[WCUSP] Holocaust victims would decry the slaughter ...

[Tura Campanella Cook]

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0804-27.htm

Published on Friday, August 4, 2006 by the Long Island, New York Newsday
Why Doesn't Israel Work For Peace?
Holocaust victims would decry the slaughter of innocent children during 
attacks on Hezbollah

by Silvia Tennenbaum
 
As a Jew who escaped the Holocaust by moving with my family to America 
in 1938, I turn on the BBC at night. And what I see are clouds of black 
smoke, explosions; the dead and the dying - children crying bitterly, 
cities in ruins. Only yesterday, these piles of rubble in Lebanon were 
home to thousands. Now, the cars roll out onto the highways, white 
flags attached to the windshields and doors. More than half a million 
are homeless.

The Israelis told them to leave, but then strafed one convoy from a 
helicopter. The military people exert their force without pity. They 
win their wars proudly. They are the masters of force.

Using the most modern weapons the United States can supply to search 
out the Hezbollah guerrillas, the Israeli soldiers destroy Lebanon. 
They wreck all of Gaza, seeking to murder the leaders of Hamas.

Many American Jews gather proudly to cheer them on. The face of the 
American president remains blank. A patter of platitudes issues from 
his lips. He is not interested in peace. He is happy to see Israel do 
the dirty war for him. Diplomacy is a word not in his dictionary.

But lo and behold - even as the destruction builds and the war 
continues through its third week - it seems suddenly no longer such a 
lark. Success is hard to come by; Israel is no longer the perennial 
victor. But will it know what to do when faced with the need to talk 
with the enemy? It has always felt so invincible that discussion seemed 
the weapon of fools and weaklings, much like the way the earnest work 
of its principled and dedicated peace camp - Jewish to the core, in an 
"old-fashioned" way - seemed pathetic and misguided.

But the peace camp knew that each and every Israeli atrocity nurtured 
another enemy, a potential terrorist, while every Palestinian home that 
the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions helped to rebuild, 
every olive tree it planted tenderly in occupied soil, brought another 
possible friend, another partner in dialogue.

Meanwhile, back at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, deep 
in the heart of the Jewish Lobby, the call to action is, as always, a 
call for solidarity, for good public relations. Denounce terrorism, 
suicide bombers and anti-Semitism in all its endless variations, which 
includes the "self-hatred" of the misguided Jew who asks us to give 
some thought to where we - obsessed with brutal retaliation - may have 
gone wrong.

And, it goes without saying, loyal Jews must talk about the Holocaust. 
Ignore the images of today's dead and dying, and focus on the grainy 
black-and-white pictures showing the death of Jews in the villages of 
Poland, at Auschwitz and Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen. We are the first, 
the only true victims, the champions of helplessness for all eternity.

No matter what great accomplishments were ours in the diaspora, no 
matter that we produced Maimonides and Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn and 
hundreds of others of mankind's benefactors - not a warrior among them! 
- look at the world of our long exile always in the dark light of the 
Shoah. But this, in itself, is an obscene distortion: Would the author 
of "Survival in Auschwitz," Primo Levi, or the poet Paul Celan demand 
that we slaughter the innocents in a land far from the snow-clad 
forests of Poland? Is it a heroic act to murder a child, even the child 
of an enemy? Are my brethren glad of it and proud?

I am heartsick, and still I see a glimmer of hope (there must be that 
glimmer, to go on at 78 years).

The American peace camp reports a sudden massive increase in 
membership. All over the country, Jews whose consciences have not been 
crippled are writing in, speaking up, gathering, to raise their voices. 
Is this not what we have always done? What we were brought up to do? 
What - since the days of the Bible and the prophets - our forefathers 
taught us? If Israel had worked for peace as hard as it has worked for 
war, might it not all be settled now?

Three hundred British Jews took out an ad in the Times of London to ask 
the question, "What is Israel doing?" This question has now been taken 
up by Jewish Voice for Peace, and by Alan Sokal and Bruce Robbins who, 
some years back, placed an ad in The New York Times, that read, "Not in 
Our Name."

The time is long overdue for Jews to return to their role as the 
world's conscience, who come to the aid of the dispossessed, the 
wretched of the earth. Once again, we must join those who demand the 
end to unjust wars - in Iraq as well as Lebanon - and an unjust 
occupation in Gaza. We must honor the example of American civil rights 
workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, not that of the mass 
murderer Baruch Goldstein or Yigal Amir, killer of Yitzhak Rabin.

And perhaps the day will come that we will be counted - by Jew and Arab 
alike - as among the Just, perhaps even given a place at Yad Vashem, 
the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, for the lives we helped to save in 
a lawless, savage time.

Silvia Tennenbaum, a writer in East Hampton, is author of the novels 
"Yesterday's Streets" and "Rachel, the Rabbi's Wife."

© 2006 Newsday

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