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By Masha Gessen
Berlin never fails to remind you of what happened there. Several museums read about totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe occupies an entire city block. In a sense, however, those larger structures are the least of the problems. The stealthily appearing monuments—the Monument to the Burnt Books, which is literally underground, and the Miles de Stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks,” built on the sidewalks to commemorate Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and others (others murdered by the Nazis) reveal the pervasiveness of the evils that were once committed here. In early November, while walking to a friend’s house in the city, I came across the data booth marking the location of Hitler’s bunker. I had done it many times before. It looks like a community poster, but it tells the story of the Führer’s last days.
In the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, when many of these memorials were conceived and installed, I visited Berlin often. It was exhilarating to watch memory culture take shape. Here was a country, or at least a city, that was doing what most cultures cannot: looking at its own crimes, its own worst self. But, at some point, the effort began to feel static, glassed in, as though it were an effort not only to remember history but also to insure that only this particular history is remembered—and only in this way. This is true in the physical, visual sense. Many of the memorials use glass: the Reichstag, a building nearly destroyed during the Nazi era and rebuilt half a century later, is now topped by a glass dome; the burned-books memorial lives under glass; glass partitions and glass panes put order to the stunning, once haphazard collection called “Topography of Terror.” As Candice Breitz, a South African Jewish artist who lives in Berlin, told me, “The good intentions that came into play in the nineteen-eighties have, too often, solidified into dogma.”
Among the rare spaces where the representation of reminiscence is not supposedly permanent are some galleries in the new construction of the Jewish Museum, completed in 1999. During my stop in early November, a gallery on the grounds displayed a Video installation titled “Rehearsing the Specter Show. ” The video was filmed in Kibbutz Beeri, the network where, on October 7, Hamas killed more than 90 people – approximately one in ten citizens – in its attack on Israel, which ultimately claimed the lives of more than twelve hundred people. . others. In the video, the citizens of Beeri take turns reciting verses from a poem by one of the members of the netpaintings, the poet Anadad Eldan: “. ArrayArray of the swamp between the coasts / has emerged that had submerged in you / and you are forced not to scream / to chase the shapes that run outside. The video, directed by Berlin-based Israeli artists Nir Evron and Omer Krieger, was completed nine years ago. It begins with an aerial view of the area, showing the Gaza Strip, and then slowly zooms in on the kibbutz’s houses, some of which looked like bunkers. I’m not sure what the artists and poet originally intended to convey; Now the installation looked like a painting of mourning for Be’eri. (Eldan, who is almost a hundred years old, survived the Hamas attack. )
At the end of the room was one of the spaces that architect Daniel Libeskind, who designed the museum, called “voids”: air ducts that pierce the building and symbolize the absence of Jews in Germany through generations. There, an installation by Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, titled “Fallen Leaves,” is composed of more than 10,000 iron bullets with eyes and mouths cut out, like molds of children’s drawings of screaming faces. When you step on their faces, they break like chains or like the handle of a gun. Kadishman dedicated his paintings to those who suffered the Holocaust and other innocent victims of war and violence. I don’t know what Kadishman, who died in 2015, would have said about the ongoing conflict. But after moving from the disturbing video of Kibbutz Beeri to the blows on the iron faces, I have an idea of the thousands of Gazans killed in retaliation for the lives of Jews murdered through Hamas. Then I thought that if I declared it publicly in Germany I might be in trouble.
On November 9, to commemorate the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a Star of David and the word “Nie Wieder Ist Jetzt!(“Never again, it’s now!”). On that day, the Bundestag considered a proposal entitled “Taking Historical Responsibility: Protecting Jewish Life in Germany”, which contained more than fifty measures to combat anti-Semitism in Germany, including the expulsion of immigrants who commit anti-Semitic crimes; accentuate activities opposing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; supporting Jewish artists “whose paintings criticize anti-Semitism”; enforce an explicit definition of anti-Semitism in investment and surveillance decisions; and strengthening cooperation between the German and Israeli armed forces. In earlier remarks, German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, a member of the Green Party, said Muslims in Germany “clearly distance themselves from anti-Semitism so as not to infringe on their own right to tolerance. “
Germany has long regulated how the Holocaust is commemorated and debated. In 2008, when Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the Knesset on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, she stressed Germany’s special duty not only to preserve the memory of the Holocaust as an ancient and exclusive atrocity, but also to save Israel. This, he continued, was part of the German Staatsräson: the reason for the state’s way of life. Since then, this sentiment has been repeated in Germany whenever the subject of Israel, Jews or anti-Semitism is raised, he added in Habeck’s remarks. “The word ‘Israel’s security is part of the German Staatsräson’ has never been an empty word,” he said. “And it doesn’t have to be. “
At the same time, an elusive but strangely momentous debate about what constitutes anti-Semitism has taken hold. In 2016, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organization, followed the following definition: “Anti-Semitism is a safe belief of Jews, which can be expressed as hatred of Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism target Jewish or non-Jewish Americans and/or their property, as well as Jewish community and devout institutions. This definition is accompanied by 11 examples, which began with the apparent – calling for or justifying the murder of Jews – but also included “the statement that the lifestyle of a State of Israel is a racist enterprise” and “comparisons between the new Israeli policy and that of the State of Israel. “”That of the Nazis.
