Don’t play the Nazi card
By Jonathan Freedland, May 26,
2016
If there’s one good thing to
have come out of the debate over Labour and antisemitism, it might be the
emerging consensus that, when discussing the Middle East, it’s best to leave
Hitler out of it. And not just the Middle East. Boris Johnson was widely mocked
for likening the EU to Hitler’s ambitions for Europe, leaving open the
possibility that Sadiq Khan might become the first ever London mayor not to
make crass references to the Führer.
Still, the casual Hitler
comparison is especially toxic when discussing Jews and Israel. It’s not just
that the charge cannot be sustained - no matter how badly you feel Israel is
behaving, it is not guilty of the crimes of the Third Reich - it’s also
designed to hurt Jews in their most sensitive spot. This is why the
near-universal condemnation of Ken Livingstone’s declaration that Hitler was a
supporter of Zionism is heartening: it suggests people understand how cruel it
is to put Jews on the same moral plane as their most murderous persecutors,
whether by accusing them of committing an equal horror or suggesting, as
Livingstone did, that they colluded with their killers as ideological comrades.
I wish I could say I was
blameless on this score, but I can’t. Sixteen years ago, I was appalled by a
short book called The Holocaust Industry by Norman Finkelstein. I wrote that it
echoed arguments made by David Irving, who had just lost his notorious libel
action and had been branded by the High Court as nothing more than a “pro-Nazi
polemicist”. Finkelstein’s book praised Irving as having made an “indispensable”
contribution to our understanding of the last war. In the final line of the
piece I wrote that Finkelstein’s outlook took “him closer to the people who
created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it.”
I now regret writing that
sentence. Finkelstein is a child of Holocaust survivors but even if he were
not, I should not have written those words. If I could withdraw them, I would.
Implicitly, I had made the comparison - of Jews and Nazis - that I believe
should be off-limits.
And
yet, drawing that boundary is not as easy or absolute as we might like. Not
long after Livingstone’s outburst, Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, Deputy Chief of Staff
of the Israeli military, told a Yom Hashoah ceremony he saw troubling signs in
Israel of the “horrific processes” - of “intolerance, violence and… moral
degradation” - that had unfolded in Germany in the 1930s. Last Friday, former
Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared that Israel had been “infected by the seeds
of fascism”.
Naturally, some of Livingstone’s
initial defenders seized on those remarks to suggest their man was in the
clear: if these Israelis could say that, why couldn’t he say what he liked?
But the sentiments were
completely different. Neither Golan nor Barak were twisting the historical
record to suggest Nazis and Zionists were partners in a shared enterprise, as
Livingstone had done. They were sounding the alarm - the ultimate alarm - about
what’s happening in their country today.
And that’s the key difference: intention.
Golan and Barak were not engaged in scoring points. They were not trying
to inflict hurt on Jews, by poking into their deepest wound. They were not
taking gleeful pleasure in Jewish anguish. On the contrary, they invoked the
precedent of the 1930s because they wanted to warn the country they love - and
which they have served - off the dangerous path they fear it is taking. It’s
not a parallel I would want to invoke. But if it’s ever to have a legitimate
use, then used this way, by these people, is probably it.
Jonathan Freedland is a
columnist for The Guardian
Finkelstein comment: The
imitable Jonathan Freedland recently wrote a column in the Jewish Chronicle in
which I was mentioned in passing (http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/columnists/158642/dont-play-nazi-card).
I didn’t actually read the column. If forced to choose, I’d rather watch
grass grow or paint dry than read Freedland. But some readers were
offended by this inveterate bore’s inveterate lies. Below I post a
letter/correction that the Jewish Chronicle refused to run.
To the editor
Mr Freedland’s long overdue
apology adds insult to original injury. Norman Finkelstein’s book The
Holocaust Industry, does not praise David Irving for making an ‘indispensable
contribution to our understanding of the the last war’. Rather it
cites Gordon Craig in the NY Review of Books as the
author of this statement, and goes on to observe that respected historians
such as Arno Mayer and Raul
Hilberg had referenceed Holocaust deniers in their
scholarly publications. As it happens, I was involved in publishing and
promoting The Holocaust Industry. Having negotiated the
serialisation in the Guardian, I was shocked to see the paper (in the
person of Mr Freedland) subsequently denounce it as ‘elaborate conspiracy
theory’, and Finkelstein as ’closer to the people who
created the Holocaust than to those who suffered in it’. If Mr Freedland have joined Finkelstein on his
book tour of the UK, he would have witnessed at the end of the
week Finkelstein debate Shimon Samuels from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in the St Johns Wood synagogue. JD Bindenagel, US
Ambassador and Special Envoy on
Holocaust Issues to President Clinton had been
flown over, along with his elderly mother. The event closed when she stood, and
interrupted Mr Samuels, with the demand that he acknowledge the truth
of Finkelstein’s argument. Samuels was left speechless. Unable
to make a serious apology, it would perhaps be more prudent if
Freedland, following Samuels, stayed silent, rather than continue to expose
himself as a fraud and malicious repeater of lies.
Yours sincerely
Gavin Everall
No comments:
Post a Comment