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"... The question no longer is whether virtually every side is using the Holocaust as an exemplar for their ideology, but whether or not such usage is appropriate ..."
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It's possible that Bush had no intention of using Auschwitz or the lessons of the Holocaust to lob political criticism at 'Old Europe,' but that didn't stop his supporters. In response to the visit, the conservative FreeRepublic.com featured comments including, "Paris aided and abetted the Nazis just as it aided and abetted Saddam," and "Maybe President Bush can tell Holocaust denier (and "Palestinian" PM) Abu Mazen about his visit."
But use of the Holocaust as a political tool isn't limited to Bush supporters. Just recently producer Ed Gernon was fired from the controversial CBS docudrama Hitler: The Rise of Evil after working analogies between Bush and Hitler into the script. In one particularly flagrant example, a historical quote from Hitler was changed from, "If this fire, as I believe, is the work of Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist!" to "The terrorists have opened fire, and we will fire back." By switching out Communists for terrorists, Gernon switched history in order to make a political point. Even the New York Observer's Ron Rosenbaum, who otherwise defended Gernon, took exception with the tactic.
Still the anti-war, anti-Bush left wing hasn't shied away from Gernon's example. Indymedia.org featured a posting that treated the revisionist Hitler quote as historical fact, and launched into a diatribe against the Bush administration's tactics and Secretary of State Powell's son, who chairs the FCC and is accused of sending liberal media "to the camps."
Democrats.com, an organization on the far left of the Democratic Party, has made a habit out of highlighting the Nazi ties of President Bush's father and grandfather, implying a guilt-by-lineage. In one e-mail newsletter, the group accused Bush of setting up "the Office of Father...er...Homeland Security," before advising its members to "look at the GOP/Bush dark history of Nazi alliances going back to Prescott Bush's financing of Nazi industrialists."
The question no longer is whether virtually every side is using the Holocaust as an exemplar for their ideology, but whether or not such usage is appropriate. Virtually from the end of the Holocaust, various groups have expressed discomfort with it being used for political purposes. Jewish groups in particular have cited the Holocaust as being unique in human history and thus not appropriate for comparison to current events. As the events of the Holocaust grow increasingly distant, that line of argument seems to be weakening.
Following the Jews to Israel
The most common arena for Holocaust comparison, however, remains the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Days after Truman took office, and before World War II was fully over, Secretary of State Edward D. Stettinius argued against humanitarian arguments for unlimited Jewish emigration to Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state. Truman didn't listen, openly supporting increased transfer of Jewish displaced persons to Palestine, and it wasn't just for humanitarian reasons. Many in his own administration admitted to a belief the Jewish vote in New York played a part in Truman's decisions.
The shadow of the Holocaust hasn't left the conflict between Israel and the Arabs ever since. The World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, for example was notable less for its efforts against racism than for its controversial attempts to highlight the Palestinian "holocaust" and reduce the Holocaust to the more general "holocausts." The attempt was roundly denounced by Jewish groups and prompted the U.S. and Israel to pull out of the conference.
Backed by Palestinian and Arab leaders, the Durban strategy was designed to confront head-on a belief that Israel and its Jewish supporters in America had used the Holocaust to give cover to oppressive policies against the Palestinians. Most pundits agree that the events at Durban failed spectacularly to address that belief, instead degenerating into gross anti-Semitism. The debacle almost caused the entire conference to collapse and ended up highlighting the hatred of Jews so prevalent in the Arab world and the antipathy of many European and other world leaders to it.
When Jews do it too
Still it's hardly surprising that Palestinians and their supporters would have the idea that Israelis were utilizing the Holocaust for political gain. Such a claim is besides the point when it comes to issues in a final peace deal, but that hasn't stopped many in Israel from using the Holocaust just as much as leftist critics of Bush.
In October of 2001, Ariel Sharon warned Bush against appeasing Arab states at Israel's expense. His choice of metaphors was the Holocaust. "Israel will not be another Czechoslovakia," he declared. The World Likud Convention, representing Sharon's ruling party, passed a resolution a few months later warning of an imminent world jihad and encouraging emigration to Israel. The message paralleled a common thread of right wing Zionism, that a Jewish state would've averted the Holocaust.
An Israeli settler in Efrat, Lynda Wolbromsky, told MacLean's magazine, "The Holocaust would not have happened had there been an Israel." Such quotes begin to explain the reference to a new Holocaust that has permeated Jewish discourse on anti-Semitism and the ongoing violence in Israel. The same Ron Rosenbaum of the New York Observer who criticized Bush-Hitler analogies in the CBS docudrama has written of fears of a "second Holocaust." The Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman has gone on record saying Jews face a greater threat today than in the 1930s, a statement that hasn't quelled critics who perceive the Jewish community of overstating the current threat of anti-Semitism.
The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, who can hardly be accused of anti-Israel bias, has made the point more clearly. In a May 2002 cover story, he called a comparison of "the plight of the Jews in Hitler's Europe" to the plight of Israel "a political argument disguised as a historical argument ... designed to paralyze thought and to paralyze diplomacy." "After all," wrote Wieseltier, "a 'peace process' with the Third Reich was impossible."
All of which boils down to one thing: if the Palestinians are wrong to use the Holocaust to bolster their cause, so too are the Israelis.
It is ours to appropriate
But aren't Jews allowed to employ the Holocaust? After all, it did happen to us. As its primary victims, don't Jews have a certain right to its lessons and its messages?