This definition had no legal force, but it has had extraordinary influence. Twenty-five E.U. member states and the U.S. State Department have endorsed or adopted the I.H.R.A. definition. In 2019, President Donald Trump signed an executive order providing for the withholding of federal funds from colleges where students are not protected from antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A. On December 5th of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution condemning antisemitism as defined by the I.H.R.A.; it was proposed by two Jewish Republican representatives and opposed by several prominent Jewish Democrats, including New York’s Jerry Nadler.
In 2020, an organization of scholars proposed a select definition of anti-Semitism, which they called the Jerusalem Declaration. It defines anti-Semitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish establishments as Jews)” and provides examples that help distinguish anti-Israel statements and movements from anti-Semitic statements and movements. But some of the most eminent Holocaust scholars were involved in drafting the declaration, which did little to diminish the growing influence of the I. H. R. A. definition. In 2021, the European Commission published a manual “for practical use” of the I. H. R. A. definition, which recommended, among other things, using the definition to exercise law enforcement officers to recognize hate crimes and create the position of state prosecutor, coordinator or commissioner. because of anti-Semitism.
Germany had already implemented this particular recommendation. In 2018, the country created the Office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism, a vast bureaucracy that includes commissioners at the state and local level, some of whom work out of prosecutors’ offices or police precincts. Since then, Germany has reported an almost uninterrupted rise in the number of antisemitic incidents: more than two thousand in 2019, more than three thousand in 2021, and, according to one monitoring group, a shocking nine hundred and ninety-four incidents in the month following the Hamas attack. But the statistics mix what Germans call Israelbezogener Antisemitismus—Israel-related antisemitism, such as instances of criticism of Israeli government policies—with violent attacks, such as an attempted shooting at a synagogue, in Halle, in 2019, which killed two bystanders; shots fired at a former rabbi’s house, in Essen, in 2022; and two Molotov cocktails thrown at a Berlin synagogue this fall. The number of incidents involving violence has, in fact, remained relatively steady, and has not increased following the Hamas attack.
There are now dozens of anti-Semitism commissioners across Germany. They don’t have a single job description or legal framework for their work, yet much of their job involves publicly shaming those they deem anti-Semitic, for “de-singling the Holocaust” or criticizing Israel. Almost none of those commissioners are Jewish. In fact, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. Among them is German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who has been targeted for his support of the BDS movement, as has South African Jewish photographer Adam Broomberg.
In 2019, the Bundestag passed a resolution condemning B.D.S. as antisemitic and recommending that state funding be withheld from events and institutions connected to B.D.S. The history of the resolution is telling. A version was originally introduced by the AfD, the radical-right ethnonationalist and Euroskeptic party then relatively new to the German parliament. Mainstream politicians rejected the resolution because it came from the AfD, but, apparently fearful of being seen as failing to fight antisemitism, immediately introduced a similar one of their own. The resolution was unbeatable because it linked B.D.S. to “the most terrible phase of German history.” For the AfD, whose leaders have made openly antisemitic statements and endorsed the revival of Nazi-era nationalist language, the spectre of antisemitism is a perfect, cynically wielded political instrument, both a ticket to the political mainstream and a weapon that can be used against Muslim immigrants.
