Leonard Grob on 'Forgetting' the Holocaust: Ethical dimentions of Israeli-Palestinian conflict

ISRAEL HORIZONS - Spring 2006 

'FORGETTING' THE HOLOCAUST: Ethical Dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

by Leonard Grob

In 1988, philosopher and historian Yehuda Elkana stunned fellow Israelis by writing an article entitled “In Praise of Forgetting.” Elkana, himself a Holocaust survivor, urged Israelis to “…uproot the domination of historical remembrance [of the Holocaust]…” from their lives.  Elkana did not argue that the events of 1933-1945 should — or could — literally be forgotten. What he had in mind was a radical critique of the role that some forms of Holocaust remembrance have played in the Zionist political consciousness of past decades, as well as in the lives of his Israeli contemporaries. In this article I articulate ways in which rethinking a Zionist narrative, forged in the shadows of the Holocaust, might serve to more responsibly memorialize the six million who were murdered.

Abusing memory of the Holocaust does not fall within the province of Israel alone. Many Palestinians also allude freely — and largely irresponsibly — to the Holocaust in order to inflame the rhetoric of conflict. Palestinians frequently compare their situation in the territories with the Nazi treatment of Jews. This simplistic equating of the systematic genocide of European Jewry with actions by Israel —however harsh or brutal — fans the flames of hatred and inhibits peaceful dialogue.

Given an asymmetry of power between the warring parties, misuse of Holocaust memory by Israel is especially grievous. Such misremembering contributes substantially to Israel’s failure to take those initiatives toward peacemaking which, morally speaking, are demanded of the more powerful party to a conflict in which each people has legitimate claims.

 To speak of an asymmetry of power is not to say that we are in the presence of a “David and Goliath” scenario; Palestinians are by no means innocent, helpless victims of Israeli power. Although lacking the firepower of a militarized industrial state, many or most Palestinian leaders have expertly employed such powers of rhetoric and propaganda in the service of the Palestinian cause as: Exploiting longstanding and common anti-Semitic prejudices to demonize Jews; manipulating popular media to incite “the street” to violence against the Jewish “outsider” in a Muslim world; utilizing Holocaust denial to invalidate the history of Jewish suffering, which gave rise to the need for a state where Jews could control their destiny; glorifying the shaheed, the martyr who has sacrificed his/her life to murder Israeli civilians. The existential fear of Israelis that they may be driven from their land — or annihilated — is rooted in the reality of hatred spawned by many Palestinians, as well as by Muslim nations held captive to extremist ideologies. Not to be minimized in this regard is the threat to Israel posed by the recently-elected Hamas, steeped in the anti-Semitism of the mythological "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and sworn to eliminate a sovereign Jewish presence in the region. Palestinians, like their Jewish counterparts in the struggle, are both victims and perpetrators. Nor to be minimized is the current threat posed by Palestinian links to Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad, both backed by an Iranian regime pledged to Israel’s destruction and potentially capable, militarily, of realizing that aim.  There are no innocent parties in the Middle East conflict.

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