Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were nonetheless its metaphysical center. Jews are not the cause of World War III either, if that is what we now expect, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways
Jonathan Rosen
Illustration: New York Times
When I was a child my father used to get into his bed with a transistor tuned to a station that broadcast news continuously. Even without the radio, my father was attentive to the threat of history. As a Jew born in Vienna in 1924, he fled his homeland in 1938; His parents were murdered in the Holocaust. Sometimes I imagined that my father listened with the expectation of some repetition of the horrors of the past, that he might mend the old reaction to them. But maybe he was just always expecting more bad news.
Either way, the sound of the bedroom radio humming depressed me, and I vowed to replace it with music that suited the spirit of America. But these days I find myself listening to my father's frequency again. I woke up to antisemitism.
Although yes, I don't get chased down alleys and called a Jesus killer. I am not exposed to practices of discrimination and prejudice that prevent me from getting a job, and I am not afraid that the police will come and take my family. In fact I am more grateful than ever that my father found refuge in this country. But in recent weeks, events have returned and reminded me, in too many ways to ignore, of the role Jews play in the world's fantasy life. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were nevertheless the metaphysical center of this conflict, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler's agenda and a decisive motivation in his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that is what we now expect, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.
I was born in 1963, one generation and one ocean away from the extermination of European Jews. My mother was born here, so there was always one half of the family that breathed the light and pleasant air of post-war America. It is not necessary to read Freud much to discover that the key to a healthy life lies in the ability to repel reality to a certain extent and to fortify yourself against it. Of course, if you deny reality too much, then you are crazy. But if you deny her too little, you will only be miserable. My own balancing act involved acknowledging the fate of my murdered parents and trying to live a modern American life. I studied English literature in college and for my MA, then toyed with the idea of writing a dissertation on Milton, a Christian who was all about trying to justify God's ways to man. I dropped out of Ham Island studies to become a writer, but I always felt about my life in America what Milton says about Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden - the whole world was spread out before me.
I lived in New York, engaged in writing, got married and had a child. For ten years I worked in a Jewish newspaper. But the feeling that America offers me endless possibilities has never left me - even working at the Jewish newspaper seemed to me to be a paradoxical confirmation of American comfort. The way my father perceived the world, as a refugee, was both something I learned from him and something I tried to define myself against. I felt it was an act of mental health to acknowledge that his world was not my world and that his fears were the product of an experience foreign to me. I was critical of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I did not want ancient European anti-Semitism to be anchored and perpetuated on federal soil. But now everything has come to American soil.
I recently read an interview with Sheikh Muhammad Gamaa, who is not only the representative in the United States of the Cairo Center for Islamic Studies, Al-Azhar University, but also the imam of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. The sheikh, who until recently lived in northwest Manhattan, explained that "only the Jews" were capable of destroying the World Trade Center, adding that "if this had been known to the American people, they would have done to the Jews what Hitler did." The feeling in the face of these things is familiar to anyone who has watched the news or read newspapers. In Kuwait there were reports that rabbis in New York ordered their flock to withdraw their money from the stock market before September 11. In Egypt, the Mossad was accused of the attack. It's easy, I suppose, to dismiss this as madness, but because so many millions of Muslims seem to believe it, and because planes did crash into the World Trade Center, the words carry a different weight and carry a different threat than before.
The same goes for history, or more correctly for the forces that shape history, and especially the history of the Jews. It's not true to say that everything changed for me on 11/30. Like the man in Hemingway's novel who went bankrupt in two ways - gradually and then suddenly - my awareness of things also grew slowly. My father's sister fled in the XNUMXs from Vienna to Palestine - which is now of course called Israel - and I have many family members there. I grew up knowing that despite all its vitality, Israel is surrounded by enemies; I knew how dangerous and bleak life had become after the collapse of the Oslo peace process a year ago, and how dangerous and bleak it had sometimes been before that.
I also knew that compositions such as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" - the Russian forgery that speaks of a satanic Jewish power center - were imported into Arab society, similar to outdated but deadly Soviet weapons. Arab governments that attached ancient Christian slanders and slanders to modern political cabalism, thus turning Israel into an outpost of evil world Jewry, and seeing Israelis and Jews as identical symbols of cosmic evil. So when the Syrian Defense Minister recently told a delegation from the British Royal College of Defense Studies that the destruction of the World Trade Center was part of a Jewish plot, I wasn't really surprised.