The B. D. S. This movement, encouraged by the South African anti-apartheid boycott movement, seeks to use economic pressure to guarantee equivalent rights to Palestinians in Israel, end the race and promote the return of Palestinian refugees. Many other people find that B. D. S. problematic motion because it does not affirm the right of the State of Israel to exist – and, indeed, some B. D. S. Its supporters foresee a general defeat of the Zionist project. However, it can be argued that associating a non-violent boycott movement with the Holocaust, whose supporters have explicitly identified it as an option to armed struggle, is the very definition of Holocaust relativism. But, according to the logic of German reminiscence politics, because the B. D. S. is directed against Jews – although many of the motion’s supporters are also Jews – it is anti-Semitic. It can also be argued that the inherent fusion of Jews with the State of Israel is anti-Semitic, even if it serves the needs of the I. H. R. A. Definition of antisemitism. And given the AfD’s involvement and the fact that the solution is widely used against Jews and other people of color, one would think this argument would gain traction. We would be wrong.
The German Basic Law, unlike the U. S. Constitution. But like those in many other European countries, it has not been interpreted as an absolute guarantee of freedom of expression. However, it promises freedom of expression not only in the press but also in the arts and sciences, studies and teaching. It is conceivable that if the solution B. D. S. Si becomes law, it would be found to be unconstitutional. But it hasn’t been proven that way. Part of what made the solution so difficult was the same generosity as always from the German state: almost all museums, exhibitions, conferences, festivals, and other cultural occasions get investment from the federal, state, or local government. “It created a McCarthyite vibe,” Candice Breitz, the artist, told me. “Whenever we need to invite someone, they (i. e. , any government company that budgets for an event) – Google offers their call with ‘B. D. S. ‘Israel,’ ‘apartheid. ‘”
A couple of years ago, Breitz, whose art deals with issues of race and identity, and Michael Rothberg, who holds a Holocaust studies chair at the University of California, Los Angeles, tried to organize a symposium on German Holocaust memory, called “We Need to Talk.” After months of preparations, they had their state funding pulled, likely because the program included a panel connecting Auschwitz and the genocide of the Herero and the Nama people carried out between 1904 and 1908 by German colonizers in what is now Namibia. “Some of the techniques of the Shoah were developed then,” Breitz said. “But you are not allowed to speak about German colonialism and the Shoah in the same breath because it is a ‘levelling.’ ”
The insistence on the singularity of the Holocaust and the centrality of Germany’s commitment to reckoning with it are two sides of the same coin: they position the Holocaust as an event that Germans must always remember and mention but don’t have to fear repeating, because it is unlike anything else that’s ever happened or will happen. The German historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, who heads the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, in Berlin, has argued that unified Germany turned the reckoning with the Holocaust into its national idea, and as a result “any attempt to advance our understanding of the historical event itself, through comparisons with other German crimes or other genocides, can [be] and is being perceived as an attack on the very foundation of this new nation-state.” Perhaps that’s the meaning of “Never again is now.”
Some of the wonderful Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust spent the rest of their lives trying to tell the world that this horror, though deadly, does not deserve to be considered an aberration. The fact that the Holocaust occurred meant that it was imaginable – and still is. Sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has argued that the massive, systematic, and effective nature of the Holocaust is a characteristic of modernity: that, even if it was by no means predetermined, it was in keeping with other twentieth-century inventions. Theodor Adorno studied what drives other people to cling to authoritarian rulers and searched for an ethical precept that would save him from a new Auschwitz.
In 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began: “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the new State of Israel of the ‘Party of Freedom’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political component very similar in form. organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal for the Nazi and Fascist components. Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt compared an Israeli Jewish component to the Nazi component, an act that today would constitute a flagrant violation of the principles of the I. H. R. A. Definition of anti-Semitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part through the Irgun, the paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a target of the army. The attackers “killed as many of its citizens – 240 men, women and young people – and kept some of them alive to parade in captivity through the streets of Jerusalem. “
The example of Arendt’s letter is a stopover envisaged in the United States through the party’s leader, Menachem Begin. It was signed by Albert Einstein, another German Jew who fled the Nazis. Thirty years later, Begin became Prime Minister of Israel. A century later, in Berlin, philosopher Susan Neiman, who heads a think tank named after Einstein, spoke at the opening of a convention titled “Misappropriation of Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right. “He warned that he could face retaliation if he questioned the way Germany now exercises its culture of remembrance. Neiman is an Israeli citizen and a specialist in memory and morality. One of his books is titled “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. “Neiman said the culture of reminiscence has become “out of control. “
Anti-B. D. S. In Germany, the solution, for example, had a clear paralyzing effect on the country’s cultural sphere. The city of Aachen has recovered a prize of ten thousand euros that it had awarded to the Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad; The city of Dortmund and the jury of the Nelly Sachs prize, worth fifteen thousand euros, also canceled the honor they had awarded to the Anglo-Pakistani editor Kamila Shamsie. Cameroonian political philosopher Achille Mbembe has had his invitation to a primary festival questioned after the federal anti-Semitism commissioner accused him of promoting B. D. S. and “putting the Holocaust in perspective. ” (Mbembe said he was not linked to the boycott movement; the festival itself was canceled due to COVID). The director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Peter Schäfer, resigned in 2019 after being accused of B. D. S. Actually, he didn’t. He organized the boycott movement, but the museum posted a link on Twitter to a newspaper article criticizing the solution. Benjamin Netanyahu’s workplace also asked Merkel to cut investment for the museum because, in the Israeli prime minister’s view, his exhibit on Jerusalem paid too much attention to the city’s Muslims. (Germany’s BDS solution might be unique in its impact, but not its content: Most US states now have laws that equate boycotts with anti-Semitism and deny public investment to Americans and institutions that surround it).
