Dear Neighbor,
Today at 11:00 a.m. the siren sounded for Holocaust Memorial Day. On my hill everything came to a standstill for two full minutes. Drivers pulled to the side of the road and stood in silence. Schools, factories, offices, army bases: all activity suspended. An entire people at one with its wound.
And then I thought of you. No doubt you heard the siren on your hill, too. What were you thinking? Did you feel a sense of human solidarity with us? Or was this a moment of bitter irony for you: the occupier flaunting old wounds, pretending to still be the victim?
Until now I’ve avoided writing to you about the Holocaust. The omission was deliberate. Its weight can overwhelm us both. And it’s too easy to manipulate: Against you—as dismissive of your suffering (because how can occupation compare to that?). And against me—as indictment (because how can Jews of all people mistreat others after what was done to them?).
Finally, I wanted to tell a narrative of the Jewish people’s return to this land that didn’t reinforce the assumption I’ve heard for decades from Palestinians and from Muslims generally: that the only reason Israel exists is Western guilt over the Holocaust. Israelis were appalled when President Barack Obama, in addressing the Muslim world in his 2009 Cairo speech, could offer no justification for Israel’s existence other than the Holocaust. Obama meant well; his intention was to challenge the Holocaust denial widespread in the Muslim world. But that’s not what Israelis heard. What about our four-thousand-year connection to the land? Israelis demanded. What about our story?
(President Obama later tried to correct that misstep, pointedly noting during a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem that Israel’s legitimacy is based not on Jewish suffering but on Jewish faith and attachment to the land.)
I recently came across this anonymous message on Facebook: “The rebirth of Israel didn’t occur because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust occurred because there was no Israel.”
Confronting the Holocaust in our conversation is as unavoidable as that haunting siren. Even as the last of the survivors die out, the Holocaust continues to shape our conflict, in obvious and subtle ways. And so, neighbor, let me try to explain what happens on my hill, among my people, when the siren sounds, and how the Holocaust affects how we think of you and our conflict.
Last night I went to the official ceremony, held at Yad Vashem. Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, spoke about the need for Jews to free themselves of Holocaust trauma: “The Jewish people was not born in Auschwitz,” he said. “It was not fear that kept us going through two thousand years of exile, it was our spiritual assets, our shared creativity. . . . The Holocaust is permanently branded in our flesh. . . . Still, the Holocaust is not the lens through which we should examine our past and our future.” Rivlin also warned Jews against misusing Holocaust memory to score political points, even against our enemies. Courageously, Rivlin condemned his political mentor, former prime minister Menachem Begin, for declaring Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon an attempt to preempt another Holocaust.
Six survivors then lit torches, each in memory of a million victims. There was the Ukrainian partisan with a chest full of Soviet medals, the Algerian-born woman who survived hiding in Paris. Each told his or her story. They spoke of their wartime suffering matter-of-factly; but they were clearly proud of the lives they’d created after the war, of their children and grandchildren. In turning from victims into survivors, they had extracted destiny from mere fate. Most of all, they spoke of their love for and gratitude to Israel, which allowed them to heal.
For me, as the son of a survivor, what is ultimately most significant about the Holocaust is that we survived it, not as victims but as victors. We are a people long practiced in endurance. We have outlived the empires that tried to destroy us—going back to ancient Egypt and Babylon and Rome. But in our long and improbable history, nothing can quite compare to the resurrection Jews managed in the twentieth century. It’s as if all that came before was mere prelude, practice for the moment when Jews had to choose between continuity and extinction.
My father survived the war in a hole in the forest. When the Jews of his town were ghettoized, as the final stage before deportation to Auschwitz, he escaped with two friends. A forest keeper, who’d once worked for my grandfather, an owner of vineyards, occasionally brought food to the three young men.
In 1945, when the war ended, my father returned home and found a Jewish wasteland. Together with the few young Jews who began trickling back from the death camps, he spent those first weeks of freedom drinking. And then, one day, he stirred himself from numbness. He told me that his parents, who had been killed in Auschwitz, had appeared to him—half dream, half vision—and he took their stern gaze as a rebuke against self-pity.
I am the son not of destruction but of rebirth. And so, on this day, I think not only of the fact that I carry the name of my grandfather who died in a gas chamber but that my son carries the name of his grandfather—my father—who survived.
