Holocast Memorial in the Venice Ghetto. Photo copyright Mr Crash
On holiday in Venice this September, we decided to visit the Ghetto. It being a lively Shabbat afternoon — and my wife being Jewish — we were invited into a restaurant for refreshments on the house. Unfortunately — and purely by chance — the subject of conversation turned to Israel (and so of course, to the Palestinians). I do not think that I have ever encountered such intransigent attitudes — person to person — before. I remained genial, friendly, and reasonable, and did not raise my voice at all. I suggested several things: 1/ That the destruction of Lebanon, over the heads of the legitimate enemy Hezbollah, was...well, carrying things a bit too far. But apparently not. 2/ That the situation was not black and white. But I discovered that, to all intents and purposes, it apparently is; and, that things will happen according to God’s will... (Which renders life utterly pointless if true; but I refrained from comment.) 3/ That we are all human beings. A debatable point, apparently. 4/ (Ah, such naivety!) That it would be a wonderful thing if all the races of the world were intermarried to the extent that there were no significantly large bodies of people to hate. I was looked at as someone from another planet. The loss of culture — Jewish, it must be said — would be an absolute tragedy. I do not disagree, but do not tell me that there is no such thing as Palestinian and Lebanese culture. And if such prodigious amounts of killing, torture, and unutterable misery are the price to be paid for the maintenance of cultures then it is too high. I did not venture this opinion. Rationality had, that afternoon, flown from the window — well, that’s not quite true: it was never there in the first place. ‘Come to Israel’, I was told, ‘and you can see how things are for yourself. It’s wonderful: you can go white–water–rapiding’, and heaven knows what else. I have no doubt of this, but could not help wondering what this had to do with the political situation. I am sure that many people would enjoy visiting Israel: how comfortable they might feel is another matter... Well, there is absolutely nothing I can do about all this. Not much that president Obama can do about it either: the tail of the Jewish lobby in America wags the body politic of America and emasculates its president. Not much at least that Obama will do about it. With great disappointment we notice that this most promising of presidents lacks — or so at least it seems to me — the courage, inspiration, and effectiveness of a John F. Kennedy. Deeply flawed though that man was he had the courage to act and to be. Obama is too cautious in his own re-election interests, and will — if not careful — wither on the vine of compromise.
During the last war between the Israelis and the Palestinians the Gaza Strip was turned into a holocaust. And the Holocaust (the Shoa), cannot forever be invoked to justify such actions. None of this is, however, to deny that Hamas and Hezbollah are dedicated to the destruction of Israel. I find it difficult to think about all this. These ‘straws in the wind’ are so bitter and implacable. The children’s teeth have indeed been set on edge, and who knows for how many generations? However, things will not remain indefinitely as they are. Something will happen, and heaven knows what that something will be... As Emerson wrote, ‘Things are in the saddle / And ride mankind.’ [‘Things’ being events.] Exactly so. The leaders of the world may feel that they are at the helm, but the people have the compass in their hands, and it seldom points to true north. The ‘ships of state’ move with the unpredictable swells of the tides. And, if enough people move to one side of the ship, then it may capsize.
I have not forgotten in all this, the bus and cafe suicide bombings of the Second Intifada — 2001–2003 — carried out principally by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.* These actions were equivalent to those carried out by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain, and by the Ulster Defence Force (UDF) in Northern Ireland. They made one feel sick to the pit of the stomach, and cast a pall over everyday life. Living in London in the 1970s gave me sufficient experience of terrorism: a wariness of every parked car that I passed, and a certain dread of what would be on the news each morning or evening. On one occasion all the windows were blown out of Selfridge’s department store in Oxford Street by a car bomb. I was working there at the time. A warning at least was given: this is not now the practice of the contemporary suicide bomber. Consequently, you may murder your own brothers or your cousin’s children — anyone in fact who by the merest of chances may be present. Just so long as the greatest number of people are blown to smithereens...