After the “We Need to Talk” symposium was canceled, Breitz and Rothberg regrouped and proposed a symposium called “We Still Need to Talk. ” The list of speakers was impeccable. A government entity vetted everyone and agreed to fund the meeting. It was scheduled for early December. Then Hamas attacked Israel. “We knew that after this, it would be incredibly risky for any German politician to be associated with an event involving Palestinians or the word ‘apartheid,'” Breitz said. On October 17, Breitz learned that the investment had been withdrawn. Meanwhile, across Germany, police were cracking down on protests calling for a ceasefire in Gaza or apparent aid for the Palestinians. Instead of a symposium, Breitz and several others organized a demonstration. They called it “We Still Need to Talk. ” About an hour after the demonstration began, police moved quietly through the crowd to confiscate a cardboard sign that read “From the river to the sea, we call for equality. ” The user who brought the poster was an Israeli Jewish woman.
Since then, the “Assume the old responsibility” proposal remains pending in the committee. However, the performative war against antisemitism has continued to intensify. In November, plans for Documenta, one of the art world’s most important exhibitions, were hit after the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper unearthed a petition signed in 2019 by a member of the art organizing committee, Ranjit Hoskote. Written to protest a planned event on Zionism and Hindutva in Mumbai, Hoskote’s hometown, it denounced Zionism as “a racist ideology that calls for an apartheid colonial state where non-Jews have unequal rights and, in practice, is based on the precept of apartheid. ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported on it under the headline “Antisemitism”. Hoskote resigned and the rest of the committee followed suit. A week later, Breitz learned in a newspaper that a museum in the Saarland had canceled one of his exhibitions, scheduled for 2024, “due to the artist’s media policy in relation to his questionable statements in the context of the action of Hamas: war of aggression against the State of Israel.
Last November, I left Berlin for Kiev, traveling on exercise via Poland and then Ukraine. This is a clever position to say a few things about my relationship with the Jewish history of those lands. Many American Jews travel to Poland to stop at the small nothing left or not of the old Jewish quarters, eat dishes reconstructed from recipes left by missing families, and take guided tours of Jewish history, Jewish ghettos, and Nazi concentration camps. I’m closer to that story. I grew up in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, in the ever-present shadow of the Holocaust, because only part of my family circle had survived and because Soviet censors suppressed any public mention of it. . When, around the age of nine, I learned that Nazi war criminals were still at large, I stopped sleeping. I imagined one of them climbing onto the fifth-floor balcony to grab me.
During the summers, our cousin Anna and her children visited us from Warsaw. His parents had decided to commit suicide in order to form the Warsaw ghetto. Anna’s father threw himself in front of a train. Anna’s mother tied two-year-old Anna around her waist with a shawl and jumped into a river. They were pulled out of the water through a pole and survived the war by hiding in the field. I knew the story, but I wasn’t allowed to communicate it. Anna was an adult when she learned I was a Holocaust survivor and waited to tell her own children, who were about my age. The first time I went to Poland, in the 90s, was to investigate the fate of my great-grandfather, who spent almost three years in the Bialystok ghetto before being murdered in MajdanekArray.
