On rescuing the memory – Pankaj Mishra in LRB:

“In 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of systematic torture against Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments as things of the past. He insisted that those who are tortured remain tortured, and that their trauma is irrevocable. Like many survivors of Nazi death camps, Améry came to feel an ‘existential connection’ to Israel in the 1960s. He obsessively attacked left-wing critics of the Jewish state as ‘thoughtless and unscrupulous’, and may have been one of the first to make the claim, habitually amplified now by Israel’s leaders and supporters, that virulent antisemites disguise themselves as virtuous anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists. Yet the ‘admittedly sketchy’ reports of torture in Israeli prisons prompted Améry to consider the limits of his solidarity with the Jewish state. In one of the last essays he published, he wrote: ‘I urgently call on all Jews who want to be human beings to join me in the radical condemnation of systematic torture. Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end.’ Améry was particularly disturbed by the apotheosis in 1977 of Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister. Begin, who organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building settlements in the Occupied Territories. In its early years the state of Israel had an ambivalent relationship with the Shoah and its victims.”

(…)

“Misgivings of the kind expressed by Améry and Levi are condemned as grossly antisemitic today. It’s worth remembering that many such re-examinations of Zionism and anxieties about the perception of Jews in the world were incited among survivors and witnesses of the Shoah by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its manipulative new mythology. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a theologian who won the Israel Prize in 1993, was already warning in 1969 against the ‘Nazification’ of Israel. In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion: the tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from ‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself.’ Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating ‘non-Jews as subhuman’ and replicating ‘racist Nazi attitudes’.”

(…)

“Though I had read Edward Said, I was still shocked to discover for myself how insidiously Israel’s high-placed supporters in the West conceal the nihilistic survival-of-the-strongest ideology reproduced by all Israeli regimes since Begin’s. It is in their own interests to be concerned with the crimes of the occupiers, if not with the suffering of the dispossessed and dehumanised; but both have passed without much scrutiny in the respectable press of the Western world. Anyone calling attention to the spectacle of Washington’s blind commitment to Israel is accused of antisemitism and ignoring the lessons of the Shoah.”

(…)

“They became more alert to Israel’s presence during the extensively publicised and controversy-haunted Eichmann trial, which made inescapable the fact that Jews had been Hitler’s primary targets and victims. But it was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when Israel seemed existentially threatened by its Arab enemies, that the Shoah came to be broadly conceived, in both Israel and the United States, as the emblem of Jewish vulnerability in an eternally hostile world.”

(…)

“At a talk in Brooklyn, Levi, asked for his opinion on Middle East politics, started to say that ‘Israel was a mistake in historical terms.’ An uproar ensued, and the moderator had to halt the meeting. Later that year, Commentary, raucously pro-Israel by now, commissioned a 24-year-old wannabe neocon to launch venomous attacks on Levi. By Levi’s own admission, this intellectual thuggery (bitterly regretted by its now anti-Zionist author) helped extinguish his ‘will to live’.”

(…)

“From Spaniards fighting for reparative justice after long years of brutal dictatorships, Latin Americans agitating on behalf of their desaparecidos and Bosnians appealing for protection from Serbian ethnic-cleansers, to the Korean plea for redress for the ‘comfort women’ enslaved by the Japanese during the Second World War, memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity, and most demands for recognition and reparations, have been built.”

(…)

“It is possible that they will lose. Perhaps Israel, with its survivalist psychosis, is not the ‘bitter relic’ George Steiner called it – rather, it is the portent of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world. The full-throated endorsement of Israel by far-right figures like Javier Milei of Argentina and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and its patronage by countries where white nationalists have infected political life – the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy – suggests that the world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law is receding. It is possible that Israel will succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza, and even the West Bank as well. There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice; powerful men can make their massacres seem necessary and righteous. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a triumphant conclusion to the Israeli onslaught.”

(…)

“But, perhaps, their outrage alone will alleviate, for now, the Palestinian feeling of absolute loneliness, and go some way towards redeeming the memory of the Shoah.”

Read the article here.

The main intuition of Misrah is perfectly right. Remembrance culture is not a given and the Western remembrance culture of the Holocaust is crumbling away, taboos are being broken and this process started a while ago. Just take a look at the rise of the extreme-right in Europe since let’s say 2001.

Israel and its policies play a large role in the undoing of the remembrance culture, but it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say, to suggest, that Israel is solely responsible for the unraveling of this culture.

Israel is guilty of many crimes, but unfortunately enough this makes the state rather normal instead of abnormal.

It’s also a bit of an exaggeration to say that the Holocaust became central in the West-European remembrance culture because of the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In Germany the American soap opera ‘Holocaust’ was essential in bringing the killings of the Jews to the attention of a wide audience. But there is no evidence that this is linked to Israel. Speaking of conspiracy theories.
And the speculations about the reason for Primo Levi’s suicide are a bit crude, to say the least.

But these are details. As Todorov knew the strong belief in your own perpetual victimhood is the fastest route to aggression.

What else is deterrence than the (potential) power of the strongest?

The idea that after 1945 the power of the strongest has been put in the fridge is naïve to say it politely.

Also, the power of the strongest and the rule of law can go hand in hand, more or less. The power of the strongest (the state with its monopoly on violence) is just kept in control, the animal is tamed.
But outside the borders, in the periphery other rules apply. This is the contradiction in the heart of Europe and its lofty ideals.

Misha wants to save these ideals. But never again for anyone might require a war to end all wars. I wish the soldiers best of luck.