German Guilt Diffusion Confronted Laor

The Myths of Liberal Zionism, by Yitzhak Laor. 2010

Jewish Author Confronts Holocaust Supremacism and Subtle Pole-Blaming German Guilt Diffusion

Author Yitzhak Laor has been lauded as one of Israel’s most prominent dissidents and poets. Much of his work focuses on what he considers the injustices of Israel against the Palestinians. There is even censorship in action. For example, Laor comments, “In today’s Israel, it is not that easy to research the atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the war of 1948. People have lost their jobs in Israeli universities for less than that.” (p. 57).

HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY IS FUNDAMENTALLY UNFAIR TO THE GENOCIDES OF OTHER PEOPLES

Author Yitzhak Laor, alluding to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, and the fact that 24 million Soviet citizens lost their lives during WWII, makes a statement and then asks a pointed question, “Official remembrance of those deaths seems to follow the USSR into oblivion; there is scant place for them on Holocaust Day. The same question might be asked of the vast monument to the Jews constructed in the center of Berlin: Would it not count for more if the tens of millions of non-Jews who perished were also honored, in due proportion? ARE THEIR DEATHS OF LESS SIGNIFICANCE THAN THE OTHERS?” (pp. 26-27; Emphasis added.)

THE HOLOCAUST AS A WEAPON TO SILENCE EUROPEAN CRITICISMS OF ISRAEL

The author also elaborates on how the Holocaust has assumed a dominant position in the thinking of western Europeans. For instance, he writes, “In Europe, the Shoah has duly become the image of everything that the Europe of today is not: dictatorship, intolerance, and hatred of Israel.” (pp. 23-24).

Laor stresses the fact that the Holocaust is not only used to build and maintain support for Israel, but also to stake out a perpetual moral high ground over Europeans. He relates how this moral bullying works, “‘We are here to remind you that evil at its worst did take place, and took place against us. The least you can do now is to not identify with the victims of our forty-year-old occupation. You owe us that much at least.’” (p. 61). [Laor’s point is well-taken. I recall an Israeli spokesman openly telling the Germans, “Exterminators, and the sons of exterminators, have no right to pass moral judgment upon Israel.”]

THE SUBTLE WAYS THAT HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE IS MANIPULATED IN A GERMAN-WHITEWASHING, ANTI-POLISH MANNER

The author’s salient point has unmentioned implications, which I discuss in this paragraph. The Germans try to relieve the moral pressure they feel from Jews by “passing on” their Holocaust guilt to others. For example, Germans accuse Poles of being “complicit in the Holocaust”, and, citing the lamest examples as proof of this, call on Poles to “come to terms with the past.”

The Germans, having seen their patriotic and nationalistic traditions discredited by Nazism and the Holocaust, as analogous to the Fox That Lost Its Tail (Aesop’s fable), try to persuade the Poles that “tails” (patriotic and nationalistic traditions) are negative things, and so Poles should give up their “heroic narrative” of fighting the Nazis and their “Jesus Christ of Nations” mindset.

No thanks!

We see such things as the chronic media mendacity about “Polish death camps”, the systematic de-Germanization of the Nazis in Holocaust films, the increasingly German-less Holocaust in Eastern Europe (e. g, neo-Stalinist Jan T. Gross and Jedwabne), etc. However, this process is also much more subtle, as explained by Laor, “Again, why choose Auschwitz in particular; why not Bergen-Belsen, for example, which is at least in Germany? Even if the worst atrocities were concentrated in the former camp, doesn’t the choice of the site nevertheless repeat what the Nazis’ did—relegating the horror to ‘over there’, outside the homeland, far away to the east among the ‘inferior Slavs?’ (The school trips to Poland organized by Israel’s Ministry of Education also serve to relegate the Jewish genocide to the margins of Europe; it is harder to imagine these visits taking place in Dachau, Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald, in the heart of Germany.) Lanzmann’s SHOAH participates in the same distancing process; the horror took place in the east.” (p. 27).