The wars of remembrance of the Holocaust in Poland ran parallel to those in Germany. The concepts being debated in the two countries are different, but a constant feature is the involvement of right-wing politicians in collaboration with the State of Israel. As in Germany, the 1990s and 2000s were marked by ambitious memorization efforts, both nationally and locally, that broke the silence of the Soviet years. Poles have built museums and memorials commemorating the Jews killed in the Holocaust — which left some of its victims in Nazi-occupied Poland — and the Jewish culture that disappeared with them. Then came the reaction. This coincided with the entry into force of the Law and Justice Party, an illiberal right-wing party, in 2015. Poles were now looking for an edition of history in which they would be victims of the Nazi profession along with the Jews, whom they sought to protect from the Nazis. Array
This is not true: cases of Poles risking their lives to save Jews from the Germans, as in the case of my cousin Anna, were incredibly rare, while, conversely, entire communities or structures of the Polish state in question, such as the Polish state, were incredibly rare. Police or city offices, which committed massacres of Jews, were commonplace. But historians who have studied the role of Poles in the Holocaust have come under attack. Polish Princeton historian Jan Tomasz Gross was interrogated and threatened with prosecution for writing that. The Poles killed more Polish Jews than Germans. The Polish government persecuted him even after his retirement. The government dismissed Dariusz Stola, director of POLIN, the avant-garde museum of Polish Jewish history in Warsaw. Historians Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking have been put on trial for writing that the mayor of a Polish village collaborated in the Holocaust.
When I wrote about the Grabowski and Engleking case, I received some of the scariest death threats of my life. (I’ve received death threats; most are forgettable. ) One, sent to a painting email address, read: “If you continue to write lies about Poland and Poles, I will hand you those bullets in your body. “There are five in each kneecap, so you don’t walk anymore. But if you continue to spread your Jewish hatred, I’ll shove the next five bullets into your pussy. The third step, you won’t notice. But don’t worry. , I probably won’t pick you up next week or 8 weeks from now, I’ll be back when you’ve forgotten this email, maybe five years from now. You’re on my list. The attachment was a photo of two glowing balls in the palm of your hand. The Auschwitz-Birkenau National Museum, run by a government appointee, condemned my article on Twitter, as did the proceedings of the World Jewish Congress. A few months later, an invitation to speak at a university fell through because, according to the university, it gave the impression that he might be anti-Semitic.
Throughout Poland’s Holocaust remembrance wars, Israel has maintained friendly relations with Poland. In 2018, Netanyahu and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki issued a joint statement against “actions aimed at blaming Poland or the Polish country as a whole for the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators from other countries. “He claimed, erroneously, that “the structures of the Polish underground state overseen through the Polish government-in-exile have created a mechanism of systematic aid and aid to the Jewish people. “Netanyahu was building alliances with intolerant governments in Central European countries, such as Poland and Hungary, to prevent an anti-occupation consensus from solidifying within the European Union. To do this, he was willing to lie about the Holocaust.
Every year, tens of thousands of Israeli teenagers stop at the Auschwitz museum before graduating from top school (though last year those trips were canceled due to security considerations and the Polish government’s growing insistence that Polish involvement in the Holocaust be ruled out). ). It’s a hard-hitting identity-building adventure that comes just a year or two before young Israelis sign up for the army. Noam Chayut, founder of Breaking the Silence, an occupation advocacy organization in Israel, wrote about his own major school trip: that he took a stand in the late 1990s: “Today, in Poland, as a first-rate adolescent student, I began to feel belonging, self-love, strength and pride, as well as a preference to contribute, To live and be strong, so strong that no one would ever try to hurt me.