I felt a gust of this spirit already at the beginning of September, when I followed the UN Conference on Racism and Discrimination in Durban, South Africa. The Arab Lawyers' Association distributed leaflets at the conference, which included anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews with jaws dripping with blood - a sideshow within the struggle for Israel's isolation and the comparison of Zionism to racism, which eventually led to the withdrawal of the United States from the conference. The mere commission of Israel to such descriptions has turned a modern nation into an archetype of the villain.
Jews were the problem and the countries of the world tried to find the solution. It was certainly not a novelty in the history of the United Nations, but there was something so blatant and blatant about the Nazi propaganda that came back to life and the anti-Semitism that fueled the political condemnations, that I felt like I had been kidnapped by history. The past comes to visit.
I felt it in a different way when I read coverage of Israel in European newspapers. Although public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in the post-Holocaust world, many Europeans felt free, when writing about Israel, to paint in their words a picture of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily "La Vanguardia" published a cartoon, showing a large building with the sign "Jewish Holocaust Museum" and behind it a building under construction, the sign on which says "Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust". The cartoon succeeded at the same time in demonizing Jews and trivializing the Holocaust.
Tom Cross, a journalist living in Israel, recently told me that a BBC reporter, Hilary Anderson, said that in order to adequately describe the abomination of the murder of Palestinian children by Israel, one must go back to the massacre of the innocent by Herod - that is, to Herod's attempt to murder Jesus in his cradle through a total massacre of Jewish babies. After taking a "Guardian" editor on a tour of the occupied territories, Cross was surprised by the editorial that was subsequently written on the front page of the influential British newspaper, in which it was stated that the establishment of Israel demanded such a high moral price that "the international community will not be able to support it indefinitely." I understood that from the editorial, which spoke about the very price involved in the establishment of Israel - not about this or that policy - it was implied that Israel's very right to exist is somehow still an issue on the agenda (it is impossible to imagine that something similar would be said, for example, about Russia in response to its war against The Chechen rebels, as far as "Guardian" can disagree about the policy of this country). And it inevitably reminded me of the situation of the Jews in Europe in the XNUMXs, when their very existence was an unforgivable crime.
Somehow I believed that the Jewish question, which Jews and anti-Semites alike obsessively debated in the 19th and 20th centuries, was resolved in the most horrifying way by Hitler's "Final Solution", and in the most hopeful way by Zionism. But more and more I feel that the Jews are once again becoming a question mark. How is it, the world still asks - about Israel, about Jews, about me - that you are still here? I've always known that many in the world wanted the Jews to just disappear, but there are degrees of knowing, and after 11/XNUMX my imagination seems capable of conjuring up in a more horrific way a world of realized rhetoric.
There are five million Jews in Israel and another eight million in the rest of the world. There are about a billion Muslims. How did it happen that Israel and "world Jewry", along with the United States, are the enemy of so many of them? It is doubly confusing and depressing when you are singled out in a country that is also singled out. There are many reasons why America - with its modernization, secularization, globalization, America whose every decision has global weight - is troubling so many parts of the world; As the bride of everything, we are a superpower. It is certainly more strange that Jews, by their very existence in the world, incite and encourage such hysteria.
And yet, what I heard over and over in those first days after the attack on the World Trade Center was that it was our support for Israel that somehow brought this destruction upon us. It was a kind of respectable variation on the belief that the Mossad single-handedly blew up the World Trade Center. Of course, this claim can be rebutted and answered - after all, the turning point in Osama bin Laden's hatred of the United States came in the Gulf War, when American soldiers were stationed in Saudi Arabia. But the effect of this argument did not wear off; It was hard to avoid the feeling that there was something almost magical about Israel, which made it poison in the eyes of friends and enemies alike.
This feeling will not disappear, if only because our support for Israel will make it difficult for us to maintain our coalition. Israel has somehow become an obstacle to war and an obstacle to peace at the same time. Recently, of course, bin Laden added the treatment of the Palestinians to his list of concessions, and this can revive the feeling that Israel bears a certain degree of responsibility. Big lies can be built from smaller truths.
