HAVING been so critical last week of what the Israelis have done in Lebanon, I might in fairness suggest now that it was not simply the Hizbullah Katyushas which prompted that invasion. An entire burden of history was in fact being leashed, a burden the Israeli people carry with them almost as integrally as they bear their genes, and which maybe all Jews of European ancestry must carry, too. Those outside that Semitic lineage can only guess at its weight and its unremitting endurance.
We can read of the fate of the Jews and also the completely forgotten gypsies without truly knowing what that fate means. We can all empathise with suffering, but that suffering remains external to our own identity. It is not internalised. It does not become part of us. Such remote and evil events remain in a separate locus. We can read about them, study them, pore over eye witness accounts, study the transcripts of the relatively few trials of the perpetrators, and they remain abominable, atrocious, unforgivable yet they are not us. They are not of us. They do not go into our being the way that the Final Solution forms part of the identity of virtually every Jew in the world.
It is not surprising, with the Final Solution, its record and its race memory, in the constant forefront of the Jewish identity, that Jews are so sensitive about what is said about them. Least year, the Spectator magazine carried an article pointing out that Time magazine could acclaim the emergence of a new elite in the USA without identifying that what that elite had in common was its Jewishness. Uproar resulted, with accusations of anti Semitism pouring in from both Britain and the USA.
Sense of insecurity
It was not, of course, anti Semitism. The Spectator's editor and deputy editor were both Jews, and of the confident, secularised variety. The outcry was not about anti Semitism it was about insecurity. Those Jews responsible for the outcry might like to celebrate the success of their people in private but they do not want others to remark on it in public. Because to remark on the success of Jews in commerce, science, law and the arts is to expose them once again to the attentions of Nazis or some new form of anti Semitic absolutist.
It was the attentions of new anti Semitic absolutists, Hamas, which I believe prompted the invasion of southern Lebanon. Psychiatrists would call that kind of conduct displacement. Israel was unable to do anything about the threat from within its borders and was tormented by the mass slaughter of its citizens by suicide bombers. What do you do to intimidate suicide culture? There is nothing you can do nothing. Paradise awaits those who die for Islam would we all not despair with such an enemy to confront? Is it not easier to tackle a more locatable, tangible, evident enemy, the fine fellows in southern Lebanon with their Katyusha missiles, than to deal with the zealots crooning their own obsequies as they manoeuvre their car packed with explosives alongside a bus load of Tel Aviv commuters?
Who would not be demented by such deeds as those which Israelis have suffered in recent weeks? When people condemn events in southern Lebanon, Israelis complain Why do you never sympathise with us? Why are our lives so expendable? Why is there never an outcry when Jews are slaughtered as they go to work?
Perpetual Warfare
It is pointless to say It is not the same. Governments should not behave like terrorists. Response must always be measured against provocation. There must be proportion. The history of the Third Reich, the genocidal behaviour of so many of the conquered peoples towards local Jews, the condition of perpetual warfare in which Israel has found itself all of these have not left Israelis with the cool, judicious approach to threat which either peoples might feel.
Their perceptions and the perceptions of their most enthusiastic backers are informed by a personal history than the rest of us can call upon. The former British Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, wrote, after the Cana massacre and the daughter of so many innocent Lebanese, that the Israelis were noted for the pinpoint accuracy of their retaliatory strikes. "The means may be harsh, but they are just", he said of the invasion and the expulsion of half a million Lebanese from theirs homes. "You may never do evil that good may come of it, but you may use force to defend innocent life." (Such as the innocents of Cana?). "This is essentially the case with the current Israeli operation in southern Lebanon." One can only conclude from reading these words of a good and humane man that he is suffering from some cognitive disorder plus a truly colossal memory loss does Beirut, 1982, ring any bells?
There are probably good reasons for his cerebral dysfunction some six million of them. There is no point in saying it is time for Jews to put the Holocaust behind them. The Holocaust is as much part of the Jewish identity as Ireland is of the Irish identity. The Holocaust is their island home. It is what now defines them. Its shores are their shores. They know every stinking reef and every smouldering hill. It is what makes them different from us non news. We cannot call upon a history such as that history. None, save the undone gypsies, can.
Appalling Slaughter
What follows is a footnote, a tiny footnote, to that island home which Jews take with them wherever they go. Some time after the slaughter of the Jews of Mizoch, Kiev, by gunfire, and their burial in shallow pits during the brutally hot summer of 1942, 55 Sturmbannfuhrer Paul Blobel was travelling with Albert Hartl, who later reported "At one moment it was just getting dark we were driving past a long ravine. I noticed strange movements of the earth. Clumps of earth rose in the air as if by their own propulsion and there was smoke it was like a low toned volcano as if there were burning lava just beneath the earth. Blobel laughed, made a gesture with his arm, pointing back along the road and ahead, all along the ravine, the ravine of Babi Yar and then said. There lie my thirty thousand Jews.