The Wrath Of The Jews

By Liat Weingart, AlterNet. Posted December 15, 2004.

I'm in the living room of a family friend, a Jewish woman who emigrated from Poland. The subject changes from yoga to Israel-Palestine, and I tell her that I think America needs to change its foreign policy towards Israel. She says, "In what way, so that the Arabs will throw the Jews into the sea?" It takes four minutes of back and forth for the conversation to further degenerate. She finally says, "Look, what I have to say isn't pretty, but I'm not afraid. I'm going to say it anyways. The Palestinians are nothing but vermin. They make trouble in every country they live in. Even the other Arab countries don't want them."

I take a deep breath. I've heard this before, except with "Jews" instead of "Palestinians." Jews are vermin. They make trouble in every country they live in.

Earlier in the evening, while sitting at the dinner table, I had asked our friend why she left Poland. She said that anti-Semitism in Poland was extremely severe when she was growing up. She said that there was another outburst of anti-Semitism in the mid-60s, and especially after the June 1967 "Six Day" War. Her husband, also a Polish Jew, looks up from his food and says abruptly, "Hey, why are you talking about this? Please change the subject."

At dinner, everyone is more than willing to oblige with their Israeli army stories, about how the Arabs want to "throw the Jews in to the sea," but no one wants to talk about how they were hurt by anti-Semitism. My mother has told me only a few stories of what it was like for her to grow up as a Jew in the Soviet Union. The most famous is how she took a broom to the head of a guy in school who persistently called her a "dirty Jew." It's the story with a happy ending. Justice was done. Less discussed is the story about how her father, a man who smuggled Jews out of the USSR and into Israel, was arrested by the KGB and sent to prison for eight years. Or how she was taken out of class every day for years and interrogated about her parents' "political activity."

There's a lot of crying and screaming to do. And there ain't a whole lot of room for it. Despite the enormity of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and various monuments to the Holocaust in the U.S., when you really get down to it, listening to Jews cry about how their families were annihilated, how they were beaten and targeted, is not a favorite American past-time. Neither, for that matter, is it terribly exciting for white folks to listen to blacks cry about the legacy of slavery, economic exploitation and racism. Or for straight people to listen to GLBTQ folks cry about what it feels like to have to lie about your identity to survive, to live in existential terror.

The Holocaust Museum is the largest in the world and in the center of Washington, D.C. Many of us think that Americans have heard more than enough about Jewish suffering. But the truth is that the Holocaust Museum and other forms of official recognition of Jewish suffering haven't addressed anti-Jewish oppression at all. It's hardly accidental.

Before 1967, it didn't fit into American strategic interests to talk about Jews or their history of oppression, particularly in the same sentence as the word "justice." After 1967, when Israel defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and conquered the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Sinai and the Golan Heights, the U.S. government decided that Israel could serve as a surrogate for U.S. interests in the Middle East. 1967 was the year when the U.S. discovered Israel, and it was the year when the Holocaust was "remembered."

The discovery of Israel happened as selectively as the remembering of the Holocaust. The U.S. discovered Israel as a military ally, not as a country with ordinary people, and so U.S. aid to Israel reflected that. Most U.S. aid to Israel, including economic aid, has been spent for expenses related to purchasing military equipment from the U.S. In order to justify that strategic relationship in moral terms, a new history of the Holocaust was "remembered."

The dominant narrative of the Holocaust is that Jews were led, like sheep to the slaughter, to the gas chambers, that they alone were murdered, and that the event of their annihilation had no precedent in history and therefore, no event in the present can compare to the Holocaust. The logical moral to the story for Jews is that we are alone in the world – no one understands our suffering because no one has experienced anything similar; we can only rely on ourselves for self-defense; we will be ever-vigilant, for danger lurks around every corner. And the logical moral to the story for Americans is that Jews need a strong Israel, and because the Jews were victims of the unspeakable, it's our duty to arm Israel to the teeth.

The dominant narrative of the Holocaust says very little about the hundreds of thousands of ordinary acts of resistance of those who perished, like the rabbi who, as he was shoved into the gas chamber, took the SS soldier by the lapel and said, "I will die today, but you will live alone with your guilt for a long time to come." Or the fact that the Jew who was forced to weld the sign at the entranceway to Auschwitz reading Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work Makes One Free") welded the "b" upside down, as a sign of rebellion and a testament of resistance.

Liat Weingart is co-director of Jewish Voice for Peace and is based in San Francisco, Calif.

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