalem will never die and never will the honor of the nation be lost.”