Questions for Holocaust Memorial Day

Last year, I wrote a piece called “Detangling the Holocaust from Israeli-Palestinian Politics.” In it, I wrote about my initial reaction to the quick approaching Holocaust Memorial Day: a grim self-bracing for the deluge of badness that was sure to flow from the mouths of Israel’s political leaders as they wielded the memory of the Holocaust to justify horrible and oppressive policies. I wrote:

”I have become deeply frustrated by the political manipulation of the Holocaust to distract from Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. These crimes should not and need not be compared to Nazi crimes, but they are unjust and immoral in their own right.”

From there, though, I went out to challenge my initial reaction, accepting as accurate the analysis of Israel’s leaders’ exploitation, but questioning the fact that that was my first thought:

”…I, like many individuals on the Jewish left, have made a concerted effort to understand Palestinian suffering and to try to grasp how the suffering inflicted by the Occupation could lead a large portion of a people to embrace an ideology that supports using violence against innocent people through bombing cafes and buses. I am proud to say that after much searching and struggling, I am able to sincerely empathise with Palestinian suffering, even as I do not endorse methods of violence and collective punishment. The more I have understood the suffering caused by the Occupation, the more I am infuriated by statements that begin with “the Occupation is terrible, but…” Statements like “the Occupation is terrible, but Palestinians have supported gruesome methods of terrorism” are in some cases correct but they are also wrong, in my opinion, because they lack true empathy for human suffering. So the fact that my first thought [as Holocaust Memorial Day was mentioned] was something like “the Holocaust was horrific, but it is exploited for political purposes” is not acceptable at all. This kind of thinking has reduced my ability to empathise with the tragic suffering of my own people and my ability to understand why many of them may have embraced militaristic views. Israeli Jewish fear is real. It may be unwarranted in some cases, and exaggerated in others, but it is important to understand how an extended period in recent history in which one-third of the world’s Jews were systematically exterminated could lead people to be fearful…”

A year later, as I stood still for the siren on Holocaust Memorial Day this morning, I stood less sure. This afternoon, after reflecting and rereading my piece from last year, I stand with questions to which I do not have easy answers:

Does agreeing to commemorate the Holocaust on the day that the government designates inherently give legitimacy to the government’s narrative? Would refusing to commemorate the Holocaust on the day in which the most of Jewish collective commemorates Holocaust be an act of self-uprooting? What does commemorating mean? Is there a way to remember the Holocaust as a particular Jewish tragedy without either (a) losing sight of its crucial universality (Never Again must Humanity allow such slaughter to be done to any portion of Humanity) or (b) slipping into cheap and grossly inappropriate pseduo-comparisons between the Holocaust and Israel’s horrible treatment of Palestinians? Knowing that comparisons are grossly inappropriate, how should [or shouldn’t] Israel’s horrible treatment of the Palestinians factor into Holocaust Memorial Day? How can suffering be de-monopolized? Is there space in our collective and individual hearts to encompass all pain? Most pain? Do we have to choose which pain we allow in and which we ignore? Should the Left think about organizing Alternative Commemorations as we do for Remembrance Day (Yom HaZikaron) and Independence Day (Yom HaAtzmaut) (both next week)? Or is today a day in which we can be part of the consensus? What is the value of being part of the consensus? What is the value of challenging it? How can values of justice and love influence all of these questions?

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1

annierobbins on May 1, 2014 at 04:39

i found your blog thru AIC website and am glad i checked it out. it’s very interesting because in reading your post above i knew what i wanted to say, and then following the conversation read emily’s comment afterwards, so i will launch off from there. i, like you, think comparisons of the occupation and the holocaust are not helpful or appropriate for the reason you mentioned.

that said, i do not believe genocides just ‘end’. not for any of the people left behind or those who survived them anyway, which includes all the cultures and societies surrounding a genocide including perpetrators. i don’t know how many generations it takes to cleanse the pain but i do believe there must be levels of reconciliations. i think, like with any deep pain, if a person or a culture does not fully heal they will probably, likely, subsequently release effects down the road. not really that different than a child who grows up abused being an abuser in their adult life.

so this is not the same as comparing the 2 crimes, but they are very very much connected. to commit massive human rights abuses against a people requires a condition of becoming insensitive to the other. genocide carries on and lives on one form or another until all the victims are healed. so i do think we can ask ourselves how and where and who the holocaust is still hurting today. and certainly in that examination, palestinians fit in there somewhere prominently.
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Moriel Rothman on April 28, 2014 at 08:01

Reblogged this on The Leftern Wall and commented:

This is the third Holocaust Memorial Day I’ve tried to write about. Two years ago, it was a piece on why I did end up going to Yad v’Shem. Last year, it was a series of questions, reblogged below, as they are questions that still ring true. This year, I will simply review those last two pieces. I think that this year, my soul falls somewhere in a middle ground, a bit detached, maybe, a bit less urgent, a bit slow, a bit calm, neither going to Yad v’Shem nor calling on The Left. Just sitting in my kitchen and writing and thinking. So the question for this year might be: What is the best way to allow the Holocaust into my own sphere and actions, with all of its moral urgency, and staggering throat-choking grayness?
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Moriel Rothman on April 28, 2013 at 19:22

Hi Emily,

Thank you for reading through the post, and for your question. My opinion is that comparisons between the situation here and the Holocaust are basically never helpful.

