Debate within Israel

Israeli author Avraham Burg’s 2007 book is now out in English as, ‘The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes’, a title no American writer would have dared utilize for fear of having his work consigned to the neo-Nazi bins. Burg was once speaker of the Israeli Knesset and is an old figure on the Israeli political scene although that doesn’t save him from being accused by the Israeli right of being virtually a Nazi himself, the usual label for any critic.

I haven’t seen anything from Burg on the latest Israeli actions—such as today’s news of the IDF’s success in ‘precision targeting’ and killing a top Hamas official, plus four of his ‘collateral damage’ children. But if I can extrapolate from Burg’s somewhat meandering, memoir-filled book, which I read last week, he would view the attack on Gaza as merely another manifestation of Israel’s psychological enslavement to the Shoah.

Burg compares Israel to an abused child who becomes a violent parent. He laments that rather than tap into the humanistic and egalitarian Judaic traditions, Israel has retreated into permanent victimhood accompanied by a comfortable, Weimar-like exclusion of Israeli Arabs from any significant role in the country’s life (mirroring historic European anti-Semitism) while ignoring the ominous growth of a dangerous ultra-nationalist faction. He proposes overtures toward eventual EU membership for Israel and a Palestinian state, which he thinks would dangle an important set of possible rewards in front of both intransigent leaderships.

Whether or not Burg’s analysis makes sense, it does address one peculiar aspect of the Gaza assault: why Israel continues to repeat failed tactics with the expectation of obtaining a different outcome. After all, the first invasion of Lebanon nearly 30 years ago was supposed to end Palestinian attacks, but it didn’t, and the periodic repetitions of these military campaigns bring nothing but temporary lulls.

Burg’s account explains this apparent irrationality as the result of the overwhelming influence of trauma-induced ideology in which the outcome of the Gaza or other battles is less important than the psychological balm provided by the act of striking out at the enemy.

We can easily recognize this in ourselves as the Bush cabal drummed up support for the Iraq invasion as therapy for our own 9/11 trauma. Whether the Iraqis had anything to do with the Twin Towers or not was perfectly irrelevant then and, to a large extent, now. We were bound and determined to ‘show ‘em’, whoever ‘em’ might turn out to be.

There’s a disturbing extension to this thinking, however, that Burg dances gingerly around. Violent assaults on Israel from within Gaza and elsewhere won’t be eliminated with the usual tactics, devastating though they are, UNLESS the slaughter is much more thorough. Although Burg specifically doesn’t equate current Israeli tactics with fascist antecedents, he clearly sees the possibility that the country will evolve in that direction.

If that were to happen, he would be among its first victims.