Chayut conveyed this sentiment to the IDF, which assigned him to the occupied West Bank. One day he posted asset seizure notices. A youth organization was playing nearby. Chayut gave what he considered a kind, non-threatening smile at a petite woman. The rest of the young men fled, but the young woman remained paralyzed, terrified, until she too fled. Later, when Chayut published an e-book about the transformation brought about by this encounter, he wrote that he did not know why this woman was: “After all, there was also the boy chained in the jeep and the woman whose circle of relatives had told us. decomposed. Late at night to keep his mother and aunt away. And there were lots of children, many of them, screaming and crying as we rummaged through their rooms and their belongings. And there was this boy from Jenin whose wall burst with a speed explosive that opened a hole a few centimeters from his head. Miraculously, he was not injured, but I am sure that his hearing and brain were seriously affected. But in the eyes of this young woman, that day, Chayut saw the reflected image of an annihilating evil, the one he had been taught about, but only between 1933 and 1945, and only where the Nazis reigned. Chayut titled his e-book “The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust. ”
Nearly 34,000 Jews were shot dead at Bathroughn Yar, a giant ravine on the outskirts of the city, in just thirty-six hours in September 1941. Tens of thousands more died there before it was over. of the war. This is what is now known as the Holocaust through bullets. Many of the countries in which those massacres took place – the Baltic states, Belarus and Ukraine – were recolonized through the Soviet Union after World War II. Activists risked their freedom to keep alive the memory of those tragedies, gather testimonies and names, and, where possible, cover up and protect the sites themselves. After the fall of the Soviet Union, commemorative projects accompanied efforts to join the European Union. “The popularity of the Holocaust is our gateway to a new Europe,” historian Tony Judt wrote in his 2005 book, “Postwar. “
In the Rumbula forest, outside of Riga, for example, where some twenty-five thousand Jews were murdered in 1941, a memorial was unveiled in 2002, two years before Latvia was admitted to the E.U. A serious effort to commemorate Babyn Yar coalesced after the 2014 revolution that set Ukraine on an aspirational path to the E.U. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, in February, 2022, several smaller structures had been completed and ambitious plans for a larger museum complex were in place. With the invasion, construction halted. One week into the full-scale war, a Russian missile hit directly next to the memorial complex, killing at least four people. Since then, some of the people associated with the project have reconstituted themselves as a team of war-crimes investigators.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been waging a serious crusade to win Israel’s support for Ukraine. In March 2022, he delivered a speech to the Knesset, in which he did not emphasize his own Jewish heritage, but focused on the ancient and inextricable connection between Jews and Ukrainians. He drew unmistakable parallels between Putin’s regime and the Nazi Party. He even claimed that 80 years ago, the Ukrainians kept the Jews. (As with Poland, any claim that such aid was widespread is false. )But what he looked like for the right wing in Poland. . . The wing government did not work for Ukraine’s pro-European president. Israel has not provided Ukraine with the help it has been asking for in its war against Russia, a country that blatantly attacks Hamas and Hezbollah.
Yet, before and after the October 7 attack, the word I heard in Ukraine, perhaps more than any other, was: “We will have to be like Israel. “Ordinary politicians, journalists, intellectuals and Ukrainians identify with Israel’s story of itself. , that of a small but tough island of democracy, resisting the enemies that surround it. Some left-wing Ukrainian intellectuals have argued that Ukraine, which is waging an anti-colonial war against an occupying power, deserves to see itself reflected in Palestine, not Israel. These voices are marginal and mostly belong to young Ukrainians who are reading or have studied abroad. After the Hamas attack, Zelensky sought to run to Israel to show his aid and unity between Israel and Ukraine. The Israeli government seems to have other ideas: the stopover did not take place.
While Ukraine has been unsuccessfully trying to get Israel to acknowledge that Russia’s invasion resembles Nazi Germany’s genocidal aggression, Moscow has built a propaganda universe around portraying Zelensky’s government, the Ukrainian military, and the Ukrainian people as Nazis. The Second World War is the central event of Russia’s historical myth. During Vladimir Putin’s reign, as the last of the people who lived through the war have been dying, commemorative events have turned into carnivals that celebrate Russian victimhood. The U.S.S.R. lost at least twenty-seven million people in that war, a disproportionate number of them Ukrainians. The Soviet Union and Russia have fought in wars almost continuously since 1945, but the word “war” is still synonymous with the Second World War and the word “enemy” is used interchangeably with “fascist” and “Nazi.” This made it that much easier for Putin, in declaring a new war, to brand Ukrainians as Nazis.
Netanyahu compared Hamas’ killings at the music festival to the Holocaust through bullets. This comparison, which was echoed and disseminated through world leaders, adding President Biden, serves to bolster Israel’s arguments for causing collective punishment to the other Gazans. Similarly, when Putin speaks of a “Nazi” or “fascist,” he means that the Ukrainian government is so harmful that Russia has the right to bomb, besiege Ukrainian cities, and kill Ukrainian civilians. Of course, there are significant differences: Russia’s claims that Ukraine was the first to attack it and its description of the Ukrainian government as fascist is false; Hamas, on the other hand, is a tyrannical force that has attacked Israel and committed atrocities that we still fully understand. But do those differences matter when it comes to killing children?
