Those Who Forget the Past Page 3

  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 MEMRI6 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.”

  A columnist for an Islamist newspaper in a nation with which Israel is ostensibly at peace. A culture in which such a murderous excrescence is celebrated rather than despised. In which such a “dream” was—it was fairly clear—thinly disguised incitement to real Egyptian bodyguards to “realize the meaning of virility” and carry out the assassination Bakri “dreamed.”

  What made it more disturbing was its metaphoric import: the Jewish state was in effect being asked by the international community to put its trust in the good faith, put its very fate in the hands of “bodyguards” such as this. By “trading land for peace,” as they were incessantly being urged to do, they’d be trading defensible borders and, in effect, giving themselves over to “bodyguards” who had not given up dreams like that. Making themselves, making their children’s lives, hostage to the “bodyguard” of purported Islamist goodwill.7

  Again, Egypt was a land officially “at peace” with Israel. That’s why the bodyguard murder-fantasy, that one paragraph in a six-thousand-word New Yorker report, touched such a nerve in those of us who had wanted to believe there was a simple, attainable, trustable, reasonable solution to the Middle East crisis. That’s why it gave one—gave me—such a sense of hopelessness, a profound historical pessimism about the possibility of peace.

  But as I said, something curious happened to Bakri’s dream, to that single paragraph in its transmission to the world.

  In preparing this volume I’d asked a researcher to fax me a copy of Goldberg’s New Yorker article she had downloaded from the LexisNexis database, the source that most commentators, journalists, and essayists consult, the one that— in practical effect—defines, describes the contours of the public debate on any given issue, internationally.

  As I read over the LexisNexis version of the Goldberg piece for the first time since it came out in The New Yorker of October 8, 2001, and came to the portion where Bakri’s ugly dream is recounted, I was stunned. It wasn’t there anymore. The text came to the place where Goldberg quoted from the dream— “in the column . . . he [Bakri] wrote:”—and after the colon, there was a space break and the text picked up: “Bakri offered me an orange soda. . . .” The existence of the murderous dream from beginning (“The pig landed”) to end (“I stepped on the pig’s head . . .”) was erased.

  I called both Goldberg and LexisNexis: neither was aware of the omission. The man at LexisNexis investigated and reported back that it appeared to be a technological glitch, not a deliberate political or ideological erasure. The dream passage was preserved on one New Yorker website version of the piece (not the “printer-friendly” one) but not on LexisNexis. The LexisNexis man said he believed that because the dream was printed in smaller type in The New Yorker, it may have dropped out in the scan that transferred it to the LexisNexis database. So it appears to be an inadvertent omission. Inadvertent, but emblematic of the way that dream of slaughter—and the widespread sentiment it spoke for—had dropped off the scan of discourse on the question.

  When I wrote the first draft of this introduction, it had not been restored. Which allowed anyone reading the piece to avoid facing an unsavory truth. Now it’s back again on LexisNexis; the murderous dream has been restored, although of course in reality it was never gone.

  But the two versions of the Goldberg story, the one with and the one without the dream, represented two versions of the world—two ways of looking at the world, and looking away.

  4) SPEAKING ABOUT THE UNSPEAKABLE

  Those two ways of looking at the world: I suppose that’s what I evoked—even if it wasn’t what I set out to do—when I touched off a controversy by putting into print a phrase that some found transgressive, disturbing, and virtually taboo: “a second Holocaust.”

  I had set out to write something about the revival of European anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism. The kind of anti-Semitism that could feature a child wearing a mock “suicide-bomber” explosive bandolier in a “peace” march. And the emerging phenomenon of “Holocaust inversion,” as Melanie Phillips called it, the pernicious rhetorical device in which Nazi imagery is used to depict Jews. There was Tom Paulin’s famous formulation “the Zionist SS”—merely the most egregious. Holocaust inversion took Holocaust denial one step further: the Jews were not victims, not even “fake” victims, as the deniers contended; the Jews were now portrayed as the perpetrators of the kinds of crimes that had been committed against them.

  In any case, the fact that I uttered the phrase “second Holocaust” was, in truth, inadvertent, a Web-surfing happe
nstance. Safe in America, yet suffering with each new report of a “suicide bombing” in Israel, one morning I followed a link from the popular “InstaPundit” website to a site I’d never visited before, one operated by a Canadian political commentator, David Artemiw.

  On that day, he happened to quote a deliberately shocking passage from a Philip Roth novel, the 1993 work called OperationShylock. It’s a novel that is set mainly in Israel, in 1988, during the first Intifada, and begins with a comic doppelgänger premise that turns—lurches at times—into moments of terrifying seriousness. (And ends in, of all places, the back room of Barney Greengrass.) I don’t want to anticipate the excerpt published herein. But in sum, the “real” Philip Roth hears that an impostor calling himself “Philip Roth” is ensconced in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem giving talks about an ideology he calls Diasporism.

  This is the belief that exile, Diaspora, the historic dispersion of the Jews, had by that year become a better solution to the problem of Jewish survival than their dangerous “concentration,” so to speak, in the State of Israel. “The Diasporist” argues that the in-gathering to Israel, while it served a purpose in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, now threatens to lead to an unthinkable catastrophe. Unthinkable but not unspeakable. He speaks it. He calls the dread possibility “a second Holocaust.”

  The phrase comes in the context of an argument he gets into with the “real” Philip Roth about the danger posed to the Jewish state, not merely from stone-throwing Palestinians but from powerful Islamic states that will someday—a day not too distant—have nuclear weapons. Indeed, Pakistan would soon have the first “Islamic bomb”; Iran was developing missiles with the range to deliver such bombs or hand them off to terrorists.

  In fact, when I reread the “second-Holocaust” passage, which Roth wrote in 1992, it was hard not to think of the Iranian leader who (some ten years after Roth wrote the passage) was thinking about the same arithmetic as the Diasporist. In December 2001, Hashemi-Rafsanjani, former president of Iran, gave us an insight into the calculations of mass murder that were going on in certain quarters of the world. He gave a speech in which he estimated that in a nuclear exchange with the State of Israel, Iran might lose fifteen million people, but that would be a sacrifice of fifteen million out of a billion Muslims worldwide. And in return, the five million Jews of Israel would be no more. He seemed pleased with the possibility of such a trade-off (regardless of the cost to Palestinian and Israeli Arabs). Perhaps it was just bluster, but less than a year after that speech, Iran announced that it had missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv.8