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Jewish Chronicle, UK
May 3 2014
We must not be indifferent to others suffering
By Ronnie Landau, May 3, 2014
Follow The JC on Twitter
Several years ago, I received a disturbing telephone call concerning
my 14 year-old step-daughter. At the time she was spending several
months in a children's village in northern Israel. The caller, who was
Israeli-born, informed me that his son was a participant in the same
scheme. Did I know, he asked, that a bus carrying some of the children
had been stoned [sic] as it passed a neighbouring Arab village?
Ishould be aware that there were Arabs working in the kitchens in our
children's village; that they had knives close to hand (hardly
surprising, I thought, in a kitchen!); and that they came from the
same village which had been responsible for the stone-throwing
incident.
While expressing gratitude for this information about the bus, I felt
somewhat contaminated by what I took to be his racist sentiments. Was
he really suggesting that we should pressure the authorities to
dismiss the Arabs from their posts?
Surely, I started to reason with him, the whole infrastructure of
Israeli society, not to mention the battered peace process, could
collapse if Arabs were continually stereotyped and shut out from the
Israeli economy?
"You don't know the Arab mentality", he kept insisting. He then
enumerated various random acts of violence by Israeli Arabs towards
Israeli Jews they had lived peacefully beside for years.
His bigoted views were not new to me, the emotive parental context of
our conversation was. And my heart sank. I explained that I was a
Holocaust historian and that I was appalled by his deeply prejudiced
views. His rejoinder was that as a writer on the Holocaust it was I
who should be ashamed of my position, defending the "enemies of the
Jews" in this fashion.
My second anecdote: in 1988, during Robert and Elizabeth Maxwell's
Remembering for the Future conference on the Holocaust at Oxford
University, a Turkish "scholar" tried to inflict on the workshop I was
attending an "academic" denial that genocide against the Armenian
people had taken place some 73 years previously (conservative
estimates range between 750,000 and 1,250,000 Armenians massacred by
the Turks, against the camouflage of a world war --sounds familiar?).
He was refused permission to speak which, ironically, outraged several
of the liberally-minded academics present, myself included. It was, as
we discovered later, only the bravery of the American scholar who
chaired the seminar which had scuppered an unconscionable attempt by
Robert Maxwell to foist this Turkish apologist for genocide onto his
own conference.
Maxwell, the billionaire media entrepreneur, it was rumoured, had been
engaged in high-level business deals with the Turkish government.
The Turkish government has elsewhere, of course, been much more
successful, especially within the United States Congress, at
sustaining this denial of the Armenian Holocaust. "Who remembers the
Armenians?" Hitler had asked of his generals in August 1939, preparing
them for, and seeking to exonerate them of, the "necessary" cruelty
and barbarism that would follow Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. To
judge from the relative neglect of other people's experience of
genocide by Holocaust museums, educational curricula and remembrance
events, it would seem almost nobody does -- except often as a token
gesture.
I feel it is important to locate the Holocaust, for all its palpable
uniqueness, within the larger picture of 20th-century genocide, of
which the Armenian catastrophe was one of the deadliest and, like the
Nazi Holocaust, "ideological"in nature -- and, as the Hitler quote
clearly shows, the world's indifference to this terrible event
provided an instructive precedent for the Nazi death machine.
In the 1970s the philosopher Emil Fackenheim coined his famous 614th
Commandment: Jews in the postwar world must not hand Hitler a
posthumous victory.
Whatever Fackenheim's original intention may have been, I would
interpret this "commandment" in two very different ways, which I feel
sum up a central dilemma facing us all. On the one hand, Jews must do
everything in their power to survive and not surrender, either to the
forces of antisemitism, anti-Zionism or wholesale assimilation into
their host societies; on the other hand, Jews must not themselves
become brutalised and over-zealous in their own exercise of political
and military power -- or indifferent to the suffering of others.