In the early weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as its troops occupied Kyiv’s western suburbs, the director of Kyiv’s World War II Museum, Yurii Savchuk, lived in the museum and redesigned the main exhibition. A day after the Ukrainian army expelled the Russians from the Kyiv region, met with the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and gave him permission to start collecting items. Savchuk and his team traveled to Bucha, Irpin, and other cities that had just been “de-occupied,” as Ukrainians used to say, and I interviewed others who had not yet told their stories. “This is before the exhumations and reburials,” Savchuk told me. “We have noticed the true face of The War, with all its emotions. Fear, terror in the air and we absorbed it into the air.
In May 2022, the museum opened a new exhibition titled “Ukraine – Crucifixion. ” It begins with an exhibition of Russian soldiers’ boots that Savchuk’s team had collected. It’s just the opposite: the Auschwitz Museum and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D. C. They have displayed hundreds, if not thousands, of shoes that belonged to Holocaust victims. They reflect the magnitude of the losses, even if they only show a small part. The exhibition in kyiv shows the magnitude of the threat. The boots are arranged on the museum floor in the shape of a five-pointed star, a symbol of the Red Army that has become as sinister in Ukraine as the swastika. In September, kyiv removed the five-pointed stars from a World War II monument in what was once called Victory Square; The name was changed because the very word “Victory” evokes the birthday celebration in Russia of what is still called the Great Patriotic War. The city also replaced the monument’s dates from “1941-1945” – the years of the war between the Soviet Union and Germany – with “1939-1945. ” Memory correction one monument at a time.
In 1954, an Israeli court heard a libel case involving a Hungarian Jew named Israel Kastner. A decade earlier, when Germany occupied Hungary and belatedly rushed to implement the mass murder of its Jews, Kastner, as a leader of the Jewish community, entered into negotiations with Adolf Eichmann himself. Kastner proposed to buy the lives of Hungary’s Jews with ten thousand trucks. When this failed, he negotiated to save sixteen hundred and eighty-five people by transporting them by chartered train to Switzerland. Hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews were loaded onto trains to death camps. A Hungarian Jewish survivor had publicly accused Kastner of having collaborated with the Germans. Kastner sued for libel and, in effect, found himself on trial. The judge concluded that Kastner had “sold his soul to the devil.”
The allegation of collaboration against Kastner was based on the accusation that he had failed to tell others that they were headed for death. His accusers claimed that if he had warned the deportees, they would have rebelled and would not have been sent to death camps like sheep to the slaughter. The trial has been read as the start of a discursive confrontation in which the Israeli right advocates preemptive violence and sees the left as deliberately helpless. At the time of the trial, Kastner was a left-wing politician; His accuser is a right-wing activist.
Seven years later, the judge who had presided over the Kastner libel trial was one of the three judges in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Here was the devil himself. The prosecution argued that Eichmann represented but one iteration of the eternal threat to the Jews. The trial helped to solidify the narrative that, to prevent annihilation, Jews should be prepared to use force preëmptively. Arendt, reporting on the trial, would have none of this. Her phrase “the banality of evil” elicited perhaps the original accusations, levelled against a Jew, of trivializing the Holocaust. She wasn’t. But she saw that Eichmann was no devil, that perhaps the devil didn’t exist. She had reasoned that there was no such thing as radical evil, that evil was always ordinary even when it was extreme—something “born in the gutter,” as she put it later, something of “utter shallowness.”
Arendt also questioned the prosecution’s account that Jews were victims, as she put it, “of an ancient precept that stretched from Pharaoh to Haman, the victim of a metaphysical precept. “other people who continually fought against the ancient Israelites, argues that each generation of Jews faces its own Amalek. I learned this story when I was a teenager; It was the first Torah lesson I ever received, given by a rabbi who gathered young people in a Rome suburb where Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union lived while they waited for their documents to enter the United States, Canada or Australia. In this tale, as the prosecutor said at the Eichmann trial, the Holocaust is a predetermined event, a component of the Jewish hitale – and only the Jewish hitale. The Jews, in this version, still have a well-justified preoccupation with annihilation. This is because they can only if they act as if annihilation is imminent.
When I first learned the legend of Amalek, it made perfect sense to me. It described my knowledge of the world; it helped me connect my experience of getting teased and beaten up to my great-grandmother’s admonitions that using household Yiddish expressions in public was dangerous, to the unfathomable injustice of my grandfather and great-grandfather and scores of other relatives being killed before I was born. I was fourteen and lonely. I knew myself and my family to be victims, and the legend of Amalek imbued my sense of victimhood with meaning and a sense of community.