Take comparisons of Ariel Sharon to Hitler, for example. Such notions are preposterous to most Jews mainly because Sharon is a Jew. It's impossible for a Jew to be anything like the mass murderer who tried to annihilate all Jews. Arafat, on the other hand, can be compared to Hitler all day. Plenty of Jews have taken the liberty of making just that comparison, both in Israel and elsewhere, and that's because Arafat is perceived as wanting to kill Jews just as much as Hitler did. When an Egyptian newspaper laments that Hitler didn't finish the job, it only fuels such a perception and gives credence to such comparisons.
But what of the Holocaust being a unique event? What of the Holocaust being so significantly different in its magnitude that no current event could even begin to compare, no contemporary figure even begin to measure up to the standards set by Hitler. Isn't there a hint of hypocrisy in crying foul when the Holocaust is compared to, say, Rwanda but in freely using it as a metaphor for the current conflict with the Palestinians?
That's just the argument being made by figures like Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael Goldberg. Halevi, a well-known Israeli commentator, has argued that Jews "must re-examine the consequences of centralizing the Holocaust in Jewish identity," since the right wing in Israel and its supporters in America have "absorbed the Holocaust into its world view." Halevi writes, "Mainstream right-wing leaders must tell their followers that the Holocaust belongs to the past and offers no blueprint for our future."
Those sentiments are further echoed in Michael Goldberg's 1995 book, Why Should Jews Survive?. The book sees, "The murdered six million Jews and continuing Arab enmity to the Jewish State [as having] pushed to the forefront the Jewish people's one overriding concern: survival." The problem with that, as Goldberg argues, is such a focus shackles the Jewish people to a political and social message that doesn't explain why Jews should survive, but merely contents itself with demanding that Jews be defended from another Holocaust, however large or small.
Despite the arguments of Halevi, Goldberg, and Wieseltier, the Jewish community at large seems unconvinced. A trend has developed in the last half-century that says acts of oppression belong to the oppressed. Two black authors, the Rev. C. T. Vivian and Octavia Geans Vivian, wrote in a joint op-ed, "No other ethnic group in America would allow its history or heroes to be shaped and controlled by another group. Can you imagine Jews allowing Anglo-Saxon Protestants or African-Americans or any other group to be in charge of defining the Holocaust Museum? Some things are too sacred to allow others to control or politicize."
By this argument, because the Holocaust primarily victimized Jews, then Jews have the right to control how it is remembered and politicized. In short, Palestinians don't get the right to use the Holocaust for their own message, because the Jews said so. Meanwhile, Israeli Jews have free reign to use the Holocaust as they wish. The argument seems appealing, and in practice, it seems most American and Israeli Jews have adopted it, but the reasoning also means Jews can't say anything about whom the Palestinians choose to see as heroes, including Arafat.
Politics in a single letter
This final argument for a Jewish right to politicize the Holocaust to the exclusion of everybody else brings the whole discussion back to its origins, that of defining the Holocaust in the first place. Was it a horrific event that occurred mainly, but not exclusively, to Jews? Was it so exceptional as to have no comparison, or was it merely a significant genocide amidst myriad other genocides of varying magnitudes? Do the Jews have the right to appropriate it, or is our understanding something for all of humanity to control?
All of these questions are rolled up into a single letter: H. By capitalizing the H in 'Holocaust,' the Jewish community has essentially answered the questions with a single stroke of the pen. A capitalized event, the Holocaust becomes unique and incomparable, and by linking it to the figure of six million, it becomes a primarily Jewish event.
Emil Fackenheim outlined the argument back in 1970, in the book God's Presence in History. Calling the Holocaust, "annihilation for the sake of annihilation," Fackenheim argued the event was a "pure" genocide, never to be compared or equated with other events or issues. He would no doubt be horrified to see, for example, the Hemophilia/HIV Peer Association refer to a former director of the National Hemophilia Foundation as "the Josef Mengele of the hemophilia holocaust."
But the appropriation of the Holocaust hasn't stopped at blood drives. Genocides in Rwanda, Kosovo, Cambodia, and elsewhere have all been compared, in some degree or another, to the slaughter of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and others by the Nazis. Even former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres referred to the NATO bombings of Kosovo as, "the first time after the Nazi Holocaust, when the world does not stand by."
One Chicago-Sun Times letter to the editor in 1987 argued that the Holocaust shouldn't be appropriated by just Jews, held as a symbol of the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. "Isn't all murder equally despicable, equally abhorrent -- unique only in the immediate circumstances surrounding the act," read the letter. "To politicize martyrdom and victimization by co-opting this horrendous and broad genocide is repugnant and it subverts historical perspective."
In other words, the very act of capitalizing the H in 'Holocaust,' and defining it as a primarily Jewish event, is an act of politicization. Jewish critics of the Bush administration's attempt to politicize a visit to Auschwitz, or supporters of Israel who bristle at attempts by the pro-Palestinian movement to draw parallels to Nazi atrocities, probably wouldn't agree, but their very disagreement highlights to the politicized nature of the word.
Holocaust denial, like that perpetrated by David Irving or Bradley Smith, is an attempt to subvert factual truths with ideological hatred. Such attempts are inherently abhorrent, but outside the realm of historical facts there remains another discussion, on the lessons we can derive from the Holocaust, and these lessons are inherently applicable. After all, why bother to remember the Holocaust if we don't intend it to serve as a lesson, and what lesson would be worth remembering if it didn't help guide our actions in the present. Just what those lessons should be remains hotly debated, and the Jewish appropriation of the Holocaust is matched by attempts to use the events by Palestinians, critics of Bush's domestic policies, and the Bush administration itself.
These wars over who has the right to appropriate the Holocaust aren't likely going to end any time soon, so it may be more worthwhile to ask ourselves not who has the right, but who has the right lesson to teach? |
