HOWARD EPSTEIN: GUILT FOR THE HOLOCAUST? BLAME THE JEWS!
In a brilliantly incisive review of anti-Semitism, with particular reference to the Holocaust, British novelist, Howard Jacobson, wrote in 2014 a short but telling work of non-fiction: When Will Jews Be Forgiven The Holocaust? Jacobson starts by quoting contemporary British philosopher, John Gray, who asks “the terrible question”:-
‘It has long been known that those who perform great acts of kindness are rarely forgiven. The same is true of those who suffer irreparable wrongs. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust?’
Jacobson posits that the burden of guilt and the burden of obligation weigh equally heavily, and that “philosophers and novelists alike note that irritation with this burden can quickly turn to resentment”. Accordingly, he points out, there are those who suggest that Jews should take care not to present themselves as victims. Those who are not Jewish are afraid that they will be identified by the victims (Jews) with those who perpetrated it (Nazis) – and will resent such association. Put another way, Jews are an embarrassment to non-Jews (who know how little was done to save the Jews), and the less enlightened (as we shall call them with some euphemism) wish that Hitler had indeed “finished the job”, so that there would be no Jews around as a constant reminder of man’s inhumanity to man.
The solution to Jacobson’s problem is, however, not as easy to achieve as even the most rabid anti-Semite might wish. Even in those places where Jews and Jewish life had been undetectable for centuries, people nevertheless classified themselves by comparison with Jewish characteristics (real or assumed) in an effort to persuade themselves that they were better than the Jews (absent though they were). In this way, and others, non-Jewish consciousness has never been exactly, shall we say, Jüdenrein.
In his masterful 2013 work on anti-Semitism, entitled Anti-Judaism – The History of a Way of Thinking, Professor David Nirenberg of Chicago 
University demonstrates over and again how, from ancient Egypt down to the present day, Jews never needed to be present in a society for it to generate words and actions harmful to Jews and Jewish interests. I shall restrict myself to three of Nirenberg’s tome-laden examples:-
- after the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the Inquisition was launched to root out those who might be secretly hiding their Jewishness;
- Shakespeare managed to write a most subtle and sophisticated demolition of the Jewish character (as he saw it) in the Merchant of Venice, putatively three hundred years after the Jews had been expelled from England; and
- during the 1789 French Revolution, the National Assembly, which convened for a mere two years, managed to debate on no less than 32 occasions whether Jews could be citizens in the new France, in respect of a group whom Nirenberg describes as having been at that time “statistically non-existent”.
Given, therefore, the level of obsession with Jews when they are almost completely, or wholly, absent, what can we expect today from Britain, Europe and America, where the profile of the Jews is not only perceptible but also raised daily, willy-nilly, by news about Israel, good or bad, true or false? As we see (and suffer), far from the Jews being forgiven [for] the Holocaust, they are increasingly accused of perpetrating Nazi-style oppression on their poor, always suffering, pure-as-the-driven-snow neighbours, the Palestinians.
Increasingly in recent years, anti-Semites, posing as anti-Zionists, assert that that their argument is not with Jews themselves but only with Israeli policies, so they must left be free to criticise Israel without deserving to be labelled anti-Semites. As Jacobson points out at the end of his work:-
The statement by the distinguished English film director Ken Loach [seen here with Corbyn] that anti-Semitism is perfectly ‘understandable’ given Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians — a statement one cannot conceive so otherwise humane a man making in regard to any other form of racism — is a frightening example, but only an example, of this self-justifying reasoning.
Such reasoning, and its propagation (as was the case with Mr Hagai El-Ad of B’Tselem, who should be interned for it – see last week’s blog), omits any balance: no mention of the morally-bankrupt leadership of the benighted Palestinian people, steering them through seventy years of rejectionism, Intifadas and sporadic but incessant terrorism, visited on ordinary Jews who seek to live out their lives in the Jewish Home that is Israel (and beyond Israel’s shores, too, of course).
Now we see from the baleful and pitifully nihilistic Palestinian leadership constant attempts to delegitimize Israel in a race to the bottom: not content with denying any 
Jewish presence in Jerusalem for the 1,500 years of history that played out before the birth of Mohamed (which UNESCO voted through just over a week ago), now they propose to take legal proceedings of some sort against some British entity or other for the 1917 Balfour Declaration that (in a way) initiated the return of Jews to the land which they had not forgotten in two thousand years of exile.