I remain in permanent astonishment about the Holocaust. The industrialization of mass murder. The creation of factories to produce corpses (the endpoint of soulless modernity). The meticulous planning by government and corporate bureaucrats. (What gas will be most effective? What is the best delivery system?) The elaborate ruses devised to lull the victims about their final destination. This was no outburst of hate or vengeance, no mere pogrom, but the ultimate premeditated crime, a crime of dispassion. And it went on, unimpeded, for nearly six years.
Sometimes I find myself unconsciously thinking, Did it really happen? Could it have happened? My bewilderment surprises me: I have, after all, been struggling with this history all my life. At those moments, I realize that a part of me remains inconsolable, still stunned by the poisoned knowledge I learned as a child about the preternatural obsessiveness of Jew-hatred, about humanity’s capacity for self-annihilation.
And yet I am more profoundly astonished by the capacity of the survivors—as individuals, as a people—to crawl out of the abyss and rebuild. And not just rebuild but transcend: the creation of Israel, the greatest Jewish dream, immediately following the greatest Jewish nightmare. I believe that in the future, Jews will celebrate our return home the way we celebrate today the ancient Exodus from Egypt, except perhaps with greater awe.
And so, neighbor, our annual Holocaust commemoration isn’t about clinging to victimhood but the opposite: reaffirming the Israeli commitment to never again be victims. That is at the heart of the Israeli ethos.
The founders of Zionism didn’t blame anti-Semites for the Jewish condition; they faulted the Jews. Without sentimentality, the early Zionists looked at the flaws in the Jewish character, developed over centuries of homelessness and insecurity, and set out to transform their people. Jews were resented as economic middlemen? Get them to work the land. Jews were physically threatened? Teach them to protect themselves. It doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, Ben-Gurion admonished, but what the Jews do.
The most beloved Zionist poet, Hayim Nahman Bialik, came to prominence as a young man with a poem he wrote in 1903, “In the City of Slaughter,” a howl of rage about a pogrom that same year in czarist Russia. Bialik’s anger was directed not against the murderers but the victims, whom he faulted for passivity. It is hard to imagine a national poet writing more bitter words to his people than the young Bialik’s taunt: “To the graveyard, beggars! And dig up the bones of your fathers / and the bones of your holy brothers and fill your sacks / and bear them on your shoulders and set forth / and display them in all the fairs . . . / and beg for the pity of the nations and pray for the mercy of the gentiles.”
This abhorrence for victimhood is one of the key reasons for Israel’s existence, and for its ongoing success. In the face of relentless and sometimes overwhelming threat, Israelis maintain the pretense of daily life. One morning recently there was a terrorist stabbing at the light rail station near my home. About an hour later I went to the station, expecting to see police, ambulances, agitated crowds. Nothing: The blood had been wiped off the pavement, and people were waiting for the next train.
I live among heroes who don’t consider themselves heroes at all. My neighbor, Aliza, came here as a girl from Kurdistan, just before the creation of the state; her mother, a widow, decided to raise the children in Jerusalem, where they arrived after weeks of travel by donkey through Iraq and Syria and Lebanon, hungry and ragged but home. Or my friend Shula, who was twelve years old when her family began walking from their Ethiopian village toward Zion, and who for weeks carried her little brother on her back. Or my friend Alex, who sat in a Gulag for organizing classes in Hebrew, an illegal language in the Soviet Union. As a former American Jew, I am among the most privileged of Israelis, scarred mostly by inherited memories. I came to Israel to be among those who refused to be defeated by history.
For me, the embodiment of the Israeli character is a young man I knew many years ago named Hemi, the father of a friend of my daughter’s in elementary school. Hemi had been shot in the spinal cord in an army training accident. He married his nurse and, in his wheelchair, became an extreme sportsman. And then he helped found an organization to encourage handicapped Israelis to adopt extreme sports, too.
Not that we don’t pay a high price for living under extremity. The Israeli character can be edgy, aggressive; my wife, Sarah, who grew up in genteel Connecticut, calls Israel the post-traumatic stress capital of the world. We cut each other off on the road and in lines. Our politics can be brutal, each side denouncing the other as enemies of Israel. There is growing violence in our schools. Political corruption is on the rise. We live with accumulated layers of unresolved trauma—wave after wave of immigrants entering a country facing the constant threat of terrorism and missile attacks and, every few years, outright war.