And yet, must we not acknowledge the part that centuries of Christian and Islamic anti–Semitism have played in driving the Israeli Jews into such an intransigent and militaristic mind–set? I think that we must. I would go further, and suggest that Israel has been as much created by anti–Semitism as it has by the Jews themselves. They have been the convenient [sic] scapegoats for the ills of the occident and Ancient Near East (Middle East) since before the birth of Christianity. However, there are numerous paradoxes in all this. One of them being that Islamic anti–Semitism has tended to be less harsh than Christian anti–Semitism. This was due to Arabs feeling an assured superiority over the Jews, who were often allowed to live as a protected minority with limited rights. However, this comparatively tolerant attitude — which did not prevent sporadic persecutions, expulsions, and massacres — was gradually undermined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: by (nominally Christian) colonisation; by the establishment of a strong and confident Israel; and by the crushing defeat of the Six Day War. None of these things seemed to accord with the teachings of the Koran, where the Jew is decidedly subordinate. It is interesting however to note that, according to Robert S. Wistrich (Anti–Semitism: The Longest Hatred.), Arab anti–Semitism although rife, seems to exist on a level of hothead sloganeering: not preventing friendships with Jews, and not evincing that form of anti–Semitism that seems to course though the veins of some Europeans.
The situation is immensely complex, and there have been multiple forms of anti–Semitism, as for instance that of the atheistic Enlightenment variety, in which freethinking anti–clerical writers such as Voltaire and Diderot attacked the Jews for the part they had supposedly played as precursors of Christianity... However the ‘final straw’ — as need hardly be stated — was the Final Solution (Die Endlösung) of Hitler’s Third Reich: the paradigm example of modern political anti–Semitism — racist and fascist. Here all the howling demons of medieval Europe came to roost in the collective psyche of state–sponsored anti–Semitism, with results that need not be rehearsed here. This form of anti–Semitism remains the most dangerous and ugly.
However, we cannot apportion the entire blame for the Holocaust (the Shoa) to Hitler’s willing executioners — to borrow the title of Daniel Goldhagen’s book. The death camps, the killing fields, (and the railway sidings...) were also in Poland, Lithuania, Italy, France, Austria, and other countries: and there was no shortage of collaborators and killers in these countries. Nor would there have been in England had there been a successful German invasion: Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists (Blackshirts) would have set about ‘Jew hunting’ with a vengeance — and I have no doubt that we would have been shocked to have discovered anti–Semitism among people we had never suspected...
To return to Venice. In the Campo dell Ghetto Nuovo there is a memorial on which is inscribed the names of the two hundred Venetian Jews transported to the death camps in 1943 and 1944. The memorial is entitled The Last Train...
I must be honest, and say that I have no wish to go to Israel. Apart from anything else, I doubt that I could keep silent and bottle up my views. And yet, ever in my mind is this poem of Elie Weisel’s: Never Shall I Forget (?)
Never shall I forget that night,
the first night in the camp
which has turned my life into one long night
seven times cursed and seven times sealed.
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*40 bombings in 2001; 47 in 2002; 23 in 2003. Source: Wikipedia
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End note
I understand that when Ehud Barak was asked what he would have done had he been born a Palestinian, he replied, ‘I would have joined a terrorist organization.’ This is, apparently, ‘a question too far’: one that militant Israelis refuse to countenance. Alas for such: it is an eternally valid question. Further, Jews who are fanatically anti–Arab are themselves anti–Semitic, given that Arabs are members of ‘a Semitic people, living in the Middle East and North Africa.’ ‘The chief member of the group [of Semitic languages] is Arabic.’ On the website, The Alternative Information Centre: Palestine/Israel, Michael Warschawski writes, ‘Ehud Barak is a sickening person, more than any other Israeli politician. A man with a corrupted personality, as is everyone driven only by his ego.’ If you wish you may immerse yourself in more of Warschawski’s immature and bitter bile: http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/blogs/michael-warschawski/3579-the-worst-of-them-all-why-is-ehud-barak-hated-
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