Israel's occupation of the West Bank, even if it resulted from a war that Israel did not want, has become a nightmare for the Palestinians and a disaster for Israel from a moral, political and spiritual point of view. It is a special suffering to feel this way and at the same time to feel that the situation has become a weapon in the war against Israel. Bin Laden would not have wanted a Palestinian state in the West Bank, because he could not bear the existence of a Jewish state next to it.
Many of our allies in the Muslim world feel the same way, who continue to claim in clean language that if only the "Middle East crisis" had been resolved, terrorism would have decreased. On the face of it, this argument seems plausible, and indeed it would be an extraordinary achievement if the Palestinians were to receive a homeland and Israel would receive secure borders. But since most of the players in the Middle East do not accept the existence of Israel, because the "solution to the Middle East crisis" would involve for them a modern version of Hitler's final solution, this sentence takes on strange overtones and even ominous when used in an innocent and watery way by governments that own Good intentions, calling for a quick solution. And this Orwellian reversal of language is one of the most irritating and confusing aspects of the campaign against Israel. He turned the word "peace" into a clean word for war.
^^If Israel fails, Islam will fail^^
I grew up in a post-Holocaust world. Despite the oppressive weight of this burden and despite its resounding emptiness, one could also find in it a strange kind of security. After all, the worst has already happened. Following the holocaust, American anti-Semitism faded, the church threw up ancient slanders from it. This atrocity was enough to shock even countries like the Soviet Union and move them to support the establishment of a Jewish state. Israel after 1967 was a powerful country - a country under siege but safe.
I am not writing this article to predict some inevitable disaster but to detect a change in the mood. My intention is to say out loud that European anti-Semitism, which made the Holocaust possible, still shapes the way Jews are perceived, that Arab anti-Israel propaganda joined hands and found a home in a Muslim world known for fighting. Something terrible was born. What happened on 11/XNUMX is proof, as if we needed it, that people who threaten evil mean to do evil.
This comes along with the growing awareness that weapons of mass destruction did not disappear with the Soviet Union; The knowledge that the danger of their use, even if only on a limited scale, may actually be greater in this century is only now percolating.
This is a cruel paradox: the solution to a Jewish problem of one century became a Jewish problem of another century. This tragedy was exacerbated to such an extent that friends who support Israel wondered aloud if it was time to admit that the Israeli experiment had failed, that there was something in this enterprise itself that sealed its fate. This is the thinking of despair. I suppose one could similarly wonder about post-11/50 America, since many American values are now being put to the test, and because when you go to war you always become a little like your enemy, if only by accepting the need to kill. I grew up in a time when sex education was considered essential, but something that could be called war education - what you have to do in war in order to survive - evoked a sense of permeating a narrow and pious feeling. I guess that will change now. In any case, Israel has been at war for XNUMX years. Without this context, clear-minded judgment is impossible, especially on the part of those who are used to the perception from the days of the Holocaust according to which during wartime Jews are nothing more than helpless victims.
My way of looking at the Israeli experiment is different from that of my friends who wonder if it failed. It is related to the way I see the fate of European Jews. When the Jews in Europe were murdered in the Holocaust, one could come to the conclusion that European Jewry failed - it was unable to protect itself, to anticipate evil and promote it, to make itself acceptable to the world around it, to pack its bags and leave. But it was also possible to reach a deeper conclusion that Christian Europe failed - it failed to accept the existence of Jews within it, and since then this stain has been placed on its culture and will remain forever. Israel is a test for its neighbors to the extent that they are a test for Israel. If the Israeli experiment fails, then Islam will fail, and so will the Christian culture that played a formative role in this part of the world.
I'm afraid I'll sound like I believe the Holocaust will repeat itself in some simpler way, that my childhood fantasy about my father is now wearing skin and sinew on me, and that I'm the one straining to hear Hitler's voice emanating from the radio. I don't do that. Israel has a strong and modern army. But so is the United States, and it has been revealed as vulnerable to attack, which raises other fears. The United States spans a continent, and its survival is not in doubt. But experts who warn us about the American vulnerability are talking about areas the size of entire countries that would be contaminated if a nuclear reactor were hit by an airplane. Israel is smaller than New Jersey.