A less resilient society would almost certainly have cracked under the strain. But a people that can emerge from its own grave more vitalized than at almost any time in its history—that is a people that can deal with anything.
There is a dark side to Holocaust memory, which President Rivlin was warning against, and I know it well. It is fear—that the Jewish people will once again find itself as alone in the world as we were in the 1940s, when the only ones who seemed interested in the fate of the Jews were their murderers; that we can never escape being the permanent Other.
I have tried over the years to free myself from those Holocaust nightmares. I have gone so far as to stop watching Holocaust films and reading Holocaust memoirs. (Sarah says I’m like an addict who needs to avoid temptation.) I keep reminding myself: It’s over.
But the fears keep returning. And what incites those fears most of all is the war against Israel’s existence and legitimacy.
Two elements were essential in preparing the way for the Holocaust. The first was the criminalization of Jewish existence. Though the Nazis plundered the Jews—even corpses were stripped of their hair and gold teeth—the war against the Jews wasn’t primarily intended for any tangible gain. The goal of the Holocaust was the Holocaust itself. Toward the end of the war, as Germany was about to lose, the Nazis diverted men and trains from the front to hasten the transport of Jews to the death camps, worried that some Jews might survive. In acting with such single-minded purpose, even against their own self-interest, the Nazis were motivated by an almost messianic sense of mission to free humanity of its greatest threat, the Jews. If the crime was existence, then the only possible punishment was death.
The second element that made the Holocaust possible is the peculiarity of anti-Semitism, which isn’t mere hatred of Jews but their transformation into symbol—for whatever a given civilization considers the most loathsome human qualities. And so for pre-contemporary Christianity, The Jew was Christ-killer. For Soviet Communism, The Jew was capitalist. For Nazism, The Jew was race polluter.
That pattern has played itself out in our conflict. Criticism of Israeli policies, of course, isn’t anti-Semitic, and I know of no serious Israeli who thinks it is. (We can be our own most vociferous critics.) But denying Israel’s right to exist, turning the Jewish state into the world’s criminal, and trying to isolate it from the community of nations—that fits the classic anti-Semitic pattern. When Palestinian leaders call the creation of Israel one of the great crimes in history and refer to the “seventy-year occupation” that began with its birth; when pro-Palestinian demonstrators around the world chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” with the clear message that there is no place for a Jewish state—then the terms of the conflict aren’t about policies but existence. Israel isn’t just accused of committing crimes; it is a crime. From there the next step is inevitable: In the era of human rights, when the international community sees racism as the worst of all sins, the Jewish state becomes the symbol of racism, arch-violator of human rights. When the UN routinely votes to criticize Israel more than all other countries combined, it reinforces the notion of the Jewish state as uniquely evil.
In different ways, neighbor, the results for both of us are devastating. The war against Israel’s existence has reawakened old demons in new form. When the worst Jewish fears are incited, your suffering becomes, for us, not a tragedy to redress but a threat to rebuff. Rather than get Israelis to face the consequences of occupation, the opposite occurs. Pushed into a corner, we don’t respond with flexibility or contrition; we move into survival mode. The war against Israel’s legitimacy reinforces our obtuseness. If the anti-Israel criticism is so shrill, then we absolve ourselves of the need to take any criticism seriously. For a people that prides itself on its millennia-old ethical code, that believes in penitence and self-examination, this is a spiritual crisis.
There is good reason for me to be in survival mode. When I look around my borders I see Hezbollah in the north, Hamas in the south, Islamic Revolutionary Guards from Iran on the Golan Heights—all passionately committed to my destruction. Iranian leaders promise that Israel will cease to exist in a matter of decades; on Iranian missiles is painted the slogan death to israel. Iran’s protégé, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, sarcastically invited Jews around the world to move to Israel because it will be easier to kill them all once they are concentrated in one place. One lesson Jews learned from the Holocaust is this: When your enemy says he intends to destroy you, believe him.
And so I have a split screen in my head: On one side there’s Israel versus the Palestinians, and I am Goliath and you are David; on the other side of the screen there’s Israel versus the Arab and Muslim worlds, and I am David.