First, they are just wrong: the Holocuast was a systematic and extremely successful attempt to wipe out an entire people. The situation here has included population transfers, heavy racism and, at some points, large scale murder, but it is not and has never been a genocide or an attempted genocide. The Nazi government wanted to murder all Jews. The Israeli government wants Palestinians to be cramped in Ramallah and Jenin or move to Jordan, but is willing to tolerate Palestinian citizens of Israel. There is a very little, in fact, that is similar about those two propositions. It may be rhetorically exhilarating to make the “jews are doing what was done to them” sort of argument, but the extent to which it is rhetorically exhilarating should, I think, be a warning sign about it’s truth or accuracy.

And putting the moral/factual argument aside for a moment, the usefulness of the comparison basically zero. There are plenty of harsh historical metaphors that are much more similar (US Segregation, South African Apartheid), and more than that, the situation can be criticized fully in it’s own right. When someone starts to use the Holocaust/Nazi metaphor, they are often written off for not understanding the situation and trying to shove the Occupation into a box in which it doesn’t fit– and in my esteem, rightly so. I am not one who hurries to shut down criticism of the occupation (as one can see from browsing my blog) but I do believe that attempts to draw the comparison stem from a lack of understanding of both the holocaust and the situation here, and that it is both morally wrong and practically unhelpful to make them.

—
Also, Noam Sheizaf, another leftist blogger I like, wrote a good, concise post a few years ago about why he bans Nazi Germany references on his blog: http://972mag.com/why-nazi-germany-references-are-banned-on-this-blog/
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emily raymundo on April 26, 2013 at 23:54

hey mori, you probably don’t remember, but we met a few times as we drifted around the middlebury campus during the same years. anyway, i’m now a ph.d. student at the american studies department at USC, and currently taing a class on the holocaust. we are spending the last two weeks talking about israel & palestine–we’ve spent much of the class talking about present legacies of the holocaust, and obviously, the state of israel is by and large one of those legacies, and perhaps the most pressing and obvious one. anyway, i’m curious if you think all comparisons between the holocaust and the current situation, particularly in the west bank, are grossly inappropriate–as we just spent a lecture trying to draw out some of the linkages (while making sure to clarify that the contexts, registers, and scales are completely, and complexly, different). for instance, we showed the famous image of the “warsaw boy” and then the scene from 5 broken cameras in which idf soldiers aim guns (and, i believe, fire live rounds) at a crowd of unarmed children. we also discussed ghettoization and the numerous registrations the Nazis forced the Jewish populations to take part in (innumerable hours spent in inhumane conditions, with guns held on them, in fear of their lives, all to take part in a redundant bureaucratic practice) and compared this practice to the check points littering the west bank. obviously, any comparison that declared these two things completely equal and undifferentiated would be, as you say, grossly inappropriate. but do you think it might be a worthwhile practice to think through some of these comparisons (even if just to force students to articulate why they think that comparison isn’t apt or appropriate), particularly, as you point out, in light of the way the holocaust is deployed politically by all manner of political parties?

cheers,
emily
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Stevie on April 16, 2013 at 15:41

The rest of the world commemorates the Holocaust on a different day and in a completely different way from Israel. In international commemorations, it is treated as the supremely horrifying logical conclusion of regarding the Other as less than human. Once you believe that, anything you inflict on the Other (Jews, Palestinians, blacks, gays, women, the disabled…) can be justified. Internationally, we remember that other groups were also victims of the Nazis in huge numbers; we remember victims of other genocidal slaughters; we affirm that all human beings are of equal worth and we remind ourselves to struggle against the impulse to oppress the Other, whether it arises in our own hearts or elsewhere. You could do worse than join in solidarity with the rest of the world in marking Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January. The Holocaust doesn’t ‘belong’ to Israel – it doesn’t even belong to Jews, though we are uniquely traumatised by it. It was a crime against humanity – and a stain on humanity’s conscience.
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SamanthaKanofsky on April 8, 2013 at 22:30

All good questions. There is something complete & whole & respectful about focusing our complete attention just on the horrific tragedies and wrongdoings of the Holocaust, because otherwise we gloss over it. But we also can’t forget that abuse begets abuse… and that suffering of humans by humans hurts us all no matter where and who and why. I’m also grappling with these questions, thank you for writing about them.
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totohanthala on April 8, 2013 at 12:35

The crime of the holocaust was 70 years ago. The crimes against the Palestinian people are happening now.
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jay rothman on April 8, 2013 at 12:20

Excellent complexifying!

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