The third edition of Ronnie Landau's work, The Nazi Holocaust: Its
History And Meaning, will be published by IB Tauris in September
http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/117790/we-must-not-be-indifferent-others-suffering
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
May 3 2014
We must not be indifferent to others suffering
By Ronnie Landau, May 3, 2014
Follow The JC on Twitter
Several years ago, I received a disturbing telephone call concerning
my 14 year-old step-daughter. At the time she was spending several
months in a children's village in northern Israel. The caller, who was
Israeli-born, informed me that his son was a participant in the same
scheme. Did I know, he asked, that a bus carrying some of the children
had been stoned [sic] as it passed a neighbouring Arab village?
Ishould be aware that there were Arabs working in the kitchens in our
children's village; that they had knives close to hand (hardly
surprising, I thought, in a kitchen!); and that they came from the
same village which had been responsible for the stone-throwing
incident.
While expressing gratitude for this information about the bus, I felt
somewhat contaminated by what I took to be his racist sentiments. Was
he really suggesting that we should pressure the authorities to
dismiss the Arabs from their posts?
Surely, I started to reason with him, the whole infrastructure of
Israeli society, not to mention the battered peace process, could
collapse if Arabs were continually stereotyped and shut out from the
Israeli economy?
"You don't know the Arab mentality", he kept insisting. He then
enumerated various random acts of violence by Israeli Arabs towards
Israeli Jews they had lived peacefully beside for years.
His bigoted views were not new to me, the emotive parental context of
our conversation was. And my heart sank. I explained that I was a
Holocaust historian and that I was appalled by his deeply prejudiced
views. His rejoinder was that as a writer on the Holocaust it was I
who should be ashamed of my position, defending the "enemies of the
Jews" in this fashion.
My second anecdote: in 1988, during Robert and Elizabeth Maxwell's
Remembering for the Future conference on the Holocaust at Oxford
University, a Turkish "scholar" tried to inflict on the workshop I was
attending an "academic" denial that genocide against the Armenian
people had taken place some 73 years previously (conservative
estimates range between 750,000 and 1,250,000 Armenians massacred by
the Turks, against the camouflage of a world war --sounds familiar?).
He was refused permission to speak which, ironically, outraged several
of the liberally-minded academics present, myself included. It was, as
we discovered later, only the bravery of the American scholar who
chaired the seminar which had scuppered an unconscionable attempt by
Robert Maxwell to foist this Turkish apologist for genocide onto his
own conference.
Maxwell, the billionaire media entrepreneur, it was rumoured, had been
engaged in high-level business deals with the Turkish government.
The Turkish government has elsewhere, of course, been much more
successful, especially within the United States Congress, at
sustaining this denial of the Armenian Holocaust. "Who remembers the
Armenians?" Hitler had asked of his generals in August 1939, preparing
them for, and seeking to exonerate them of, the "necessary" cruelty
and barbarism that would follow Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. To
judge from the relative neglect of other people's experience of
genocide by Holocaust museums, educational curricula and remembrance
events, it would seem almost nobody does -- except often as a token
gesture.
I feel it is important to locate the Holocaust, for all its palpable
uniqueness, within the larger picture of 20th-century genocide, of
which the Armenian catastrophe was one of the deadliest and, like the
Nazi Holocaust, "ideological"in nature -- and, as the Hitler quote
clearly shows, the world's indifference to this terrible event
provided an instructive precedent for the Nazi death machine.
In the 1970s the philosopher Emil Fackenheim coined his famous 614th
Commandment: Jews in the postwar world must not hand Hitler a
posthumous victory.
Whatever Fackenheim's original intention may have been, I would
interpret this "commandment" in two very different ways, which I feel
sum up a central dilemma facing us all. On the one hand, Jews must do
everything in their power to survive and not surrender, either to the
forces of antisemitism, anti-Zionism or wholesale assimilation into
their host societies; on the other hand, Jews must not themselves
become brutalised and over-zealous in their own exercise of political
and military power -- or indifferent to the suffering of others.
The third edition of Ronnie Landau's work, The Nazi Holocaust: Its
History And Meaning, will be published by IB Tauris in September
http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/117790/we-must-not-be-indifferent-others-suffering
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress