This is a troubling thought which bears honest appraisal, because I
think it's a real problem.  My husband, who is technically Jewish by
matrilinear descent, has a play which speaks of the Holocaust (a
story told by an old woman who is not Jewish) which has been touring
France very successfully for the past year.   It has also toured
Morocco, where it provoked protests from Muslims. He told me that
when the  Israeli attacks started (he was in France at the time) he
had a strong wish that the play was _not_ on and would have withdrawn
the work if he could: he said he had no desire to support what was
happening to the Palestinians, and implied that recalling the
Holocaust was giving aid and comfort to the IDF and Sharon.

I guess this response is to acknowledge how deeply the Holocaust is
entwined with the history of Israel, although Zionism predates it.  I
have read analyses by Jewish historians, although I can't recall the
references, which trace the rise of Holocaust mythology and ideology
since the '60s and link its politicisation with the justification for
the Israeli State, making the tracing of this history increasingly
problematic (not that history hasn't always been problematic or
politicised).  So much of the discussion of events in the Middle East
seem to rely on the moral superiority of the victim: who is the
victim? who is the oppressor?  And this presumes that being a victim
can justify all sorts of actions, which is a highly questionable
assumption in the first place.

But my husband's response seems to me, all the same, deeply
inaccurate.  If one is against the dehumanising of human beings,
whether because they're women, or black, or Jews, or Palestinians, or
homosexual, there is no contradiction at all in both condemning the
Holocaust and condemning Jenin.  However, there is no doubt that in
the West, where democracy says in theory that all people are equal,
some people are definitely more equal than others, and this is where
complexities arise: and I don't want to skate over them either,
though to acknowledge them properly is beyond the province of email...

Best

Alison

At 11:15 AM -0500 19/4/02, KENT JOHNSON wrote:
>Indeed. For example: Let's say a contemporary Israeli poet had
>written a pro-Zionist poem in which the phrase "killer Arabs" was
>used to refer to suicide bombers... The problem would be
>immediately apparent, and any explanatory qualifications after the
>fact from the poet readily dismissed by anyone with a sense of
>ethics and reason. It's interesting, in a troubling way, that "killer
>Jews" can seem less charged with racist implications, more
>mediated by "complex history." And I'm not putting myself on a
>high horse here, because I'll sadly admit: "Killer Jews" is for me, at
>first, intuitve blush, somehow less viscerally shocking than "killer
>Arabs." That bugs me.
>
>Of course, we know that great poetry can be written by racist, anti-
>Semitic poets, witness our modernist heritage, and maybe this is a
>hidden part of the problem we are discussing. Maybe anti-
>Semitism, to some extent, is part of a certain high-culture tradition
>and so more unconsciously dispersed within the Anglo-American
>literary communtiy, say?
--

"The only real revolt is the revolt against war."
                                        Albert Camus

Alison Croggon
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