Israel does not always treat the Holocaust appropriately. Sometimes we manipulate ourselves. We turn those anxieties into a worldview and system of values. We idealize the victims, whom we often refer to as the “Holocaust martyrs.” Among our youth, we create a one-dimensional identification between Jewish experience in the Holocaust and the overall meaning of being Jewish. Tens of thousands of high school students, on the verge of their enlistment in the army, make pilgrimages to Auschwitz to discover their “roots.” For nonreligious young Jews, the Holocaust often becomes the central element in their national identity, taking up a bit of the space filled in others by religious identity. All these distortions still exist, but today’s children at least do not have to grow up with the same taboos that my generation had. That suffocating silence, from which terrifying whispers sometimes escaped, the screams of our parents’ nightmares, the rumors that our imagination could not comprehend — all were part of our lives.
IV
Israelis have no choice but to confront the Holocaust each day. I think it’s easier for Germans to ignore it. A young German can choose to take an interest, to purposely address the question of his parents’ actions. On the face of it, one can understand the natural desire many Germans have to rid themselves of the burden of “the bad times” and of the sense that all Germans will forever have to pay the price of their parents’ crimes. Perhaps this is the source of the somewhat embarrassing haste with which certain German politicians seek a kind of “instant reconciliation.”
But the burden that became unbearable during that war cannot be quickly set aside, and will certainly not disappear as a result of silence and by being ignored. It requires a very long process of identity construction and education. Today’s neo-Nazis demonstrate, in their dynamism and their drawing power, that the burden is still palpable. The German regime’s (ambivalent?) tolerance of the neo-Nazis gives the impression that, in many ways, Germany is still only at the very beginning of a real discussion of its character.
I’m trying to write in a measured and rational way, but I feel how my emotions are suddenly surging. I want to talk about the simple, concrete things that still hurt me, fifty years later. There are the Holocaust survivors who, during the Gulf War, dispersed their families to different parts of Israel “so that at least someone will survive.” I myself was only able, only brave enough to visit Germany after my name had appeared on a book cover — believing that this way no one could kill me anonymously, as a number, because now I had a first and last name in Germany. I want to write about the wild, primal fear that overcame me when the two Germanys united — and I was lying in my bed in a hotel in Mainz, listening to the cheering crowds. I need to ponder over that split second of hesitation and awkwardness I hear in the voices of Germans when they say the word “Jew,” as if the word is still prohibited. There’s also the walk I always take when I visit Munich, through the beautiful English Garden (Englischer Garten). I never walk there alone. I always take companions with me — Walter Benjamin, Kurt Tucholsky, Else Lasker-Schüler, Ernst Lubitsch, Franz Werfel, Alfred Döblin, Nelly Sachs, people who were once in Munich and others who never were. On these walks I always take a book written by one of them, or a memory of a poem they wrote or a film they made. We walk together and talk, and I constantly wonder, What is it like to feel like a hunted animal in the midst of all this beauty?
There are so many things to say, but I feel that in another moment I might fall into the insult trap that I mentioned before, so I must be careful. Fifty years is too short a period for the wound to heal. It’s too early to sum up, and there’s no urgent need to speak about reconciliation. After all, there is no feud between Israelis and Germans today. On the contrary, there are widespread ties in almost every area, a growing closeness and mutual curiosity. But at the tragic points of contact, the wound is still gaping. No person has the moral authority to cover it with a false bandage of ceremonies and declarations. No person has a right to decide on the date on which the scab begins to form, when the responsibility reaches its expiration date. We still have a long way to go.
Yes, Prime Minister
April 1995
After the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians moved on two separate tracks, one toward interim Palestinian self-government and another toward a permanent settlement. The interim track culminated with the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, known as Oslo II, which Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat signed on September 28, 1995. This agreement divided the West Bank and Gaza into three zones, each with distinctive borders and rules for administrative and security controls. Area A, including nearly all of the Gaza strip and six West Bank cities, was to be under exclusive Palestinian control; Area B was to include 450 Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank, where the Palestinians would have civilian control and Israel would retain responsibility for security; Area C was to include mostly unpopulated areas of the West Bank and would be controlled exclusively by Israel.
During a meeting last week with Palestinian intellectuals, an Israeli asked, “You, our Palestinian colleagues, know just as well as we do that the current difficult spot in the peace process is only a passing moment, and that in the end, after extended negotiations, you will receive what you want — a sovereign Palestinian state and separation of the two nations from each other. Why, then, don’t we hear more of your voices within your society? Why don’t you say this to your compatriots? It’s precisely you who are supposed to be the farsighted vanguard, which can point out the advantages and hopes that the process offers. Why are you, of all people, silent?”
“Because we ourselves no longer believe very much in the process, as we once did” was the reply. “Because we look around us each day and see that large-scale land expropriations still continue, that roads are being paved around each city and village, that the settlements are being enlarged through massive construction projects. We are beginning to feel that, once again, just as in every contact we’ve had with the Israelis, you will defeat us, that you will mislead us; only this time it will happen in such a devious and oppressive way that we will have no chance at all of recovering from it.”
This dialogue will not reveal anything new to people who are in contact with the Palestinians. But it may well be that most of the Israeli public, especially that part of it which supports the peace process, is not sufficiently aware of these sentiments. This response from our Palestinian colleagues, all of whom support peace with Israel and have paid a heavy personal price as a result, requires the members of the Israeli peace camp to make an honest assessment of the (horrific) possibility that we are deluding ourselves.