Netanyahu has been brandishing Amalek in the wake of the Hamas attack. The logic of this legend, as he wields it—that Jews occupy a singular place in history and have an exclusive claim on victimhood—has bolstered the anti-antisemitism bureaucracy in Germany and the unholy alliance between Israel and the European far right. But no nation is all victim all the time or all perpetrator all the time. Just as much of Israel’s claim to impunity lies in the Jews’ perpetual victim status, many of the country’s critics have tried to excuse Hamas’s act of terrorism as a predictable response to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Conversely, in the eyes of Israel’s supporters, Palestinians in Gaza can’t be victims because Hamas attacked Israel first. The fight over one rightful claim to victimhood runs on forever.
For more than seventeen years, Gaza has been a walled, densely populated, impoverished domain from which only a small fraction of the population was allowed to leave, even for a short time; in other words, a ghetto. It’s not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or a downtown ghetto in America, but similar to a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months following Hamas’ attack on Israel, all Gaza citizens suffered slightly interrupted attacks by Israeli forces. Thousands of others died. On average, a child dies every ten minutes in Gaza. Israeli bombs hit hospitals, maternity wards and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from place to place, never being able to find a place of safety.
The term “outdoor criminal” appears to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British foreign secretary, then prime minister. Many human rights organizations documenting situations in Gaza have followed this description. But as in the Jewish ghettos of occupied Europe, there are no criminal guards: Gaza is not yet guarded by the occupiers through a local force. Presumably, the more appropriate term “ghetto” would have generated complaints for comparing the plight of besieged Gazans to that of Jews in ghettos. They have also given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza right now. The ghetto is being liquidated.
The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.
From the earliest days of Israel’s founding, the comparison between displaced Palestinians and displaced Jews was presented, only to be dismissed. In 1948, the year the state was founded, an article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv described the terrible conditions: “old people so weak that they were on the verge of death”; “a child with two paralyzed legs”; “another child whose hands were cut off” – in which Palestinians, mainly women and children, left the village of Tantura after Israeli troops occupied it: “A woman carried her child in one arm and in the other hand He held his elderly mother. The latter, unable to keep up, screamed and begged her daughter to slow down, but the woman did not agree. Eventually, the elderly woman collapsed on the road and she may no longer be able to move. The woman tore out her hair. . . for fear of not arriving in time. And worse than that, is the agreement with the Jewish mothers and grandmothers who thus wandered the roads under the harvest of murderers. »The journalist hit himself. “There is clearly no room for such a comparison,” he wrote. “They inflicted this fate on themselves. “
Jews took up arms in 1948 to reclaim land that had been presented to them through the United Nations resolution to divide what was once British-controlled Palestine. The Palestinians, supported through neighboring Arab states, were not satisfied with Israel’s partition and declaration of Israel. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Transjordan invaded the proto-Israeli state, triggering what Israel now calls the War of Independence. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled the fighting. Those who failed to do so were expelled from their villages by Israeli forces. Most of them were never able to return. The Palestinians 1948 like the Nakba, a word that means “catastrophe” in Arabic, just as Shoah means “catastrophe” in Hebrew. The fact that the comparison is inevitable has forced many Israelis to argue that unlike the Jews, the Palestinians brought about their own catastrophe.
The day I arrived in Kyiv, someone handed me a big book. This is Stepan Bandera’s first educational study published in Ukraine. Bandera is a Ukrainian hero: he fought against the Soviet regime; Dozens of monuments have depicted it since the collapse of the USSR. He ended up in Germany after World War II, led a partisan movement from exile, and died after being poisoned by a K. G. B. Bandera, also a staunch fascist, an ideologue. that sought to build a totalitarian regime. These facts are detailed in the book, which has sold about 1,200 copies. (Many bookstores refused to offer it. ) Russia gleefully uses the Ukrainian cult of Bandera as evidence that Ukraine is a Nazi state. The Ukrainians are responding by basically whitewashing Bandera’s legacy. It is very difficult for other people to grasp the concept that someone could have been the enemy of their enemy and yet not a benevolent force. Victim and also perpetrator. Or vice versa. ♦
The Assassin Who Got Into Harvard.
Napoleon’s disputed legacies.
Why 1956 A Radical Year In The Hair Dye Box.
The legends of Lizzie Borden.
The skyscraper that could have collapsed during a storm.
The day the dinosaurs died.
Fiction through Amy Tan: “Immortal Heart”
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