The Holocaust Is Over

By David Gordon
February 9, 2009
Courtesy Of Lew Rockwell

The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes. By Avraham Burg. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Xvii + 253 pages.

The just-ended Israeli incursion into Gaza killed over one thousand civilians. Israel claimed that the rockets that Hamas directed against Israeli territory, even though they inflicted no fatalities, made its retaliatory strike, however severe, necessary and justifiable. How did the Israeli leadership arrive at this judgment? Did a biased mindset lead it to ignore chances for peaceful compromise? Avraham Burg’s remarkable book appeared before the Israeli strike and so of course does not directly address our questions. Nevertheless, it offers indispensable background information that enables those concerned to judge the issues for themselves.

Though Burg shows himself deeply committed to his native country, he decisively breaks with the dominant ideology that its ruling elite professes, a break all the more surprising when one considers the author’s family and career. His father, Josef Burg, headed the National Religious Party and held cabinet rank in every Israeli government from 1948 until he retired from active politics in 1986. The party that Burg represented stemmed from the Mizrachi movement of religious Zionists. Early twentieth-century Zionism had been largely secular, and most of Orthodox Judaism condemned it. The standard view of Orthodoxy, in that pre-State era, held that Jewish control of the Promised Land must await the coming of the Messiah. A minority of religious Jews, though, viewed Zionism with more favor. In the years since Israel established national independence in 1948, many of the religious Zionists adopted a much more militant stance than that favored by the senior Burg. They supported an aggressively expansionist policy, with even less attention to the rights of the indigenous Palestinians than the Likud party allows.

Avraham Burg makes a decisive break not only from these militants but from mainstream Zionism altogether. He has been a leading Israeli politician, both in the Labor Party and the One Israel Party; and he was for a time Speaker of the Israeli Knesset [Parliament]. He now, though, rejects the dominant themes of Israeli politics. In his view, constant stress on the Holocaust in Israeli society has led to a dangerous "us against them" mentality. "I [Burg] am increasingly convinced that the language of my land. . . is based on a false premise. Israel accentuates and perpetuates the confrontational philosophy that is summed up in the phrase, ‘The entire world is against us.’" (p.14)

In what way does stress on the Holocaust lead to this sort of mentality? Burg responds with two connected reasons. First, because the major European powers failed adequately to interdict Hitler, Israelis holds that at the present time only they themselves can stave off annihilation. "The Shoah [Holocaust] and the establishment of our state created a mechanism that necessitates force and obsessive defense at any cost for every Jew wherever he is." (p.88) Further, faced with what they conceive to be existential threats, they maintain that they must use force, to whatever extent they deem necessary, to preempt these dangers.

Suppose that Israelis do in fact have both of these beliefs. Why is this a ground for complaint against them? Perhaps these beliefs accurately reflect reality and permit Israelis to confront their problems better than they otherwise might. This Burg vehemently denies. The events of the Second World War, he holds, have decisively shifted world opinion toward Jews. The image of universal hostility that permeates Israeli thought misconceives reality. As Burg stated in a speech to the Knesset in January 27, 2004: "I don’t feel that the threat of a second Shoah is real in any way. . . The Western World. . .has many more protections for the hated, and especially for the hated Jew, than ever before. . . . Had we had the same friendships we have today sixty years ago, with the greatest superpower, with the three major European powers – Germany, France, and Britain – not to mention other states, the Jewish world would have looked different. We have this friendship unconditionally. . . No danger of genocide exists today." (p.167)

But precisely in this image of existential struggle lies a danger. Because Israelis wrongly see themselves as facing a continual battle to the death, they adopt policies that evoke condemnation. They thus help to bring about the hostility that they wrongly think makes these very policies necessary. Even more important, these policies violate the demands of morality.

As an example, during the 1948 War of Independence, many Arabs were forced to flee their homes. Israel has since that time refused any compensation for the property seized from them. "Israeli leaders have never admitted to our responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem. From a tactical point of view, no one wanted to open the Pandora’s box of refugee recognition and compensation too soon, so as to avoid giving the Arabs anything tangible in return for nothing. . . The Shoah sensitized governments and organizations to anti-Semitism and other hate crimes. . . In contrast, we have never done anything similar to the Palestinian refugees and their descendants. We did not fulfill what we demanded of others." (pp.81, 83)

Matters were only exacerbated after the 1967 War, which brought great masses of Arabs under Israeli control. Burg quotes here the distinguished Orthodox Jewish philosopher and scientist Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who at the time warned against both the impropriety and the folly of this policy: "The inclusion of one and a half million Arabs within Jewish jurisdiction means undermining the human and Jewish essence of the state and the destruction of the social-economic order we established. . . The Arabs will be the working people, and we will become a nation of managers, supervisors, officials, and policeman, especially undercover policemen. The state will necessarily be a police state, and its central institution will be the General Security Services. . . This will surely influence the entire spiritual and moral atmosphere in the state and in society; it will poison education." (p.68. The book has been at times carelessly edited, and Leibowitz’s name appears in two different spellings. For his political and religious views, see his Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State [Harvard University Press, 1992])

Leibowitz’s wise words had no effect on policy, owing to the Holocaust mentality that crowds out rational consideration of alternatives to force. This mentality by no means was confined to the Israeli Right. "Speaking shortly after the Six Day [1967] War, one of Israel’s most remarkable doves, the foreign minister Abba Eban, brilliantly argued that Israel must never return to its prewar borders. He coined a term that is still used today, defining Israel’s boundaries, the 1949 Armistice Line, as ‘Auschwitz borders,’ – tight boundaries that compelled Israel to act." (p.22)

Again, in the incursion into Lebanon in 1982, images of the Holocaust controlled Israeli policy: "When we [Israelis] attacked Lebanon in 1982, launching a war of deceit, folly, and futility, Prime Minister Menahem Begin sent us out to fight Yasser Arafat, the ‘two-legged beast.’ It was the same expression he had used thirty years earlier to describe Hitler. He also liked to compare the Palestinian National Charter to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. ‘Never before in human history was such a despicable, wicked, armed organization formed – except for the Nazis,’ Begin once said, referring to the Palestinian Liberation Organization." (p.57)

Constant stress on the Holocaust, Burg argues, has led Israel to replace ideals with militarism. He draws a disturbing parallel with Bismarckian Germany. "The few who shared his [Nietzsche’s] views understood that German national revival at gunpoint was a poor substitute for true national revival, such as was needed to repair a decadent regime and society. . . In such a situation the military state would sanctify flawed values, such as nationalism, belligerence, and the idolization of a national security doctrine, above all others. Militarists know no other way of functioning but to manipulate people’s prejudices against those perceived ‘others’ through social and political toughness." (p.53)

Given the presence of this militaristic mentality, does it make sense for American policy to support unconditionally all of Israel’s drives against the Arabs? Rather, we would do best to heed the wise counsel of Ron Paul, one of only five Congressmen to vote against a resolution of support for the Gaza invasion: America should stay out of the politics of the Middle East altogether.

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and editor of its Mises Review. He is also the author of The Essential Rothbard. See also his Books on Liberty.

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