I am aware that this obsession with the Holocaust seems somehow inappropriate and inappropriate, and when talking about modern politics, the attitude is seen as evidence of bad taste if not bad history. I do not seek to eliminate or suppress Israel's political mummy and flaws by bringing up the Holocaust. But the very reluctance to bring it up was exploited and twisted in a way that makes me ignore these flaws. "Six million Jews?" said last year the mufti of Jerusalem, appointed by the Palestinian Authority. "Let's stop this fairy tale, used by Israel to buy international solidarity." The language of the demonization of Israel in some European newspapers, and of the Jews in the Arab press, is reminiscent of the Europe of the XNUMXs. I grew up thinking that I live in a post-Holocaust world, and I find that it sounds more and more like a pre-Holocaust world as well.
^^Anti-Zionism embraced anti-Semitism^^
Ten years ago I interviewed Sol Blue in Chicago and asked him if there was anything he regretted. He said that looking back on his career he feels that he was not sufficiently aware of the Holocaust. This surprised me because one of his novels, "Mr. Zemmler's Planet", is basically about a Holocaust survivor. But Blue remembered how he wrote "The Adventures of Auggie March" - the great novel that built his reputation - in Paris in the late XNUMXs. Holocaust survivors were everywhere, Blue told me, and as a Yiddish speaker he had access to the horrible truths they harbored inside. But as he put it, he was in no mood to listen at the time. "I wanted the American cake on its seven layers," he told me. He did not want to burden his writing at this early moment in his literary path with the burdensome burden of Jewish history. The book cheerfully opens with the words "I am an American".
I also want the American cake on its seven layers, even if this cake has collapsed somewhat in recent weeks. There is no pleasure in feeling that the horror of history conquers you and claims you for itself, and in the feeling that you stand in opposition to the all-encompassing universalist temperament of our society. Thinking about it makes me feel old, exhausted and angry.
In World War II, American Jews muted and downplayed their specific Jewish concerns in favor of the more general struggle to liberate Europe. I understand the psychological urge to broadcast on the same wave as the American goals. But Israel is stuck and stands out in this crisis as European Jewry found itself in World War II, and it imposes a secondary level of Jewish consciousness, mainly because the anti-Zionism of the Arab world has adopted the anti-Semitism of the European world.
The danger to America, which has already fallen upon us, and the danger to Israel, which so far remains mainly rhetorical, are of course related. And although it is not true to think that if Israel did not exist, America would not have its enemies, those who raise this connection intuitively feel something beyond the simple fact that both are Western democracies.
In: and Jews in the Age of Discovery” “Cultures in Conflict
Christians, Muslims Bernard Lewis points out that after the Christians reconquered Spain from the Muslims in the 15th century, they decided to expel the Jews before the Muslims. The reason for this, Lewis explains, was that although the Jews had no army and were a much smaller political threat than the Muslims, they posed a much greater theological challenge. This is because Jews believed that believers of other religions could find their own ways to God. Christianity and Islam, which described members of other religions as infidels, did not share this essential religious relativism. The rabbinic interpretation of monotheism - which saw all human beings as created in the image of God, recognized their essential equality - perhaps contains the seeds of those democratic principles themselves, which were so intolerable in the eyes of the September 11 terrorists.
Is there any wonder that in the minds of the terrorists and their fundamentalist defenders there is an unholy alliance between Americans and Jews? Expressing my separate Jewish concerns does not put me in opposition to our pluralistic society - it puts me in harmony with you, for here more than anywhere else I am free to express all my identities: American, Jewish, Zionist. And if the Jews who were kicked out of Spain risked their lives and stuck to a religion that holds such an unequivocal belief in the redeemable nature of humanity, who am I to reject this opinion? Perhaps the optimistic American half of my heritage does not ultimately contradict the darker Jewish component. In this context, the double awareness that weighed on my response to our new war should not be perceived as something that alienates and differentiates me. On the contrary, she doubles my patriotism and forges me for the struggle that awaits her.