Maybe, in different ways, Israelis and Palestinians need to free each other.
In spring 2004, as the second intifada was ending, I participated in a joint pilgrimage to Auschwitz in a group comprising Arab Israelis—Palestinian citizens of Israel—and Jewish Israelis. The initiative came from the Arab side: a Melkite priest from Nazareth, Abuna Emile Shoufani, together with a group of leading Muslim and Christian figures from the Palestinian Israeli community, who were seeking some way to break the growing estrangement between Arabs and Jews within Israel.
I was skeptical: My traumas as an Israeli, I argued, were rooted in the Middle East, not Europe—in exploding buses, not Auschwitz. Still, if Palestinians were willing to take the emotional risk of opening themselves to Jewish trauma, I felt obliged to respond.
Close to three hundred Arabs and Jews set out together. Had there ever been a stranger pilgrimage to Auschwitz? On the bus to the site an Arab woman took the mike: “I’ve come,” she said, “because I fear the anger that is distorting me.” Maybe that’s why I came, too: not to save the Middle East but myself.
The tensions were unavoidable: Palestinians were wary of the Holocaust overwhelming their tragedy, Jews were wary of comparisons between the Nakba and Auschwitz, of admitting Palestinians into our deepest trauma. One Arab participant confessed that a friend had warned her, “You’ll lose your victim status by going to Auschwitz.” A Jewish participant confessed that a friend had warned him, “You’re giving away our history by going to Auschwitz with Arabs.”
But when we stood together before the crematoria, we hugged and wept. Ali, head of the Arab Scouts movement, took my arm: “Does it make it easier or harder to deal with the past by coming here?” he asked tenderly. Elderly survivors and young Arab men walked hand in hand. We were pilgrims to brokenness, a hope of shared humanity in the place beyond hope.
This was Abuna Shoufani’s vision: that the very irrationality of our journey, the suspension of fully justified mutual suspicion, would create a space for God to work—which is, after all, how miracles can happen. We all called him “Abuna,” father—Muslims and Jews, too: On this journey, he was our spiritual father. A Christian with an open heart to both sides had managed to bring Muslims and Jews together in Auschwitz.
The result of our risk taking was an exchange of sensibilities. Jews acknowledged that Auschwitz isn’t just a Jewish but a universal wound, while our Arab partners discovered in themselves Jewish rage. Where was the world? they demanded.
We spoke together in Hebrew; however uneasily, we were, after all, fellow Israelis. One older Arab woman, addressing the Jews in the group, said: “From the moment I first met Jews I loved you; but you didn’t seem to want me to love you.” It was a painful moment of realization: This is how Jewish insularity can be experienced by outsiders.
One of Abuna’s implicit intentions was to challenge the “Holocaust denial” widespread in Palestinian society and throughout the Muslim world. I regard Holocaust denial as a backhanded affirmation of the Holocaust’s uniqueness, its literal unbelievability. In the West, Holocaust denial is the currency of crackpots; in the Muslim world, from Egypt to Iran, its message is broadcast on state television. The attitude toward the Holocaust in parts of the Muslim world could be summed up, only half-ironically, this way: It never happened, we’re glad it did, and we’re going to do it again.
Just how deeply the poison has penetrated was evident even in our own group. During one of our nightly processing sessions, an Arab participant said: “I always assumed the Jews were exaggerating about the Holocaust. I thought, it was a tragedy, but innocent people always die in war. But now . . .”
Our Palestinian partners in the pilgrimage to Auschwitz were telling us: We are not at war with Jewish existence. We will not side, even indirectly, with those who tried to erase you from history. We are ready to hear your story, to live together as neighbors. But we need you to see us, too; we need you to hear our story and our pain. Without resorting to foolish and unnecessary historical comparisons. Each side in its wound.
Abuna was trying to help us see in each other the face of suffering humanity. He was offering us a way to free each other.
In the end, did it matter that Arabs and Jews went to Auschwitz? Aside from the participants, who even remembers?
Abuna taught me to believe that any spiritual initiative, done with purity of intention, can have unintended consequences. Muslims and Jews—in the midst of an intifada—actually did this together. That gesture of radical goodwill, that defiance of political common sense, is now part of the story of Arabs and Jews in this land. And by writing to you now, I am passing on that memory of the possible.