Not known for an inimical approach to the Palestinians, The Guardian newspaper published last July the following anticipatory critique:-
Threatening legal action over a 99-year-old document is certainly a stretch, and it attracted more ridicule than serious analysis. It has in any case long been superseded by other decisions including UN resolutions. Still, the statement may be seen as a symptom of desperation about the Palestinian cause at a time when the peace process is non-existent and hopes for an end to occupation and a two-state solution to the conflict appear moribund.
Desperation indeed, but it should by now be crystal clear that, as little as Israel is perceived of having enthusiasm for a two state “Solution”, the only resolution that the Palestinian leadership seeks is the removal of some 6.5 million Jews – whether alive or otherwise being irrelevant to them – from what the Palestinians would like to think was always theirs. That being so, talk of meaningful negotiations is just a lot of hot air.
The Arabic for Realpolitik (read: a system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations) is السياسة الواقعية؛ سياسة الواقع but is there anyone in the Arab world, competent to read the script, who can understand and disseminate its meaning? Little sign of this has so far been discerned.
The morally- and intellectually-bankrupt Palestinian leadership is not assisted by its friends. The Baroness Tonge, a former Liberal Democrat MP hosted an event, 
organised by the Palestinian Return Centre (“PRC”), in the House of Lords at Westminster last week in order to launch a campaign for Britain to issue a formal apology to the Palestinians on the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration (on November 2, 2017, in case you would like to celebrate the day). It is hard to discover how many luminaries attended this exciting event in one of the most august venues in London, but we do know it was live-streamed on the PRC’s Facebook page; and we may read something of what transpired, for the Times of London reported the following day:-
An audience member was applauded after suggesting that Hitler only decided to kill all the Jews after he was provoked by anti-German protests led by a rabbi in Manhattan. The speaker, described on a blog as an ultra-orthodox Jew, said that in the 1930s Rabbi Stephen Wise, whom he described as a heretic, “made the boycott on Germany, the economic boycott . . . which antagonised Hitler, over the edge, to then want to systematically kill Jews wherever he could find them”…… “As opposed to . . . make Germany free of Jews, a Jew-free land. He [Hitler] became a madman after this boycott. Judea declares war on Germany. In Manhattan they had 100,000 people marching in the economic boycott in 1935, it was the same heretic rabbi who caused that.”
Tonge’s event earned her suspension from the Liberal Democrat Party and she went off in a huff, declaring her resignation from it. In any event, Tonge and her associates did the Palestinians no favour, for the documentary evidence is that Hitler was determined to kill all the Jews he could get his hands on by the time he had finished writing Mein Kampf in 1926 – ten years earlier than claimed in the House of Lords – thus, by way of example from Mein Kampf:-
“the nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated” [my emphasis]
In the meantime, the Palestinians were not advancing their case by antagonising (with a little help from UNESCO) the world’s 2.2 billion Christians who lament the murder (whether they blame the Jews or the Romans) of the Jew, Jesus Christ – the first Christian – some 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem, by denying any presence at any time there other than a Muslim one.
The Palestinian leadership now seeks, with a little help from Tonge, to rewrite modern history too, but say what you like about Balfour – and Sykes and Picot, too – the region enjoyed, as a result of their pencil and ruler efforts, almost a hundred years of peace – punctuated by the German effort to reach Palestine (rebuffed by the British at El Alamein), the Iran-Iraq war (and several other intra-Arab-world wars) and, not forgetting, the wars against Israel – before US President Barak Obama, presumably in an effort to justify his Nobel Peace Prize, threw all the Middle East jigsaw pieces up in the air at Cairo University in 2009, declaring:-
… I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights.
Thus was uprising and revolution encouraged in a region in which the main human motor has always been (as Professor Bernard Lewis has pointed out in many magisterial works) tribalism.
We see the results of Obama’s intervention most egregiously in what used to be Syria: inter-tribal violence on a scale not seen for centuries, if ever. The 500,000 so far killed there cannot, and the 11.5 million displaced (internally and externally) are unlikely to have the energy for it, but Tonge and her fellow-travellers might like to reflect that it was Sykes and Picot – and Balfour – who protected the Arabs from themselves for a hundred years. Tribalism had been suppressed by artificially-created nation-states – until Obama came along.
Perhaps Arab opprobrium should be directed, not at some long-departed European politicians and administrators, but at a contemporary American one.
© 2016 Howard Epstein
Howard Epstein is a political commentator and the author of Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism: America in the Twenty-First Century, recently published by Amazon and on Kindle. He writes:-
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